The Labour Party won the 2005 UK general election with 35.3% of the popular British vote. The Conservative Party was just a few points behind with points behind at 32.3% of the popular vote, but because of the first past the post voting system, the Labour Party had a significant majority with 356 parliamentary seats […]
Continue Reading General Election 2010 Poll Results
All we need is change! after nearly 12 years of a Labour Government the UK as a whole, as one united country has been hit tragically under Gordon Brown, however, if Tony Blair was still in power i believe that Labour could have picked us up and made the country a better place. They have done good over these 10/11 years but change is needed fast and it will happen.
VOTE CONSERVATIVE ! A FRESH NEW APPROACH
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Agreed Gary
As it is the Christmas Season I thought I’d stop off and wish everyone a Happy Christmas (and I do mean everyone).
As I’ve just cracked open my second bottle of 20 y/old Single Malt I’m in something of a good mood, so enjoy your Christmas one and all :-)
Merry Christmas everyone, spent the evening with the family watching movies.
X-Men Origins, really good film :-)
Have to say the TV isn’t very Christmassy this year, seems to get worse every year!
David
Well David you should watch the comedy stuff rather than the films lol :-)
the queen in her christmas message seemed to be more interested in the comenwealth, than in britain and the british people. although no fan of margaret thatcher she was right, when the queen said if you continue with your policy,the commenwealth will break up: thatcher,SO BE IT?
Awwww bless! Thank you chaps!
Your “last night” was my today (quiet afternoon) although no one was around until later on (your afternoon), I thought it was a bit quiet!
Traditionally I’m a Tory but this time around I’m voting UKIP (wait for all the thumbs down!!). I have emailed the Conservative Party, gave them a list of demands and I got wishy washy responses!! I couldn’t really expect them to take on all of them!
I suspect if David Cameron and his team did pull a couple of rabbits out of the hat during the election campaign then I may revert back. I was very inspired after the Conservative conference but looked at the details in their manifesto I just didn’t feel that their implementation were strong enough.
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What is it your are looking for the Torie to give you that would change your vote Sarah?
I know I had some miss givings as well, but there have been a few policy modifications lately that have helped change my mind (previous Labour voter)
“I have emailed the Conservative Party, gave them a list of demands and I got wishy washy responses!!”
ROFLOL, that brought laughter tears to my eyes :-)
Don’t suppose you still have the email and the response, would love to see your list of demands?
You could post them on the “Reasons to Vote Conservative 2010 General Election” page at https://general-election-2010.co.uk/reasons-to-vote-conservative-2010-general-election/ I bet VoteNo ToBNP would respond as he’s a Conservative voter.
Would be great if more commenter’s were like you and VoteNo ToBNP, the vast majority of the BNP supporters commenting here can barely form a logical argument or mostly post copy and pasted articles and YouTube videos of extreme views!
At times it’s dragged my debating style into the gutter, what ever happened to the art of reasoned debate in Britain?
With regards you voting UKIP, at least they have some reasonably well formed policies. I think if any small party are going to do well in 2010 it will be UKIP, I bet they take some of the BNP vote. Considering they were formed in 1993 they have done exceptionally well to get 13 MEP’s.
Are there any estimates from reputable sources for how many MPs UKIP might gain at the general election?
I won’t vote UKIP, but I don’t have any fundamental objections to others voting for UKIP like I have for those voting BNP.
David
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I haven’t seen any offical estimates for UKIP but I have done some basic work on this and from what I have looked at I believe they could get 2 maybe 3 MPs in 2010.
They have a possibility of 5 if they take the BNP on hard in it’s two key areas in the North, if they do that then they could have 5, as for the BNP looking at the way they intend to focus their campaign they are only seriously targeting 3 seats with money etc one of those being El Griffo.
How ever the other parties I would hope are gearing up to through some serious weight behind that one I know UKIP are also targeting the Barking Seat, and I think judging by this years donations reports that have been handed in they are far better placed financially to take the fight hard in Barking.
So overall I would expect the BNP to get none (outside maybe 1 MP) and UKIP could be looking at 2 or 3 depending on how they target the seats.
But overall you’ have to say that they have a far better image to work from than the BNP and they seem to be much better financed and have made far more progression over the last few years securing the 13 MEPs that gives them a good starting base to work with.
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““I have emailed the Conservative Party, gave them a list of demands and I got wishy washy responses!!”
ROFLOL, that brought laughter tears to my eyes :-)”
I do laugh about it now but I won’t post the emails as they were pretty unsophisticated so I wouldn’t want to embarrass myself! The general gist was, if you do this, this and this then I’ll vote for you, if not, then I’m voting UKIP (ner ner ner ner ner!)!
I was quite irritated when I sent it! :-)
Surprisingly I did get a response, in the sort of patient “you’re obviously not that clever” sort of manner, but thinking about my phraseology they probably (quite rightly!) thought I was an idiot!
I did also email them about a referendum on Europe which I’ll post the response under the Conservative Policy thread.
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Hi all…just thought ide start with saying ive been looking at your site David for a few weeks now and found the comments a realy good read!
ime not a seasoned voter but as my young son starts to get older i have found myself looking at the country that i was brought up in and how diffrent the the foundation of the country looks today….so i started loooking at the politics mostly through the internet and found the party i agree with the most is the bnp
Saying that i am not sure the bnp will be getting my vote as i would need to be certain the party has got rid of any old relations to the NF
i think the last 12 years under labour have been horrific in the way we have signed over laws to the EU and been taken into wars on the basis of lies..
then theres immagration..ime all for immagration , but when mass immagration happens it becomes a problem..as we see it has put a major strain on our schools ,housing ,nhs ,and communities..as intergration hardly happens!
so what party other than the bnp will deal with theese issues ..would conservatives be a wasted vote!?
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Those are fair points and questions I’m sure many people considering voting BNP in the 2010 general election are asking similar things.
I considered moving your comment to https://general-election-2010.co.uk/reasons-to-vote-british-national-party-bnp-2010-general-election/ as the majority of BNP discussions have degraded quite fast, as long as commenter’s try to stick to your very good questions and not turn this into a slanging match or a place to post countless YouTube videos and copy n pasted articles I’ll leave it here.
I’d never vote BNP, but with almost a million people voting for them in the EU elections they should be discussed openly, so voters can make an informed choice either way.
I’ll make a separate comment to give you some of my points of view.
David
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I’m not a Conservative voter, currently I plan to vote Labour for reasons I’ve stated a few times in other comments (best of a bad lot), so it’s difficult for me to give a Conservative type answer to your last Conservative question (I bet Vote No To BNP can give it a go :-)).
Although I’m a Labour voter who is not that happy with how things are going (I have similar concerns like yours) I’m not looking at things from the perspective of “Labour have done a poor job, who should I vote for next?”, but “Labours done a poor job, but will any of the others do a better job AND would my vote be wasted?”
By doing this I’m not voting from angry at the Labour party, kick em in the teeth sort of approach, but trying to pick the best people for the job based on those available: that’s like asking do I want the village idiot or the town fool to run things!!!
When I look at who to vote for this way I’m torn between Labour and Lib Dems, but the Lib Dems never get enough MPs to hold real power, if they could win a seat where I live I’d vote for them especially with the possibility of a hung parliament.
When I look at the Conservatives I remember how it was when I was young (I’m 39), as a poor person back then the Conservatives came across as not giving a rats ass how they ran the country affected the average British family, no minimum wage, everything left to market forces, NHS was in real trouble (hell of a lot worse than now, the NHS is improving in my recent experience), services are cut, cut, cut so they could give tax cuts to the rich and though they say they are the party that’s fiscally sound look at how poorly they managed the finances before Labour took power!!! The current recession we are in now is not Labour’s fault, every country has been hit badly, yes you can argue they could manage getting out of recession better, but the Conservative recession was mismanagement by the Conservatives, they can’t blame a world credit crunch for how bad things got!
If the economy is not managed well we are all screwed, so whoever you vote for you have to be sure they are up to the challenge and if you’ve looked at all the parties policies like I have (posted them all on this site for discussion) that rules out the Green Party and the BNP, both their economic policies would be a DISASTER for the country.
Lib Dems I’d give them a try, I see them as a mix between Labour and the Conservatives, being closer to Labour than the Conservatives. They have never been in power, but I used to like how they’d tell the truth in their policies (not so much now) even though they knew they wouldn’t gain power (they could have said anything, didn’t matter that much).
UKIP are more Tory than the Conservatives if you ask me, so not a party I’d vote for, but based on the things you’ve mentioned if you decided the Conservatives are not for you then UKIP sounds closer to what you are looking for. Conservatives are loosing their eurosceptic status IMO (many of the anti EU Tories have moved to UKIP).
Like the Lib Dems, UKIP have never been in power (the parties less than 20 years old) so are a bit of an unknown quantity, but they do have people in the party that have been Conservative MPs so have some experience. I’m not eurosceptic, to be honest I’m not completely sure where I stand on Europe, the media discusses Europe so little from an intelligent perspective it’s hard to know if we’d be better or worse off if we left the EU? I suspect we’d be far worse off and to be honest I like the idea of close partnerships with other countries, it protects us from ever going to war with them and means we (all EU countries) have to abide by the same trading laws leveling the playing field. If we left the EU I think we’d have to loose the minimum wage to compete in the world, that would be terrible for working class families.
And that brings me to the BNP, I’ve spent more time looking at their policies than any of the other parties (because of this site!). If you read them they are very pie in the sky ideas (some are silly, who’d use the word Banksters to describe the bankers that caused the credit crunch in a policy document!) ranging from military National Service for all over 18s or they loose the right to vote to increasing our military spending, but at the same time stopping the Afghanistan war and not going to war unless it directly affects Britain (why do we need more military if we’ll not use them?).
Could you imagine the cost of getting all 45 million eligible voters to server military national service so they are allowed to vote still? though we do get the option to own a rifle, yep that will cut down on crime!!
The BNP plan to completely stop immigration completely, which might sound like a good idea at first, but what happens when businesses don’t have a skilled British workforce? They can’t click their fingers and produce tens of thousands of well trained British workers over night, it would take decades of extensive training programs to meet all our needs, too many of our young people reject education and as long as that is true we need immigration. We don’t need foreign workers to pick fruit and clean toilets though, British workers should be encouraged to do these lower paid jobs.
Then there’s the voluntary repatriation scheme, to get rid of legal immigrants they plan to pay them 10s of thousands of tax payers money to persuade them to leave. If someone offered me £50,000 to leave the country with my family I’d take it and I was born here. This BNP policy could not only cost us billions, but remove well trained immigrant workers that we need.
Then there’s acquiring British land and businesses, yes the BNP plan to take back businesses and land that are not currently owned by British people! This means companies like ASDA (owned by a US company) will be removed from Britain. The only realistic way for the BNP to take back land etc… without it costing the tax payer untold billions would be to steal it back and that would cause no end of legal trouble. Add to this foreign investors would no longer invest in Britain because of fear of loosing their investment when the BNP steal their businesses and we’d no longer be a center of finance, but become a third world economy!
I can not stress enough how bad BNP policies actually are, please have a read of them and feel free to comment on them under https://general-election-2010.co.uk/votes/bnp-policies/
I went a tad all over the place with that comment :-)
David
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You did a bit, but I think we get where you’re coming from;)
I’m only a year younger than you and I just don’t remember things being so bad under the Conservatives even in the recession. I suppose it was why I voted them in again.
I was always in work whenever I wanted to be, I did lose my job on a couple of occasions but always had another one within a week or two, dole was never an option, it was only about £22 per week! I didn’t earn much but seemed to have enough to live on.
I’m moving on from Conservatives now because I don’t feel that much will change fundamentally if they do come to power, there will still be a ridiculous amount of political correctness, health and safety directives banning people from carrying out simple tasks, yob culture (I blame the Conservatives for this anyway with their banning of corporal punishment) and discriminatory laws amongst a whole raft of stuff that really grinds me down about the UK.
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A few personal examples of why I couldn’t vote Conservative.
When I left school at 16 (pretty much stopped going to school at 15) I’d messed up my education and life, already had a 24 hour attendance centre order (a bit like going to the Cadets for young criminals!) and a 3 month detention center order (prison for kids) under my belt for a string of criminal offences (petty offences, never anything violent)!
Started looking for a job and here’s a few examples of how British people are treated when market forces determine wages etc…
These are examples before I reached my 18th birthday.
Worked as a civil engineers assistant, basically carrying equipment, setting it up, bit of laboring… I worked 5 1/2 days a week (10 hours a day, 5 on Saturday) and sometimes a full 7 days a week (half days on the weekend, I’ve never been shy of hard work). I averaged at 16 years of age around 55 to 60 hours per week and was paid £55 (£60 if I worked Sunday morning) and if I recall correctly had to pay tax (think it was about £5 tax)! I also did a maths night class as well :-)
Went looking for a job on an industrial estate. Was offered a job putting springs into a machine all day, pick a spring up, pop it in a hole….. (a monkey could be trained to do the job) that would have been under a YTS scheme for £27 a week, the employer wasn’t going to pay a penny! YTS was the Conservatives answer to their destruction of apprenticeships, businesses took full advantage of young people with that little YTS initiative.
Found a job in the job center advertised at £1.30 an hour, the job was engineering based, mainly spraying bike frames with protective paint. Started the job, but at the end of the first day was told it was £1 an hour not the £1.30 advertised, never went back (didn’t get my one days pay either).
Worked in a print factory, packing food packaging boxes into boxes. Pay £1.50 an hour, would be on my feet all day at the end of a conveyor belt filling boxes with empty flat cereal boxes etc… Would work 12 hour night shifts 6 days a week and would be lucky to take home £120!
Got a job in a foundry that made car parts (turbos etc…) had to use glue spray to attach ceramic rings to polystyrene turbo moulds, was paid £1.40 an hour. The room we worked in had no ventilation and you’d get high by the end of the day from glue fumes!! Day two I complained to the supervisor who fobbed me off (others had also complained), gave up the job on day three and reported them to health and safety and they had to fit extractor fans.
The Conservatives did not care about the average working class man or woman when I was a teenager and I see no evidence they’ve changed. We live in a Conservative run area and it’s clear from how the district council is run they care more about themselves than the people they represent. For example they actually built a leisure center in a small town near where many of the Conservative councillors live even though the local people didn’t want it, yet we live near a popular holiday location that lacks a leisure center (it would pay for itself long term) and they build nothing!
I went back into education at 17 1/2 and had to lie to claim benefits etc… (I signed on unemployed) so I could study, there was no way for me to study full time legally under a Conservative government (I had no family financial support). I was living on my own by 18 and studying full time, if I didn’t lie I’d have been entitled to nothing and would have starved.
I now run a successful business and have no money worries, but will never forget how hard and more importantly how unfair it was under a Conservative government. If I was being a selfish git I’d vote Conservative as they will cut services and benefits I no longer need.
I believe in a fair days pay for a fair days work, the Conservatives leave it to market forces which results in employers taking full advantage of their employees.
Our eldest son worked in Argos while studying full time to gain qualifications to enter University earlier this year (he’s 18 now). He got £30 from the government a week for studying 12 hours a week and was paid over £5 an hour working at Argos on weekends!
The minimum wage alone shows Labour cares more about hard working people than the Conservatives do. I’m self employed, so minimum wage isn’t a big issue for me now, but my early working life would have been so much fairer had we had a minimum wage that the Conservatives would have never legislated for.
David
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I do sympathise with your working life beginnings, I only earned £100 per week standing on my feet all day and night doing bar work and waitressing when I first left school!
That said, everyone else earned around that too or not far off.
Buying a house didn’t cost £200k in those days it was more like £30k, the general cost of living was lower too apart from when Poll Tax was introduced which worked out at 10% of my meagre £100! (I hated them for that – they bloody chased me for years!).
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Well I can’t really add that much to the answers that have been given here other than from the Conservative point of view on Immigration.
Whilst I actually agree with the proposal for caps on immigration I still think the policy needs to go further and be used on Student visas as well (a longer version of what I would like to see as far as immigration is on the site somewhere).
My main reasons for voting Tory this time are based on economy and getting the country back in to good shape again. Labour haven’t done enough over the last 18 months to get the economy moving again which I believe they should have done by now.
I think any right thinking person knows that public spending has to be cut and the belt tightened to get the economy moving again, and looking through all the proposals for the other parties the only one for me that has a solid enough set of proposals to get the job done in the Conservatives.
Labour intends to pretty much carry on as we are (which hasn’t worked)
LibDems intend to well I can’t see exactly what they intend to do.
BNP intends to create a protectionist state in the UK which will basically floor the economy worse than anything the Tories or Labour have done before.
UKIP I haven’t read their economic policy as yet
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I do have concerns about immigration, not necessarily skilled workforce but the issue of the EU migration.
One of my issues is that the EU project allows too many unskilled workers to compete with British unskilled workers for lower salaries (they come from generally lower cost economies and manage on less).
The purpose of the EU is a common market with the free movement of capital, goods and people, what it doesn’t have is a common language.
I think the British are very much disadvantaged, it’s a lot easier to migrate to Britain than for British to migrate to other European countries due to language barriers.
English is considered worldwide, the international language of business and trade (and is used as a communicating language between different speaking nationals). However, day to day business in Europe tends to be in the mother tongue of each particular country.
When I was at school, we had the choice of french and german, you only got to do german if you were good enough at french!. So fine if I wanted to move to either of those countries!
Most schools in Europe teach at least English as their main second language with maybe french and german as well.
So provided that they have a moderate understanding of English, most European countries can compete with us for our jobs on an individual basis.
As an adult its a lot harder to learn a new language from scratch.
I never had the opportunity to learn italian, bulgarian, czech, polish or any other language and I doubt very much I could turn up in their country and someone would give me job and help me learn the language at the same time. Let’s be honest, the British are notorious for being poor at learning other languages!
I just wonder whether anyone else considered this language barrier issue when we committed ourselves to the free movement of people.
Any thoughts?
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“One of my issues is that the EU project allows too many unskilled workers to compete with British unskilled workers for lower salaries (they come from generally lower cost economies and manage on less).”
That’s an issue I have as well, only an extremist would say we don’t benefit at all from immigration and so ban the lot of it, but I also don’t understand why we allow unskilled foreign workers to enter Britain to take jobs that require no training.
Offer me one well trained dentist from Turkey over 50 British born Chavs who are too lazy to work and would rather rot on benefits any day, but we don’t need any more unskilled workers, we have enough British born people who refuse to get a decent education or training that should do these jobs!
As Vote No To BNP has said many times we need a much stronger immigration policy based on a points based system that only allows in economic migrants that we actually NEED. We don’t need unskilled foreign workers to clean our toilets, pick our fruit etc, we have over 2 million unemployed, when the unskilled unemployed have filled available unskilled jobs (that are suitable for them) then and only then should we look to other sources.
I appreciate under current EU law we can’t stop unskilled foreign workers entering Britain completely, but surely we can tighten the rules significantly?
We need immigration, but we need it strictly controlled with the primary goal of benefiting Britain.
David
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I picked this up from the BBC on the migration of Europeans and which countries have restrictions (dated April 2009).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3513889.stm
“The UK was one of the three countries, along with Ireland and Sweden, to place no restrictions on workers from the 2004 entrants. However, workers have to register and only become eligible for benefits such as Jobseeker’s Allowance and income support after working continuously in the UK for at least a year.
After an unexpectedly large influx of workers from Central Europe – an estimated 600,000 in two years – the UK announced that it would impose restrictions on workers from Bulgaria and Romania. Up to 20,000 are allowed to take low-skilled jobs in agriculture or food processing, high-skilled workers are able to apply for work permits to perform a skilled job, and students are able to work part-time. Self-employed people from Bulgaria and Romania are already allowed to work in the UK, and this will continue.”
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Well my New Years evening starts now, have a good one everyone and don’t forget to take a couple of paracetamol before you go to bed!
We’ll being seeing the New Year in 4 hours ahead of you lot or I’ll be asleep by then!!
Let’s all hope 2010 will be better than 2009!
:-)
Have a good evening Sarah I think I shall be just slightly hung over in the morning (that’s assuming I even manage to get home)
:)