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UK PoliGAF: General election thread of LibCon Coalitionage
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Linkified said:
cameron is like the new sleazy asshole step-dad who is only nice to you while he can still get a few good lays from your mum. as soon as she's not around it's back in the wardrobe with a rape alarm and childline on speed dial.
my hometown is a lib dem/tory marginal, so my decision is easy.
Linkified said:
The Tory lead in the polls was weak, that's why it changed so much all the time. People want change, but haven't trusted the Tories to deliver the sort of change they want.
Polls like this make ALL the difference, because it removes the obstacle to the Lib Dems of 'wasted vote'. So suddenly there is a much more palatable option for change, that doesn't have the baggage of the past or the problem of Cameron not being trusted because the Tory's haven't made clear exactly what they stand for because they've flipflopped around so much.
And do people REALLY want power back in the way the Tory manifesto said? No. Which is why the launch completely bombed and the Tory vote collapsed 4% the next day. It's fantasy soundbite politics.
Setting up your own school may appeal in the leafy suburbs of surrey, but it's fantasy to the average person in the UK and is like saying 'if we fail, you do it'. People would rather put their trust in people who wouldn't fail in the first place.
The Tory campaign and Cameron has been a complete disaster from start to finish, he modelled himself on Blair and thought all he had to do was sit back and let Labour and Brown's unpopularity hand them the election. The public after the expenses scandal have become a LOT more cynical though ...
DECK'ARD said:
Most people don't read the mainfestos anyway - the Lib Dem is a wishlist of things that will never happen either. Most voters will base it on in the end who can clean up the problem of immigration, no one can trust Labour, no one will want to waste a vote on a third party. So it will be conservatives - anyone who currently has a lib dem council will vote conservative. Its inevitable.
Of course they are - our diplomacy, our economic requirements, our environmental concerns, our strategic defence, our energy security... I could go on with policy areas in which every member state's government has volunteered to pool sovereignty out of a clear recognition of the compatibility and benefits therein.Linkified said:
Don't try to do the migration argument with Europe, there are nearly a million British living in Spain, over 200,000 living in France, 100,000 in Germany, 300,000 in Ireland etc... I don't have the total figures to hand but it wouldn't surprise me if the numbers showed more British living in the rest of the EU than other EU citizens living in Britain.
EU migration has been hugely positive - it provides us with cheaper labour to fill vacant positions that people here have time and again shown to not want, and we get that labour without having to pay for their schooling or their pensions.
We've also benefitted from being a part of the largest economy in the world - our influence in international fora is huge because it is the EU that represents us, not individual states. We've been able to enact laws that benefit consumers and the general public without fear of driving jobs and business elsewhere, by way of the fact that the EU is the world's largest market. We're increasingly flexing our diplomatic muscle to shape the world around us according to European ideals - which are a damn sight better than Russian or Chinese [and at times American] ideals.
But beyond that, being a member of the world's largest functioning market has driven a significant GPD growth benefit. Back when I did that sort of thing, we modelled the impact of EU membership between 1992 and 2006 as being at least 3% of total GDP - which is huge, whereas the EU's budget is just ~1.1% of GDP which itself ends up filtering back into the economy.
It's not a huge sin to be unaware of the benefits of the European Union - but it is a bit silly to harp on about its lack of when clearly those benefits are present and substantial.
Bullshit.
brain_stew
Member
Linkified said:
Thankfully not everyone in this country is racist/xenophobic cunt, so no, this won't happen.
Can't be arsed. Every time I try or anyone else tries to defend centre-right policy we get absolutely blitzed, since NeoGAF is full of Lib Dems.defel1111 said:
Instead I will try to summarise what I see has happened here:
Cameron did not make any major blunders over his leadership, since the "election that never was" in 2007 he has pretty much been spot on, but two huge unforeseen events have happened since then.
1) Expenses scandal and political apathy
A lot has been talked about this already, it has basically meant that people who are not hardcore party supporters, i.e. the swing voters in this country who decide each election, have become seriously resentful of the political class. Until now they have had nobody to turn to and been talking about voting UKIP, BNP and so on. Finally on Thursday night they saw a new face, Clegg, in equal standing with Cameron and Brown who are seen as "the old guard". While Brown and Cameron were catfighting, Clegg was able to point and laugh at them, and say "they do not offer real change". He took an easy win. The media frenzy has given the Lib Dems huge momentum in the polls and I have no idea whether it will be maintained.
2) The financial crisis
People here like avaya will tell me I am wrong, but our country cannot afford to borrow £170bn per year from international markets forever. There will be a gilts crisis and we will be forced to go cap-in-hand to the IMF for an emergency loan if the next government does not DRASTICALLY cut public spending (by 90 to 100bn, at least enough to balance the budget or give a small surplus, since we need to make headway on the 900bn debt) whether the public and the unions like it or not
The parties have had zero success in trying to get this story over to the public.
The public keep saying they want politicians to be honest. Well, back at the Conservative conference late last year, George Osborne made his age of austerity speech and said how we'd have to make difficult decisions (higher pension age, public sector pay freeze, etc) to get the deficit down. Their poll lead fell, instantly. The public say they want honesty but they don't, they want to hear that the politicians can make everything better without them feeling any pain.
The truth is nobody in the UK who kept their job really felt the recession. Brown put everything on the public credit card with all the economic stimuli so we did not see many cuts, and those who kept their job saw interest rates fall, so their mortgage cost a lot less and some people may actually have become better off.
Fact is, the public are sick of the two-party system, sick of politicians, and are liking the idea of a "fresh" candidate, even though most of them have no idea what his policies are. This is the X Factor election.
In a way, I am excited. The recent polls show that something momentous might be happening. The screens have gone blank and we can no longer predict the outcome - the UNS calculators are designed for traditional swings between CON and LAB and for Lib Dems to remain at their usual total of 18 to 20 percent. We are about to see the end of First Past The Post, possibly the end of the Conservative and Labour parties in their current forms if they both lose the election. We will see a complete political realignment and a new voting system. The next two debates will be interesting. Brown is now basically finished, but will we see a "Cameron Comeback"?
It will be fascinating.
I am upbeat, but I no longer predict a Conservative majority (understatement of the year? :lol). We're heading for a hung parliament if the polls remain like this. Which party is first, well, that depends how the Lib Dem surge is distributed. Politics in this country might have changed forever on Thursday night.
Linkified said:
Cutting the number of MP's by 10% is gesture politics, and completely meaningless in the grand scale of things. The Tories have always opposed parliamentary reforms as well, and are very tainted by party funding issues which is of far more concern to people after the expenses scandal than 10% fewer MP's.
Plus people's concerns are now shifting to the undemocratic-effects of our election system by how the poll results are related to number of seats. The Tories have no answer to that, and Labour's attempt to jump on the electoral reform agenda just before the election made them look as opportunistic as the Tories have done on other issues like NI.
Both main parties have been shooting themselves in the foot for months, a week is a long time in politics but just 2 weeks to change months of resentment/confusion of policy isn't long at all ...
I've watched my dad for the last 30 years graft his heart out running his own business. He hardly ever had a holiday and worked 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. After 25 years of hard struggle he finally cracked it and now he could be classed as wealthy, very wealthy. He deserves every penny of it as well....... It pisses me off that the thought of the Lib Dems getting into power as I know those guys will target people like my dad to take money from to give to all the lazy scrotes of this country..They'll be worse than labour....
Is my perception of the Lib Dems wrong?
Is my perception of the Lib Dems wrong?
Dabookerman
Member
defel1111 said:
If by that you mean that Labour have fallen on the floor from leaning so far to the left.
Dabookerman
Member
defel1111 said:
I am sure they are left.
"The Liberal Democrats, often shortened to Lib Dems, are a centrist to centre-left social liberal political party in the United Kingdom."
Says wikipedia.
I was under the perception that Liberal tends to be left leaning.
I'm probably wrong perhaps. I'm still fairly new to the whole politics thing really ;p
jas0nuk said:
The age of austerity thing was more an issue of who was delivering it. In the great makeover of the Tory party, Cameron made some incredibly bad decisions. People want straight-talking, but when it came from someone like Osbourne it just played badly. Cameron's "We're all in this together" was also incredibly badly judged. It was taking the public for idiots with soundbites, who could expect the public to accept a message like that from people they knew were living a world apart from them. The Tories problem has been a lack of empathy with the public.
In the debate Clegg was the only one who raised the problem of the public finances and the public liked that. They like it when Vince Cable talked about it as well.
It's not the message that's the problem, it's about how it has been delivered. It's just added to the lack of trust in politicians, which is why the lead in the polls has fluctuated so much and so many people are undecided. This election is about trust more than anything, which Clegg and Cable have done very well on.
If Ken Clarke had been the one delivering the age of austerity speech I think the reaction would have been very different.
Not really. We have 650 MPs. A 10% cut would reduce that to 585. That is quite significant considering the finely balanced electoral geography of the country which has always given us approximately 650 constituencies.DECK'ARD said:
It'd require a whole redrawing of the boundaries and allow a load of the useless "safe seats" to be removed.
curls
Wake up Sheeple, your boring insistence that Obama is not a lizardman from Atlantis is wearing on my patience ð¤
Linkified said:
How about asking why there is so much reported/percieved immigration in the first place. You can't just lock the doors and claim that will solve the problem.
freethought
Member
Linkified said:
So the Tories are more trustworthy than the Lib Dems? :lol
brain_stew
Member
Linkified said:
So you're saying they'd want to keep a system that requires them to win over 50% of the vote just to receive the most seats in the house of commons (and yet still be a long way off a majority)? Yeah, I'm sure they would. You think they'd be able to keep that level of support after breaking one of the cornerstone promises of what brought them to government?
brain_stew said:
But then they would need to get the others in the House of Commons to vote on it and then it would be a balancing issue other mp's including their own which may not want it to happen. But may need there support in other issues to get them through the HoC so its up to them to decide is it best to do a better proportional system - which would increase UKIP, BNP and Green chances of gaining seats.
Spirit of Jazz
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Linkified said:
:lol I see the expenses scandal is long forgotten. Oh well, at least the northing's happened in the last year to suggest Tories views on business and finance aren't the way forwards.
travisbickle
Member
Linkified said:
Do you even understand the implications of this?
brain_stew
Member
Linkified said:
Not necessarily. There's more than one alternative to the first past the post system.
blazinglord
Member
Actually polls consistently show that immigration tops the list of issues voters are most concerned about. Parties underestimate the importance of immigration to voters at their peril.brain_stew said:
blazinglord
Member
I actually laughed out loud at this.avaya said:
But yeah, as a Cameroon I'll concede that I don't really see the point of keeping an independent nuclear deterrent. Seems like quite an expensive waste for the small role we play in the world today. A while ago I read that the French government was interested in maintaining a joint nuclear deterrent with the Britain, which would have been a good idea in my view. Alas, the Foreign Secretary rejected any possibilities of talks let alone joint action.
freethought
Member
Linkified said:
But it's not Mr. Cameron's sound bites that I disagree with, it's his policies.
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