What do the election results really mean?

[stevie lee]

What is BJ planning for London?

i thought it was BoJo..


What the results mean for me is that my dad didn't get elected again.. he came third out of five.
lib-dem won, conservatives 2nd, my dad 3rd, labour 4th, so even my dad is more popular than labour around these neck of the the woods..

is it just me or has anyone else noticed that since gordon stopped being chancellor, all this financial mess has appeared, is darling incompetent, or was gordon just doing a better job at hiding it?


zaks comment about houses on flood plains - theres a new housing estate being/has been planned in southport on an area that is currently semi-flooded, a marshy bog and low sand level (we are on the coast the sand level is about 6ft down).. this is a lib-dem area by the way.

[Stewart]

It means the rapid and irreversible disintegration of the post Blair Labour party is now obvious for all to see.

After Northern Rock, the data loss episodes, party funding, etc, etc, they have been crushed in the local elections, lost the London mayoral elections to a Tory candidate who is a bumbling, laughable chump, and are in free fall.

Brown is universally despised, for all the cock ups, for the 10p tax changes, for lieing when he bottled the election because Labour were going to lose, and for being a dour Scottish cyclops with a Stalin complex.

As Paul Merton said on Have I Got News For You, its a classic case of a man who has wanted a job his whole life, then gets it and can't do it.

Labour can not win a general election under Brown, and they will fight the next general election under Brown, therefore they will lose.

[IBM]

It's that whole 'promoted to the point of incompetancy' which seems to have occured about 2 positions ago with Gordon Brown....and yet he still managed to go even higher.

What's that joke about bull**** getting you to the top, but not being able to keep you there?

[Andy3536]

They will lose my vote if they touch the tax credits system as it fine as it is. If i did'nt have the tax credits that help us low wage earners out, things would be very different for my family. I really don't think the tory party is going to lead us any better than labour to be honest, Cameron will say and offer anything to get into power but can he really make any difference.

Though i think its time for some of the scroungers to get back to work instead of milking the credits system, spending it on booze and fags make me sick.

What about the 10p tax rate going?
I'm fall in the bracket of being hit by it but not getting any of it back with the added tax credit concessions.
I'm qiute frankly disgusted that they've hit low wage earners in this way but havn't hit those well off.
This is supposed to be a labour government 'for the workers' too.
If your a single male getting under 18K your quite honestly screwed, can't afford to buy, can barely afford to rent (in some places this is even out of reach)
With the ridiculous council tax bills aswell, it's just gone mad.

[grayg1]

I don't feel comfortable with any of the parties running this country. Everything is tax, tax, tax and more tax and what is there to show for it in this country? Nothing, everything is a joke, this country is crap.
Where does all the money go?

[Saracen]

They will lose my vote if they touch the tax credits system as it fine as it is. If i did'nt have the tax credits that help us low wage earners out, things would be very different for my family. I really don't think the tory party is going to lead us any better than labour to be honest, Cameron will say and offer anything to get into power but can he really make any difference.

Though i think its time for some of the scroungers to get back to work instead of milking the credits system, spending it on booze and fags make me sick.

The tax credit system is far from fine as it is. It's horrendously complex, and incredibly top-heavy in terms of bureaucracy. In terms of a state 'jobs for the boys' program, it's a wonderful wheeze.

Instead of taking money of, as you put it, "us low earners" then giving it back in tax credits, it'd be better to not tax it away from you in the first place. Instead of grabbing everything, and then making people fill in forms and qualify to get it back, just use the basic tax rates and the existing allowance system to leave those least able to afford tax paying less of it. The Income Tax system has one major advantage, and that is that for most people, the PAYE system means that every employer in the country is also an unpaid tax collector, and most of the administration of the system is therefore "free" to the government (and hence, indirectly, the taxpayer) because employers are doing it and therefore shareholders are paying for it. Some administration and complexity is inevitable if you're to target the effective marginal rate accurately, but it does NOT need to be done through a technically arcane and obtuse system like tax credits.

But the tax credit system is nauseatingly complex to administer (which is why some aspects of it have been horrendously ballsed up by the civil service), with huge incorrect overpayments and then a very aggressive attitude to demanding overpayments back .... or just suspending payments without warning while they claw it back, regardless of whether that's what the recipient was using to feed their family or not. And even where there aren't overpayments, administering it is keeping significant numbers of civil servants in a job .... and the only people that benefits is the civil servants doing it. So next time you here New Labour ministers boasting about how they've cut unemployment, you know where at least some of them went. (that last bit, for anyone that took it too seriously, was largely facetious).

The entire tax system is ludicrously over-complicated, and yet they still can't stop expensive tax lawyers finding ways to save the filthy rich vast sums, or get realistic assessments on non-doms, etc. And the tax credit system is one of the most over-complicated parts of the whole thing.

[Saracen]

....

is it just me or has anyone else noticed that since gordon stopped being chancellor, all this financial mess has appeared, is darling incompetent, or was gordon just doing a better job at hiding it?

Darling hasn't been in office long enough to be able to really screw it up. That's taken Brown years.

The 10p thing was entirely of Brown's doing. He announced that while he was still Chancellor, and it's just that it's only now coming into effect.

Not everything is Brown's fault. Nothing in economics is ever quite that simple. The trigger for the worst of the current economic gloom was the sub-prime lending fiasco in the US, and more specifically, the way those sub-prime mortgages have been repackaged into complex financial instruments that a LOT of banks, in their greed, bought (and I mean banks all over the world) and now find that they don't know what those packaged assets are actually worth. And that I, personally, put down to two things :-

- greed on the part of the banks
- the incredible stupidity of the US authorities for the nature and extent of the financial deregulation that took place some years ago. That's what allowed this nightmare in the first place.

But .... while we can't blame Brown for US financial deregulation, we can blame him for the level of spending he's indulged in for years (for results not consistent with the money spent), and for asset stripping, whether it be selling off gold reserves or vast raids on pension fund assets. And we can blame him for an economic policy that, while it keep interest rates low in order to keep inflation under control, allowed the boom in the credit market that has seen personal debt levels rise to the huge current position, and that allowed the house price feeding frenzy to support and encourage that credit frenzy. And we can also blame him for allowing financial institutions to lend on mortgages with daft multipliers (like 4x and 5x) with little or no deposit, and indeed, often lending more than the property is worth. That is only possible because of the level of house price inflation.

Brown is a one-trick pony. He, and his cronies, keep going on about his "financial prudence" because he's kept inflation (as measured by a careful chosen index designed to exclude certain crucial factors) and because the economy has "grown" consistently. Of course it has ..... paid for by creating huge levels of government debt, huge "off the books" commitments via private finance initiatives and a housing bubble that's encouraged vast levels of personal debt. In other words, the apparent "prudence" suggested by growth figures and inflation is largely illusory because it's paid for by debt. And, as with any household, if you spend beyond your means, sooner or later you either have to face very austere times while you pay off all that debt, or you go bankrupt.

And that is traditional Labour tactics. They spend themselves stupid, and then when we end up with economic hard times, it'll be the tories that end up having to impose hard measures .... and usually end up with the blame for the financial belt-tightening caused by Labour tax and spend tactics.

So no, it isn't just that Darling is incompetent (though he hasn't exactly shone). Mostly, it's that he inherited a dire mess, but can't really say that because it's his boss (with the much-boasted-of economic competence) he inherited it from.

All I can say is that I'm heartily glad Brown chickened out of the election that never was. Because it's looking distinctly like the next couple of years are going to involve some economic unpleasantness, and if he'd had the balls and called the election, he might have lost ..... and then been able to blame the tories when it falls apart over the next couple of years. Instead, is (as looks likely) it falls apart while Brown is still PM, then at least the blame will end up where it belongs .... firmly at his door.

[burtie]

The tax credit system is far from fine as it is. It's horrendously complex, and incredibly top-heavy in terms of bureaucracy. In terms of a state 'jobs for the boys' program, it's a wonderful wheeze.

Instead of taking money of, as you put it, "us low earners" then giving it back in tax credits, it'd be better to not tax it away from you in the first place. Instead of grabbing everything, and then making people fill in forms and qualify to get it back, just use the basic tax rates and the existing allowance system to leave those least able to afford tax paying less of it.

I really don't understand how difficult telling the tax credits people in April the info on a p60 is, must be hard for some. Maybe its just easy for me, to tell then what you've earned, money goes into bank, so complex.

The Income Tax system has one major advantage, and that is that for most people, the PAYE system means that every employer in the country is also an unpaid tax collector, and most of the administration of the system is therefore "free" to the government (and hence, indirectly, the taxpayer) because employers are doing it and therefore shareholders are paying for it. Some administration and complexity is inevitable if you're to target the effective marginal rate accurately, but it does NOT need to be done through a technically arcane and obtuse system like tax credits.

But the tax credit system is nauseatingly complex to administer (which is why some aspects of it have been horrendously ballsed up by the civil service), with huge incorrect overpayments and then a very aggressive attitude to demanding overpayments back .... or just suspending payments without warning while they claw it back, regardless of whether that's what the recipient was using to feed their family or not. And even where there aren't overpayments, administering it is keeping significant numbers of civil servants in a job .... and the only people that benefits is the civil servants doing it. So next time you here New Labour ministers boasting about how they've cut unemployment, you know where at least some of them went. (that last bit, for anyone that took it too seriously, was largely facetious).

Yes well I had an over payment last year and i got none of the so called aggressive attitude to demanding overpayments back .... or just suspending payments without warning while they claw it back.....they where very helpful and i paid it back in small amounts over a year. I'm happy with the current Goverment and I'm sure they will pull themselves up to win the next election as The've got my vote and will continue to get my vote. I maybe the only person on earth that thinks Tony Blair did a good job in his years in office,(apart from the war)i spent 2 years on the dole under a tory goverment and have no intention off going back on it. And i do not earn enough to pay tax so the system you mention is floored really.

[Saracen]

I really don't understand how difficult telling the tax credits people in April the info on a p60 is, must be hard for some. Maybe its just easy for me, to tell then what you've earned, money goes into bank, so complex.

There is FAR more to the tax credit system than that. For a start, there's working tax credit and children's tax credit. And what an individual is entitled to depends very much on their individual circumstances. Each credit has a variety of elements and each applicant will potentially be entitled to some elements, but not others. And what those elements are can change.

For instance, if you are claiming the childcare element, and the level of costs change, you must tell the Inland Revenue within one month. Failure to do so can result in a £300 penalty. If the person/company you use for childcare seeks being registered, you need to notify the Revenue. Some changes in the hours you, or your partner, work can affect the elements of the credit you can claim, and again, you're required to notify the Revenue and can be levied penalties if you do not.

If you change job, you must notify the Revenue. Child tax credit will not be affected if the new job qualifies you for tax credits and if the gap between finishing one job and starting the next is no more than 6 days. But if you take a couple of weeks off in-between .....

The tax credits you're entitled to will be affected by the hours you/your partner work, the age of your kids, whether any of them enter training schemes or start claiming Income Support, whether any of them are babies, whether any of the kids are in the household is disabled, whether you are aged 50 or over and have been receiving specific benefits, whether you are 25 or over and working certain hours, and so forth.

I could go on but I'm sure you get the picture.

And if you don't report any changes of any of this myriad of parameters, the very least that's likely to happen is that you'll have to repay the overpayment. That might be all in one go, or it might be by having payments reduced or stopped, and it might also involve those penalties I mentioned. All of the above possibilities are standard and published Revenue rules.

You may not have had aggressive demands or clawbacks, and seeing as you said you didn't, I'm sure that's the case. But nonetheless, it has happened in the past and in sufficient regularity for it to have been front page news and on national TV, and for questions about the operations to have been asked in Parliament. Maybe a somewhat more reasoned approach is taken these days, but the fact remains that this is a very technical and complex system, and that it's easy for people to fall foul of some of those arcane implications of the system and at the least, open themselves up to repayments of overpayments ..... which can be blooming tricky if you're on modest income and have already spent the overpayment because you didn't realise it was an overpayment.

[JK Ferret]

I think we need to fire all politicians. All of them. And ban them from re-entering politics. Then open up the system again to all new comers. The problem being that the type of people the position attracts and just the kind of people, for the most part, you wouldn't want running the country. New Labour or New Conservatives, sometimes it's difficult to tell them apart. And I'd no longer vote Lib Dems (as I might have done in the past) as I just don't see them as being a credible alternative.

The system's broken. And so deeply embedded that no-one could ever possibly fix it.

Hear Hear!

Zak's post was here

Zak for PM, anyone?



I've never really taken too much notice of what happens in politics, but I can't help thinking now that with all this debt and crap all over the country, it's going to be the younger half of the population that's going to be knee deep in the brown stuff when it all collapses.

Some of the things that the Government come up with are just so stupid, why do we let them get away with it all the time? Sooner or later, all the rubbish that we put up with now is going to land back on our doorsteps, and it won't be a particularly pleasant time when it does.

It seems to me that the current Government at least just wants to protect itself from anything bad, and failing miserably at it.




Saracen... another truly thought provoking post/thread. I salute you

[Blitzen]

And that is traditional Labour tactics. They spend themselves stupid, and then when we end up with economic hard times, it'll be the tories that end up having to impose hard measures .... and usually end up with the blame for the financial belt-tightening caused by Labour tax and spend tactics.

Saracen.
I dont know how old you are, but i grew up in 'Thatchers Britain' and things were FAR WORSE then than they are now (unless you were from a well-off middle/upper class family). How you can call your statement 'Traditional Labour Tactics' i dont know. Thats traditional politics from ALL the parties i think you will find. Its the blame game.

I am not defending Labour as i think they are doing a shocking job at the moment. What i can say though is that if yoy think the Tories will turn around the fortunes of this country and answer our prayers then cloud cuckoo land beckons for most that think that.

Its also a VERY sad day that the people of London voted in that bufoon Boris Johnson. He is nothing but over-prviledged and has no grasp on the real world at all. I REALLY hope that anyone that was insane enough to vote for him will reap what they have sown.
I am so glad i no longer live in London as the Chuckle Brothers are more politically minded than he is.

I maybe the only person on earth that thinks Tony Blair did a good job in his years in office,(apart from the war)

I think he was good aswell ( and i was/am all for the war).
It really does fill me with dread at the possibility of going back to Tory Britain.

Dont read to much into these local elections though. Historically they have had no resemblance on the outcomes of General Elections.

[Koolpc]

They are all as bad as each other. Full of promises at election times which are complete fabrications. They are all the same.

I didn't vote for anyone this time as i am cheesed off with their lies and fat expenses they can claim etc etc etc. And before anyone says it, no, i don't want to run as an independent!! lol

Taxes going up and up. Bills going up and up, fuel, food costs etc. MPs lining their own pockets!! Gee, i just couldn't vote. Makes me feel sick to think of all the bull...t that comes out of their mouths and how we as a nation are going down the swanny. We can't be called Great Britain anymore. The law is too lax in that pedos and murderers etc get off too lightly. Bring back hanging and hard labour for prisioners. Make prisons a harsh place to be, not full of mod cons (Sorry for the pun) Cut off pedos privates and have their heads tattooed with the word 'Scum' or 'Pedo'. Stop over-running the country with more immigrants taking our jobs and social benefits.

I am not a racist just peed off with the way this country is going!! Not one party i can think of that should get my vote at the mo. If the BNP cleaned up some of their policies they would definitely get my vote!!

[Blitzen]

If the BNP cleaned up some of their policies they would definitely get my vote!!

In alot of places (it will happen here i suspect aswell), you would get slaughtered for making that comment.
I actually agree with you to a certain extent.

I really think that in a democracy (as we are supposed to be), the BNP do not get a fair say as someone is always trying to shut them up for fear of upsetting someone. Certain Muslim clerics can preach hate all over the country with little no consequence. As soon as the BNP say they want to end immigration straight away they are called racists. This is wrong and if truth be told, millions of people would want it end aswell but are too afraid to say.

Whatever people think, they are a legitimate party and therefore their opinions are as valid as the tories and labour. The Lib Dems dont really have an opinion so they dont count. Their opinion changes daily to match the general concensus so they cant be taken seriously.

At least the BNP have a clear picture and are not afraid to say what millions (but no everyone) think. They are the only party to do this.

Its already coming aswell. They are getting more and more local council seats and one of them, for the first time, has been elected into London as one of 25. If they were not a legitmate party, as many seem to think, they wouldnt be getting into these positions of power.
People are voting for them out of sheer frustration at how things are going wrong in this country.

Im not a racist either i might add, but even putting that comment onto the end of my post shows that a party that can be freely elected is marginalised as a racist one when in reality there is far more to it than that.

[SiM]

If the BNP cleaned up themselves then they wouldn't be the BNP. The BNP is the BNP because of its dirtiness...

[Blitzen]

If the BNP cleaned up themselves then they wouldn't be the BNP. The BNP is the BNP because of its dirtiness...

How is it 'dirty'?
I dont know a massive amount about it either, but that seesm to be a common thought with little evidence.

Forget their leader (is it Nick Clegg or something), as he has done some questionable things. But why should people not be able to, or even thoguht to be a racist, by voting this way?

Im also pretty sure that the tories and labour are far from sqeaky clean aswell........so how does that make the BNP worse?

[SiM]

I will just point out some key words from wiki.
whites only
Fascism
accepts white immigrants
overtly anti-Semitic

That is just from the introduction...

If BNP get power there might be world war 3, as they do not seem far different to the Nazis