What do the election results really mean?

[Skii]

Superb posts Saracen, pretty much sums it up.

[TheAnimus]

It's intresting blitzen that you say you'd never vote Tory?

Why exactly? If you've got a blind allegence to any party, then your effectivly giving them carte blanche to do what they want.

What is it that you think the Tories would do? Tax the poor... wait a second.

[Blitzen]

It's intresting blitzen that you say you'd never vote Tory?

Why exactly? If you've got a blind allegence to any party, then your effectivly giving them carte blanche to do what they want.

What is it that you think the Tories would do? Tax the poor... wait a second.

Just because i say i wouldnt vote Tory, it doesnt mean that i have 'blind allegance' to just one other.

Your 'tax the poor' quote is interesting and i think i get the gist of your meaning in the question. I know that the labour party are taxing everyone to the hilt. Its wrong. If you believe that the Tories won't do the same, then we all know in reality that they will. They are all the same, they just dress it up differently. Giving to us with one hand and taking back with the other. Its always been the same so why would it change now?

Maybe there is slight allegence, to the labour party, but certainly not total.

Maybe i live in the days when the Labour Party really were for the people. I am not too blind to see that this is no longer the case.
What REALLY annoyts me though, is that when my dad was very influential in the Labour Party and NUPE he put many hundreds (if not thousands) of people onto picket lines. It was all very militant and his views were very strong on it. These people striking had nothing...literally.....but he would take a colleague to dinner, ON EXPENSE, whilst thos poor sods couldnt afford a bottle of milk.
This is probably why i didnt speak to him for years. I am glad those days are gone and the unions dont have anywhere near as much power. It would be folly to abolish them though like the Tories want/wanted. There has to be middle ground.

Problem is, no one is right or wrong on the political front and as long as people arent stupid enough to vote for George Galloway then i cant see things changing massively whoever we put into power.

Tories, Labour, Lib Dems, BNP......whoever governs us from now until the end of time will all just be feeding from the same trough FIRST......they will just be different pigs

[TheAnimus]

i guess i'm saying if you wouldn't vote for one of the two parties, then your going to end up voting for the other!

What is it that you think the tories will do thou thats so hanious? Granted their curroption was rife, but never quite metronet grade incompitence that makes me assume courruption. I still think the worse thing the tories did was the right to bribe, i mean buy. By getting rid of the social housing, with a total lack of forward planning, they might of won a small army of voters, but in the long term made things much worse.

The problem i have with them is they don't seam to want to do *anything*.

Oh well, someday someone will come in and fire the 50% of the NHS that seam to exist to purely to justify their own existance, get rid of the pointless tax credit schemes etc.

Problem is axing the tax credit scheme would give plenty of ammo to any oppersition party.

[Blitzen]

The lack of social housing was a big thing and still is. Thatcher got shot of all that and that is a massive proportion of the elctorate that cant actually afford to live from day to day. The way that Brown has hiked all the other living expenses hasnt helped but the blame cannot be laid at his feet for this one.

NHS is also a very good point. Far too many pen pushers taking large salaries. Start getting shot of some of them and get the Matrons back on the case. That would solve alot of the NHS problems very very quickly.

Tax Credits - as you rightly say, this can make or break a party and i dont think anyone would dare abolish it.

[Saracen]

......


Your 'tax the poor' quote is interesting and i think i get the gist of your meaning in the question. I know that the labour party are taxing everyone to the hilt. Its wrong. If you believe that the Tories won't do the same, then we all know in reality that they will. They are all the same, they just dress it up differently. Giving to us with one hand and taking back with the other. Its always been the same so why would it change now?

Maybe there is slight allegence, to the labour party, but certainly not total.

Maybe i live in the days when the Labour Party really were for the people. I am not too blind to see that this is no longer the case. ....

You have a point, at least, up to a point.

Where I agree is that there would not, and indeed probably should not, be any huge, immediate tax savings if the Tories got it. I think they would have to take a leaf out of Gordon's book and stick by the general level of Labour spending, at least for a while. There are at least a couple of reasons for that, and of the two biggies, one is pragmatic and one political.

The pragmatic one is that a lot of things that are underway that are already commitments, and either aren't easy to change or aren't legally possible to change. The political reason is that if the Tories were to announce that they're going to "revise" spending on the NHS, for instance, it would be tantamount to handing Labour a weapon to beat them with.

But .... in the medium term (and I exclude long term because that, in this type of thing, takes us out of the first term of a government anyway), I think there are still some fairly deep differences between Tory and Labour, and that is where savings, and tax cuts, will come from, if they come from anyway. The difference is one of philosophy. Labour still believe in controlling everything from the centre, in the state knowing best and in Whitehall determining which pair of underpants each of us puts on in the morning. Oh, okay, maybe not quite that last bit.

But there was an article on the Daily Politics today about government plans to bring back singing in schools. Apparently, the idea was to get all kids singing - it's good for morale, encourages proper breathing and posture, and so forth. And the idea was to produce a 30-song songbook that ALL schools would have to use to teach their kids the same songs. But it fell apart because the powers that be couldn't agree on which 30 songs should be used.

And that, while a silly example, typifies the attitude that Labour, even New Labour, have and that the Tories don't - micromanagement, control freakery. Labour believe in state interference in everything, unless there's some reason why not - which is not good when your Prime Minister is a humourless anal control freak. The Tories believe in the state not interfering unless there is some reason why they should - which is also perhaps not good if your potential Prime Minister is an insubstantial juvenile public schoolboy PR manager.

Either way, we're going to get an element of taxation, and in all likelihood, the public are going to moan about it whatever level it is set at and whomever is imposing it. You're dead right about that.

But the difference is that the Tories want to retain an element of control by controlling gross funding levels. You have to if you want to control the economy at a macro level, and you also have to if you want to prioritise where you do the spending. Labour, on the other hand, want to put a combination lock on everyone's wallet to which they have the combination and you need permission from Whitehall to spend your own money ..... or at least, that seems to be how they want to micro-manage things like the NHS.

As for the NHS, Labour keep going on about how much they're spent. But they're missing the point. It isn't just about how much they've spent, but about how they've spent it and more to the point, whether they (or we) got value for money. In other words, it's results that count. And what do Labour do to achieve that? They impose a stupid level of micro-management, vast swathes of targets that everyone has to reach and a bureaucracy employed to monitor it and collate statistics. That's why we have police officers spending far longer filling in the forms explaining why they did a search than they spend doing the search, and why we have hospitals given advance notice of inspections so that they can (and it''s been admitted, often do) bring in extra staff on inspection days to skew results, and spend time and money worrying about reaching government targets when they should be worrying about patient care.

So are things going to change dramatically and instantly if the Tories win? Nope, or at least, I hope not. But the way things are done, the underlying philosophy will change, and perhaps more of that NHS funding will be spend on doctors and nurses and less on administrative bureaucrats and 'managers'.

There is, in my opinion, nothing whatever wrong with cutting NHS spending IF it is achieved by improving, or at least, maintaining medical standards, and cutting red tape.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of cutting red tape, let's scrap things like the National ID card system, and more importantly, the database. That'll save a good few billion quid of taxpayer's money that can be better used, and the IT companies salivating over those juicy contracts will have to put their plans for new Porsches on hold and go back to working for a living.

[iranu]

Saracen as usual speaks eloquently and hits the mark. I certainly echo his sentiments.

I do agree somewhat with Blitzen about the social housing. Selling it off was a brilliant idea (bear with me!). Home ownership encourages personal responsibility and by allowing people who would not have ever dreamed of owning a house the chance to do so it gives those people a sense of aspiration. The big problem with selling it off was the money generated was not ring-fenced for building new social housing it was used for tax cuts or keeping rates down. This was a bad move.

The Torys have a couple of problems. Firstly any new policy they announce gets nicked by the government. It's hard to introduce new policy then because you don't get the credit for the idea. At the moment all Cameron has to do is stay quiet and let "the snot gobbler" make a mess of it and win by default.

Secondly spending and tax cuts. The electorate shop in supermarkets and they expect value for money. Here is what happens. They go in to Tesco with £10 and they buy the things they need or want and they get ten quids worth of stuff (minus Tesco's profit). However, they equate this value with how governments spend money which is false. Your £10 at the government supermarket would probably get you about £4 worth of stuff because the other £6 gets wasted on bureaucracy. No one in their right mind would go to the government supermarket and it would swiftly go out of business. However, suggest to a person to cut tax from £10 to £8 and they go ballistic because they think the "skools 'n 'ospitals" would fall apart even thought the real spending is £4 and a lot of the rest is waste.

I think Cameron should be bold. Massively simplify the tax system. The ideas are simple. I'm sure people could come up with more.

Raise the personal allowance massively so that it takes low wage earners out of paying tax altogether. Then you can scrap the 10p rate and introduce the higher and lower rates. That way there is incentive for people to work and you don't have to administer a complete balls up that is "working tax credits" and it saves cash too.

I find it perverse to take money from the low paid then produce a system that wastes a large proportion of that money administering a system to give some of that money back if that person is deemed worthy/needy enough. It's criminal and ironic from a socialist government. Don't take the damn money in the first place!

Road tax. This is another thing that is pissing people off and is another self inflicted Labour wound come 2009. Taxing people who have to use a big car because they have a family is ludicrous. Tax people on how much petrol they use, not what car they own. So scrap the road tax and put the tax on petrol. That way you are taxed for what you use. Also this reduces bureaucracy so saves money. In order to raise tax you have to administer it and that costs money and that's where the waste is.

[Saracen]

I do agree somewhat with Blitzen about the social housing. Selling it off was a brilliant idea (bear with me!). Home ownership encourages personal responsibility and by allowing people who would not have ever dreamed of owning a house the chance to do so it gives those people a sense of aspiration. The big problem with selling it off was the money generated was not ring-fenced for building new social housing it was used for tax cuts or keeping rates down. This was a bad move.

Yup, selling off social housing has an upside and a downside. The upside, as you point out, is that home ownership gives a larger degree of responsibility. But, and it's a point I've made before, ownership is not a one-size-suits-all solution. Not everyone should buy. For a start, it involves you in a level of responsibility for paying for infrastructure - you are not just buying a property, you're buying the on-going expense involved in maintenance, repair, insurance ... and perhaps improvement. It is also VERY expensive to buy, and to sell, and takes what can be both quite a lot of time, and an unpredictable length of time. In other words, it's a bit commitment and it ties you down a lot. You have much-reduced mobility. For some, that's good. For others, bad.

The problem is, when house price inflation is at the level it has been at for years, there is a very convincing argument that people should get on the housing ladder while they still can. The market is pulling the ladder up behind itself. That might, however, self-correct in a slump, if we have one.

Selling off council houses and not providing a program of replacing them seems, on the one hand, to be stupid. But on the other hand, if you sell off houses (at a substantial discount, in most cases) and then go out and build new ones, there's a couple of implications to that. If you fund the rebuild program entirely from sales receipts, it is going to be a dampening cycle unless receipts exceed costs. Even if that isn't true of existing stock, it will be, sooner or later, as soon as you start selling off the rebuilds. Now, either that implies topping up the sales receipts with general taxation, or it implies that you are going to run out of replaced stock sooner or later. What was the point of selling them off? Is it to use tax revenue to build and sell houses at a discount? Because that's what you'd be doing. Or is it for the government to run a house-building company in competition with the private sector, because that's what you'd be doing if the program was self-funding from sales receipts.

The conclusion to that would seem to be that there's little point in selling off state-owned assets, like housing, at a discount if you're going to immediately go out and spend tax money building more, only to sell them again.

But if selling off council homes is a typical Maggie policy, we might well ask why, after 11 years in power, New Labour hasn't even tried to reverse that step if the traditional Labour values of social care were still on their agenda? But we haven't seen any such program of providing social housing. Instead, we've seen a huge boom in enthusiasm for private ownership, and that is an aspect of our society and economy that has been encouraged by, and fuelled, by Gordon Brown. He is, in large part, responsible for it. Why? Several things :-

• house price is largely a function of supply and demand. And supply has stayed limited, so prices have risen.
  
• one of the biggest factors to affect housing demand is transaction cost, as measured largely by interest rates. And Brown has affect that in two main ways :-
  
  - he gave direct interest rate control away, the the BofE MPC
  
  - he gave the MPC inflation (in a carefully crafted measure) as the sole imperative of interest rate policy
  

Keeping inflation low is a laudable objective in its own right, but it isn't the ONLY aspect of the economy that needs to be kept in balance. Brown just seems to treat it as such, and judging by the way he speaks, low inflation and output figures are the only indicators of the health of the nation's economy. But one effect of keeping interest rates low is that borrowing is cheap. And that has directly fuelled not only the huge growth in personal debt, but it probably the single biggest factor in keeping house prices rising. If interest rates had been allowed to rise, it would have made mortgages more expensive, damped down housing demand and kept house price growth at a more manageable level.

And the cycle is self-reinforcing. Because those of us on the housing ladder are watching our own house price go up, we're not really hit by the price of other houses. We are, however, encouraged to think that we're wealthy because our home is "worth more". Newsflash for those that haven't worked it out yet - it's only worth more when you sell it. Meantime, you need to live somewhere.

But, given the ever-increasing asset value, that has been used to justify (or even provide collateral for) ever more loans. And that is what has been feeding consumer demand, and that is what has been keeping unemployment down and consumer demand up.

A large part of the reason our economy has bucked many European trends in recent years is that house price growth has kept us spending, and borrowing to spend, at record (and unsustainable) levels. And low and behold, our Chancellor has done very well out of it because every time consumers buy in the shops, the Treasury gains. Every time corporate profits increase, the Treasury gains. And every time a house is bought, and Stamp Duty paid, oh boy does the Treasury gain.

And it is that cycle of overly hyped consumerism that has kept the economy looking good, by those indicators that Brown chose to emphasise all the time, that made him look like the model of prudence that he claims to be. But it's all built on the housing bubble, and on a vast mountain of consumer debt.

And it's now looking like it's coming home to roost.

Gordon Brown, sound Chancellor? If I wasn't laughing so hard I'd be crying.

And that, incidentally, is why he promised to keep basic and higher rates on tax at Tory levels. It's because he had other ways of getting the money out of us. And did he, the "best" Labour Chancellor in history, spend any of that huge treasure trove of consumerist revenue rebuilding social housing? Did he hell!

[Saracen]

... The Torys have a couple of problems. Firstly any new policy they announce gets nicked by the government. It's hard to introduce new policy then because you don't get the credit for the idea. At the moment all Cameron has to do is stay quiet and let "the snot gobbler" make a mess of it and win by default.

I'm not so sure about that last bit.

I agree about policies getting nicked. It's also the case that the Tories needed to go back to the drawing board and have a long hard think about what they were going to do, seeing as Blair and his crew had, largely speaking, abandoned so many traditional Labour beliefs and moved in on Tory ground. Combine that with the fact that the Tories had simply been in power too long, were looking arrogant and distant, not to mention sleazy, and Labour had it handed to them on a plate.

But it's one thing for people to protect vote mid-term against the incumbents. It's another for the population as a while to put a party in unless that party has done a competent job of looking credible. The Tories have to look like they can run things. They have to look like they have ideas, are fresh and new, have drive and enthusiasm, and most important of all, have 'direction' a story to tell.

And that story has to be detailed enough to make sense and coherent enough to be credible. And you can't announce 100 new policies a month before an election and expect to get them out and across.

The Tories have had a long period in a largely policy-free zone. That's good in that it's given them plenty of time (I hope) to come up with good, practical desirable and workable ideas. If they haven't got a whole truckload of those under lock and key, you have to wonder what they've been doing in the last 10 years. Also, the absence of policies makes it hard for the opposition to attack them on policies - other than the absence of them. And that wears off in effectiveness after a while.

So ... having no substantive publicly-announced publicly was a smart tactical move while they stood no chance of winning an election, and I think everyone knew, going in, that they were going to lose the last couple. But now, they are looking like a credible alternative electorally. Labour are in the doldrums, getting increasing fractured internally and a ripe for a fall. But, IMHO, they won't fall unless the Tories look credible as a government and to do that, they need policies.

The critical question - exactly when is the next election? I'd bet that, despite public pronouncements of the "bring it on" variety, Cameron et. al. were pooing their underwear at Brown's election that never was, because if the numpty had had the balls to go through with it, the Tories were hopelessly unprepared. You simply can't communicate a whole policy spectrum effectively in a few weeks. You (IMHO) have to announce some things, bang on about them for a while until they've penetrated a largely disinterested electorates consciousness, then release some more and bang on about them .... and repeat. It takes time for people to really get what you're saying. I don't mean to hear it and understand it, I mean to know, without thinking about it, what you're values are and what type of things you'll do.

Next problem is that Brown has to have the election within, what, 25 months? he has no choice. And a nightmare scenario for any PM is to go right up to the wire, be left with no choice but to hold the election and then to be hit with some unpredictable disaster ...... like some civil servants loosing 25 million people's bank records in the post. Because if you've left it until the last minute, you still have to go to the country with that type of disaster fresh in everyone's minds.

So I'd expect Brown to go before he absolutely has to. But clearly, he won't go yet. He and Labour need to try to recover from the local elections. I'd say that means a year minimum. And I doubt he'll want to (though might have to) go in the last 6 months, in case something blows up in his face (again). Then, factor in the time of year, daylight hours and ambient temperature and seasonal rainfall etc affecting turnout and you have quite a complex calculation of the best time to go.

And all of that might be overridden by conditions on the ground if something happens. He might plan on going 6 months ahead of when he has to, only to find something blows up. So he delays .... only to find it gets worse ... and worse .... and worse. Assuming, of course, Brown is still PM, which I'd suspect is pretty likely, but by no means certain.