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About LinkBackswell see if it works, otherwise another election.
well see if it works, otherwise another election.
Too true! I also couldn't believe some of the statuses last night. As one of my mates put it:Originally Posted by Lee @ SCAN
Looks like they are going to make an elected house of lords and they are going to use PR which is good as no first chamber will control the second one again. However I guess it means we are going to see Lord Griffin!
(\__/) All I wanted in the end was world domination and a whole lot of money to spend. - NMA
(='.*=)
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When I was at uni, I used to wind up all the pretentious Ba students who claimed everything derived from shakespear by claiming everything was just a re-hash of Leslie Nielson films. Surprisingly, that didn't get me laid much.
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Quite simply... w00t!!!
Kickstarters Pledged:
Godus Stonehearth Rain World Satellite Reign
lets see if i keep my job
But what will be biting people in the ass won't be Tory tax policy - it'll be a hybrid Tory/LibDem tax policy. And then you have to ask why they have that policy?
According to reports, and bearing in mind we haven't seen the actual agreement yet, tax "fairness" was at the heart of the negotiations as it was a central part of the LD manifesto. So all the signs are that, for example, the Tory Inheritance tax proposal is now history, at least for this Parliament. Well, no great surprise there as the Tories had said well before the campaign started that it wasn't a priority and would have to wait until it was affordable .... by which I assumed they meant some years.
On the other hand, we're hearing that there will be progressive moves to implement the LD idea of Income Tax starting at £10,000. That will certainly be good for low earners. How you pay for it is the question, though. If someone gains, someone else loses, and the question is, who?
Overall, I said way before the election that spending was going down by more than they'd admitted to and taxes were going up, and it didn't take advanced prescience to see it coming. Moreover, it was coming whoever won, including Labour.
So what will be biting asses won't be Tory tax rises. The Tories, after all, are traditionally a party of low taxes, paid for by a smaller state. If we get tax rises, and my strong bet is we will, they will be tax rises that are utterly necessary to pay down the deficit caused by Labour excessive spending. Tax rises are the consequence of spending beyond our means, and that doesn't refer to the element of the deficit resulting from the financial crisis, much of which was unavoidable regardless of who had been in power at the time - it comes from the structural deficit which is absolutely unavoidably down to Labour. They, by which I mean Gordon Brown, have been totally and exclusively in control of public spending for 13 years, and have transformed a healthy public spending level into a nightmare.
It is factually indisputable that they have done this. We can argue about the benefits they got from it, about reduced NHS waiting lists for instance, and about whether we got value for money or spending for waste's sake, but it is utterly indisputable that they did the spending, and that we couldn't afford it.
So any pain that comes from redressing that structural deficit is utterly the fault of those who caused the structural deficit, not those that have to sort out the disastrous mess.
Sad fact is though a rather significant proportion of the UK won't see it that way and will bitterly complain about the cuts/taxes, citing the whole problem to be that of the new government...
Not for 5 years, unless 55% of MPs support a vote of no confidence. And the Tories hold 47% of the seats. Wonder when they came up with that 55% figure...
I'm not sure if this is the right way round to do things or not, tbh - it'll certainly make it interesting. I guess the theory is that the proper democracy happens in the Commons, where the locally elected representatives sit, and the party politics happens later on. I can think of some interesting variants on a 2 house democratically elected system...
Me too - both the Lib Dems and the Tories plan to get rid of the body that funds my position. Hopefully, however, they'll be replacing the function that we carry out and as an independent, contracted third party we'll be able to keep the contract. It's a bit uncertain, though...lets see if i keep my job
That's the blessing and curse of every new government though - the people blame the current government, the current government blames the last government, and last government claims things would be better if they were still in power, and round the circle goes.
The whole point is a government generally stays in power until something really bad happens, so the new government is always inheriting a mess. And most normal people will struggle to understand that fixing a country isn't like fixing a car. They voted for someone else to fix it, so within a few months they want to know why things haven't got better. Depending on how bad it was, the legacy might last a long time - I strongly suspect that the reason the Tories don't have an overall majority in this parliament is because they're still suffering the backlash from people who did badly under Maggie.
Looks like they are going to close the birth centre where my child was born, because they cannot afford to pay for it! (only been open a year) The muppets got a private company to build the place only to find out they cannot afford to rent/run it, it is a shame as it was a wonderful facility, what we needed was a 10 year plan not build everything now, as all of we know buying two computers at the same time is the worse thing to do as they both need to be replaced at the same time. Our experience was so good there (to my suprise) I said to my partner I would pay next time for the facilities if we had to.
(\__/) All I wanted in the end was world domination and a whole lot of money to spend. - NMA
(='.*=)
(")_(*)
Indeed they will. They always do. But it makes as much sense as contracting a nasty disease by doing something stupid, and then blaming your GP when the medicine tastes foul.
But maybe, just maybe, things will be a bit more mature this time. We've had so much talk of cuts, and moreover, so much pressure from political commentators trying to get details of how the gap between what it's blatantly obvious needs to happen and what's been announced before the election that maybe the public will remember the problem existed before the election.
If there is a disadvantage to being in power, and especially in the same post, for so long it's that it's hard to blame anyone else when the problems start to become apparent. That was Brown's single biggest political mistake ... staying as Chancellor for so long. And he can thank Blair for that, which I rather imagine is causing whoops of delight and uncontrolled howls of laughter in the security of Blair's private study over the last few days. I don't doubt that Blair wouldn't admit it publicly, for the sake of the Labour party, but I'd bet in private he's hoist an ironic glass or two of 1907 Heidsieck (or similar) in honours of Brown's ignominious defeat.
removed :x
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