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About LinkBacksYeah I get that, didnt know it was recorded though, lets be fair the entire system needs a reinstall, its become so bloated with crap we dont need or use lolOriginally Posted by kalniel
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Yeah I get that, didnt know it was recorded though, lets be fair the entire system needs a reinstall, its become so bloated with crap we dont need or use lol
Corbyn and his team are the weakest opposition party there is, however austerity, public service cuts (Which they are now saying they'll throw money into if they win the GE, howver the figures are still less than what they cut in the first place because of austerity so doesnt take much to see through that pile of BS) means I'd rather vote Labour than Tory, after all it is a two horse race realistically, then theres the Russian/Corruption connection and all the other give your friends jobs and tax breaks and pretend that its going to be good for the economy..
That's not answering my question. Could you have another go, unless that subject just doesn't interest you...?
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I utterly agree. With every ounce of my being : exept we don't have those people . We don't have the time to do those things. We are where we are... and it's a deep pot of misery. We dpn't have a dialogue and they don't trust us. We have only bluff and counter bluff. And as for reneged deals... dire as it seems, we need something to start with.
We have to get someone to do something. Surely? And it's Boris or Corbyn or Swinson or a combination of two of those I think.
And WHOEVER it is, won't still be in power all the way through the divorce anyway, as it's gonna take years to split properly. So....... send in the person most likely to get some agreement so we can do something....
Anything.... other than this stalemate that we are entrenched in.
Arghh.
Here I have another problem. See, I utterly agree with that.
But I agree with spacein_vader too.
Two opposite views, and I agree with both. It's doing me 'edd in.
If there was a "none of the above" candidate, I'd vote for him/her. But sadly, that's actually banned by election law.
Yeah really, it is. It is, IMHO, part of the great FPTP stitch-up.
But for Brexit, I might be tempted by LibDems. There are certainly a number of their broad positions I agree with. Sadly, as others have explained, their Brexit u-turn position I see as a cynical attempt to mop-up those Remainer voters that care more about stopping Brexit regardless, than anything else. And that, in my view, makes them manipulative and unprincipled. Not much has a higher priority for me, electorally speaking, but the principle of democracy is one of them.
Ergo, LD is a non-starter for me .... at least until Brexit is done with.
Monster Raving Loony .... if it was demonstrably a 'none-of-the-above" protest vote, albeit with a humourous and 'dititus impudicus' to the piwers that be veneer on top, then maybe. But the veneer is to thick for me and obscures any genuine, considered protest. It's far too easy to just construe such a vote as "don't give a f .... fig" for the point of democracy. And that point, that principle, is very important (to me, at least).
So, spoiling the ballot. I kinda have the same problem. It might be a thought-out considered and principled spoilage .... or it might be someone too stupud or drunk to get it right.
If, maybe, vote-by-vote details of how it was spoiled were published (without identifying the voter) so that anyone caring tovlook could identifying the difference between :-
- someone carefully saying "I reject all the above as unfit"
compared to
- too stupid to mark just one candidate ( this not being a voting system where that might be valid),
- so drunk as to just scribble obscenities or rude drawinfs on the ballot,
- etc.
then maybe I could see it as a valid protest. But there is no such publication.
Even a tactical vote is acceptable as a genuine, legit democratic option .... if an acceptable tactical vote option exists.
To be honest, my best option probably is tactical ... a Tory vote to try to keep Corbyn out. Not that with our current Tory incumbent's majority it's likely to matter, though not that ling ago, and for quite some years, our MP was a Labour minister.
Anything else, round here, us a waste of effort even turning out. But I will.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
Zak33 (14-11-2019)
/\ that with knobs on. A silent "I reject it all" vote won't show on a radar.
Aint no point spoiling a ballot, because protests do nothing. I can be very certain, in my heart, that neither Corbyn nor Swinson nor Johnson will lose a millisecond of sleep if the spoiled ballot papers quantity went up , even by a huge amount.
Because by that point, they have another job to do !
My response to that, which is a discussion that goes way beyond this thread, is that publuc service cuts are merely part of "austerity", and the real issue is not that austetity was good/bad, because it's self-evidently bad, but whether not having austerity was even worse.
Safly, we still have a huge level of historically accumulated national debt. That, effectively, is a tax burden your kids and grandkids will be paying for, for services provided mostly way before they were born.
Debt ain't free, and nor is it cheap, any more than your credit card or mirtage are. The big difference is that government actions, and even intentions, have a huge impact on that cost.
Know how that debt is financed? Mainly, gilts. A bond issued whereby money (say, £10 billion) is lent by international markets, and a defined interest rate is paid. Currently, ours is pretty low, at around 2%. And at the end of that fixed term, governments have to pay back the £10 billion. They do this by issuing another £10 billion bond, usually (in our case) over 10 years.
So, during that period, you've paid all that interest on all those bonds, but you still owe exactly the same amount, kinda like paying interest-only on a loan, but nothing off the capital.
So ... when one of those bonds needs to be repaid (and it happens several times a year) what matters is how those markets see the future of government finances. After all, very borrower has to find a lender, and the lenders collectively set the rate. Because markets viewed 'austerity' as taking our problems seriously they lent over the last decade plus, at more or less the same rate as Germany got. Now go look at Spain, Italy or for a real shock, Greece.
Last time I looked, the interest costs on our hundreds of billions of debt (then trillion-ish) were the third largest item in our national spending, behind only the welfare budget and the NHS (first and second line items respectively).
If we hadn't had austerity, hadn't managed to keep those markets confident, we very likely would be looking at 5%, 6% or even 7% .... still way short of Greece. The cost of that rate difference alone would have been in the tens of billions, per year. And remember, that's without paying a penny off the actual debt itself.
A higher rate level would be the equivalent of, say, the annual cost of our entire nation police force, or defense, or education.
Those rates are that important.
Lose market confidence a bit further and it no longer is an issue of rates, but of not being able to find a lender on the markets at all. Then, you're down to "last resort" sources, like the European Central Banks .... and remember what they did to Greece, or arguably worse, the IMF. Or with an economy our size (as opposed to tiny Greece) it'd be both and even that might not be enough.
It's all very well bemoaning austerity, but the alternative was collosal expense (for our kids, grandkids and great-grandkids to pay for) and some internatoonal bodies like the above dictating government spending patterns as a condition of bailouts. And without those bailouts, you're looking at a European Venezuela, or even Weimar republic inflation.
Sometimes the choice isn't from nice or nasty, or even nasty v. really nasty, but from utterly, truly nasty or collossally horrific. Guess where the Corbyn/McDonnell levels of planned spending lead?
Want to end up with IMF dictat requiring the spending on the NHS or welfare state to be, oh .... halved? No, me neither.
A lesson learned from PeterB about dignity in adversity, so Peter, In Memorium, "Onwards and Upwards".
"The UK’s stock of index-linked debt stood at around £426billion at the end of 2018, making up 26% of the government’s debt portfolio(Chart A.10)"
https://assets.publishing.service.go..._final_web.pdf
The chances of Corbyn getting to Number 10 is virtually zero at this point.
I think that the only possible outcome is an outright Tory majority, or a hung parliament.
Keeping that in mind, I think that anyone who doesn't like the Tories (or this Tory), or their Tory MP, can feel safe to vote for Labour or just about anyone they want.
[Though it may not matter in your constituency]
But still compos mentis enough to make it to the right polling station, state their name and address clearly enough to get a ballot paper, and slot it in the ballot box?
I'm sure it happens, but I doubt in any significantly different amount between constituencies that a voter shift to spoil papers wouldn't still be noticed.
Lib Dem for me & very happy with that choice. Wont be a wasted vote in my constituency either. Cant vote for scum bag Tories and wont vote Labour as it's a wasted vote, not that I would have any way.
I take your point. In which case based on the voting tallies from last time I may choose to vote in the only way that may have a meaningful impact.
That impact being the Greens might keep their deposit this time.
I think that is rather harsh. Lib dems always had a remain stance, they've been pretty consistent on that. If they believe their supporters believe in remain then it is reasonable to stay with that line even if the rest of the country wants to leave. TBH I expected them to take this line at the last election, but as usual they were a bit half hearted about the idea. So yeah, it might win them some votes, but if it is winning them votes for a policy they actually believe in that's something I can respect (even though in my case it may stop me being able to vote for them)
He couldn't lead a thirsty horse to water...
But there's too much Tory corruption and crap that's gone off in the last decade to ignore, IMHO they've had long enough to make things work, but haven't..
It's an odd election frankly.
On the one hand, if you're a remainer and havent budged then you might still want the Conservatives in power, but not with a big majority so as keep them in check.
On the other hand you have Labour who are not likely to have a majority either, so will form an alliance with SNP, who will insist on a 2nd independence referendum. So in effect, Boris now gets to say a vote for us is to keep the union and have no more referendums. We are facing 8 years of nothing getting done.
All while they will squabble about the NHS because the Conservatives have sold off everything else barring the land registry.
Funny thing is, while I firmly pro-remain, and would would indeed pick -any- party that is pro-EU than anti-EU, including the LD, a straight out revoke is not nearly my favoured outcome. I would still much prefer a well formed second referendum that -really- put all the options available on the table with STV.
Though I also don't think that you can really fracture leave and remain any more than it already is, and the only possible fracture one might have with the LD stance, is one -within- the remain faction (between those who are comfortable with revocation without second referendum and those who are). A self-defeating outcome.
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