To all of you who voted labour:
Thankyou....
you're welcome
don't particularly agree with this policy but if the Tories got in I'd be up shit creek and so would most familys with 1.5 incomes and a couple of kids.
Some of us believe in a moderate socialist ideal. higher taxes and more state involvement. better standard of life for those nearer the bottom of the ladder. state funded schools, hospitals, pension etc.
I hate pretty much all our main current political parties but bladdy hall meight.
Its labour who are privatising our industires, they've sold off the NHS, they've sold off everything they can think of onto lucrative PFI contracts that are awarded for 20-30 years, make fat profit great, dont make profit well the goverment has to fork out its a no-risk high reward option and leads to crap service.
As for the people lower down being better off are you taking the piss?
Under gordon brown your pension contributions are taxed, and your pensions are being cut in real terms as they dont rise in line with inflation.
Anyone relying on a state pension is in for a rude awakening.
state funded schools? lol, "city academies" that offer worse results than what was there before but get labour donours nice titles.
Education for all? Great, part of the labour manifesto was no university fees, and what happens?
Billions wasted on expensive computer systems that fail to deliver, the firm cant pay so the government has to.
Child support lol, payments months late - payments lost, proposed writing off all child support debts etc.
NHS IT system? utter shambles.
Defence - defence procurement is ridiculous, the uk army still uses uncoded radio while we wait for a replacement system.
The standard army rifle is the SA80, a shambles of a rifle.
We went into Iraq without body armour because the goverment didnt want it to look like we were going into Iraq.
Our transport planes are without insulating foam to protect from RPG fire - but its been standard on US transport planes since vietnam.
NHS? Huge cutbacks because government funding is inadequate for rising healthcare costs resulting in cuts for nurses, creating a huge surplus in nurses allowing health trusts to pay as little as possible for nursing.
The reason this country is so shit is because people wont educate themselves on the political realities.
The health service isnt "free" its rationed because there isnt the supply to cope with demand.
The defence service is overstretched and underfunded
Our transport network is a joke - the train system cant cope so with one hand they raise fares and on the other they say cars are bad so use the rail network.
The UK and the US are not democracies, they are political systems run by and for the elite - remember we invented "democracy" - it was great, it was a way for fat landowners and barons to control the country while promising the people the earth, how little have things changed.
And then you go and blame the tories.
Fair enough they may have been cocks in the past but Margeret Thatcher solved a lot of the UKs economic problems, and like any big economic fix it had huge repercussions and families suffered. But how much would we be suffering now if we were subsidising tens of thousands of miners, and had militant unions ?
We'd be in a huge national debt in a situation where an individual would be declared bankrupt if they were in the same situation ( ie the position france is in now - fucked ).
Feel free to disagree with anything I've said but blindly voting for labour or the conservatives or the lib dems is insanity.
The political system is so awful in this country and in most countries, yet we are comfortable in our cesspit of mediocrity.
We banned the slave trade yet we endorse goverments that create economic slavery in third world countries - NIMBYism at its best.
Bah.
You read papers and watch news created by corporations with vested interests, our politicians are lobbied by those with the money to do so.
We have an unelected upper house and judicial overview.
We have no written constitution so we cant change the system very easily.
Oh PS: Sorry for derailing this thread but there you go.