the tories show they're ready to lead a government...

I'm so hacked off with the government that I was almost thinking it would be better if the Tories got in. And then I was listening to them in the embryology debate and remembered all that moralising, family values, gay bashing stuff they did, and realised that despite Dave's nice smile they haven't changed. All the collapsing schools and hospitals and railways and the rest. Bleah

And THEN I realised THIS government are so bad because they are the most Thatcherite government we have ever had with continued privatisations, unelected quangos, attacks on personal freedom and fawning over business and the city whilst abandoning any attempts at a fairer society.

And I just wish for once that we could have a liberal government with genuine liberal values.
I'm sure that most brits are liberal really. Tolerance and acceptance of difference are supposed to be the defining British characteristics after all.

Or are we really a nation who just don't care about our fellow citizens and go along with 'I'm all right jack, fuck you'

I'm doing a project at the minute about the failings of the Conservative Party in the 90's, and theres so many comparisons that can be drawn between then and now with the Labour Party.

I don't think the Labour Party has done a whole lot wrong, especially when you compare the state of the country now to the Thatcher years. These things just happen in cycles; the honeymoon period is long gone and people are bored of the same government and looking for change.

I work for the Labour Party and I don't think theres any way they will get a fourth term. It would be bad for the party if they did get re-elected because the moaning would continue and they would be even worse off come the next general election, much like the Tories in 1997. I'm worried though, because theres no way the Tories will give a shit about a place like Newcastle....

hmm let's see...

started and illegal war in Iraq that we now can't get out of

forced PFI on everything despite it being blatantly obvious to anyone with half a brain that this will inevitably cost the taxpayer way more in the long run than it would have done to just borrow the money ourselves and build the stuff ourselves... never mind the sheer stupidity of having a company running the buildings on a 25 year contract with the aim of making as much profit from the contracts as possible... oh while we're on this... metronet, all gordon browns doing, wouldn't let livingstone raise the money himself to do up the tube, forced a pfi on him that then goes bankrupt leaving the job half done and the taxpayers to pick up the bill.

ran such huge levels of national debt while the economy was peaking that there's no margin for error now it's taking a nose dive.

spectacularly failed to do anything to tackle climate change - they talked the talk but did fuck all.

In not tackling climate change they also failed to move us away from such a fossil fuel based economy, meaning that when the inevitable happened and we reached the point where demand outstripped supply of oil we'd be utterly fucked - as we're now finding out.

Failed to recognise that the boom industry of the 21st century would be renewable energy, and that shipyards and the like could easily be converted into building windturbines & the boats needed to install them.... meaning that when they finally decided that they actually did want to go for offshore wind in a big way, there wasn't enough capacity to produce the turbines or boats to install them so the price of the installations trippled meaning the entire project is now uneconomic.

Overturned the results of a comprehensive energy review that had come up with relatively sensible recommendations because they'd fallen for the lies of the nuclear lobby, so they're now in the process of committing us to a new generation of nuclear despite the estimated cost to the tax payer of decommissioning the current generation recently increasing by another 10 billion quid to around £70 billion on top of what we've already spent... the uk has no natural reserves of uranium, and there is already a spike in the uranium price as demand is now exceding supply globally.... basically unless we're about the only country to go for a new generation of nuclear there will not be enough supply to meet demand, and the price of uranium will sky rocket just like oil's done. But forget all that, forget that we've still no idea what to do with the nuclear waste we already have, forget that the resources with which this country is blessed are wind, rain, tides & waves... nah fuck it let's build another 10 reactors, but more to the point let's let a french state owned company buy our nuclear generator that we've already indemnified against decomissioning costs, so essentially the french taxpayer will benefit from the profits made from selling nuclear electricity to the british public, and then the british taxpayer will then pay the tens/hundreds of billion quid to clean up after them.

Introduce the most draconian police state powers in the democratic world by stealth on the back of 2 terrorist incidents, one of which was in a different country & a reaction to that countries foreign policy decisions, the other was a direct reaction to this governments decision to ignore the biggest demonstrations in this countries history, world opinion, international law and actual real world intelligence to attack Iraq.

Allow ourselves to be a partner to, and complicit in the extraordinary rendition & torture programme of the US government with it's whole illegal combatants bollocks, guantanamo bay, bazram airbase & fuck knows how many other secret prisons ./ torture centres around the world to which they fly people they've kidnapped off the streets of any country they choose, and deny any rights or legal representation - not even the rights of an enemy soldier as laid down by the geneva convention. This is not only wrong, but it also means that our soldiers can have no complaints if they're captured and tortured - how can you complain about something when it's what your own side is doing. Essentially we now have no honour - fucking nice one new labour.

Then we've got this whole dropping the 10p rate of tax thing, which was basically undoing one of the only good things the government has done... fucking great idea, let's double the rate of tax for people who earn fuck all but at least aren't on the dole, just so we can cut the tax of people who're reasonably well off... how dare gordon brown even call himself fucking labour?

they did a few things right in the first couple of years, but from the millenium dome onwards they've been an utter shambles - basically the entire government is utterly incompetent.

this from someone who was celebrating when they won in 1997.

IMO the labour party is morally bankrupt, bankrupt of ideas, and thank fuck, about to go financially bankrupt and hopefully take this shower of shit of a prime minister bankrupt with it... then we'd all see just how fucking prudent he really was.

thing is the list of things they've fucked up is so big I could go on all day, but the worst bit is that they've done this when they started with the biggest majority of any government in history, and could basically have done pretty much anything they wanted.


I don't know what you do for the labour party, but unless it's clean the toilets, then I'm utterly amazed that you can manage to be so blinkered you don't think the labour party's done a whole lot wrong.

nowt personal like

Who you gonna be voting for gav?

I think thats a bit of an understatement, don't you?

Lowest inflation since the 60s

Lowest mortgage rates for 40 years

Introduced the National Minimum Wage

Record police numbers in England and Wales

Cut overall crime by 30 per cent

Record levels of literacy and numeracy in schools

Best-ever primary school results

Funding for every pupil in England doubled

Lowest unemployment for 29 years

Written off up to 100 per cent of debt owed by poorest counties
77,500 more nurses

19,300 more doctors

NHS Direct offering free convenient patient advice at any time

The New Deal helped over a million people into work

Local government funding has increased by a third in real terms

Overseas aid budget more than doubled

Child benefit up 25 per cent since 1997

Introduced the Disability Rights Commission

£200 winter fuel payment to pensioners & extra £100 for over-80s

Negotiated the historic Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland

Over 28,000 more teachers in England schools

Implemented the Freedom of Information Act

All workers now have a right to 4 weeks’ paid holiday

Record rises in the state pension

600,000 children lifted out of relative poverty

Introduced child tax credit giving more money to parents

Banned handguns

Cut long-term youth unemployment by 75 per cent

Free nursery places for three and four-year-olds in England, Scotland and Wales

Implemented the Human Rights Act

Cleanest rivers, beaches, drinking water and air since the industrial revolution

Halved maximum waiting times for NHS operations

Record number of students in higher education

Extended the Race Relations Act so that all public bodies and functions now have a duty to promote race equality

I imagine a lot of these reforms will have or have had a fairly large impact on yourself at some stage?

Like I was getting at before, I think the majority of the electorate have very short memories. It wasn't that long ago that the tories were fucking up the economy a hell of a lot more than what Brown is now after the exit from the ERM. I'm not for one second suggesting that everything happening now is good (Brown is not the leader Blair was), but if we put things into perspective, I know which of the two parties I would rather have running my country....

Or maybe I'm just being completley biased?

i dont think any of the parties could run anything properly.

the whole countries situation is a bit scary IMO, i'm just waiting for the electricity to be turned off.

Reasonably well-read and educated argument on the Nucastle board? Will wonders never cease?

I agree with both Gaz and Danny. They are both right. Labour has done good things and bad things. But all governments fuck up given enough time. The Tories had 18 years and by the end of it the schools, hospitals, railways, and all the public sector were in a desperate state due to massive under investment. The tragedy is that we only have these two ideologies to choose from. One thinks that everything can be done by the state, the other that the market will always make things right.

I would like to see a Liberal government. Not because it wouldn't fuck up too, but because I think this country needs one. I want fairness and social justice but I don't want a nanny state. I don't want us to carry on as the worlds number 2 warmonger licking Americas arse. And I want the state to keep it's nose out of my private life.

The sad thing about both parties is that they both want to tell people how to behave. I'm so sick of moralising politicians banging on about family values and hard working families and being 'tough' on crime. Just some honesty and humility would do. And the ability to stand up to the Daily Mails poisonous agenda of fear and hate instead of pandering to it.

The Labour Party didn't do a great deal in their first term to be quite honest. The only reason they won by a second landslide is because nobody wanted Hague as Prime Minister!

I agree that something needs changing. The Tories only just won the general election in '92 and look how long it's taken them to recover after all the shit that happened during that term. Their image was pathetic until the last couple of years. I'd hate to see the same happen next year with Labour- it's a double edged sword for me though to be fair. I'd like to see them lose the general election next year and come back stronger with some fresh ideas like in '97, but at the same time that means voting the Tories in, which would be a nightmare.

probably lib dem - voted against the iraq war, party policy to fully re-evaluate drugs policy etc.

I'd vote green if we had PR, but unless you're in an area where there's a really strong green candidate / campaign there's not much point.

no way I'm falling for the tory lies - no point swapping nu tory for old tory with a shiny new pr image.

voted labour last time coz jim cousins actually seems to be a decent MP and has a decent voting record, but I don't think even that's going to swing it this time.

nope - can't see how any of them have affected me at all... but that's the thing, about the only thing that had benefited me was the 10p tax rate, and now they've got rid of that in order to give some more benefits to people who earn £20k plus.

nah - we remember, and we also remember exactly how much we wanted labour to come in and actually be fucking different - you nicked our anthems, used our icons, did the whole cool britania thing, then turned into the tories we'd just kicked out.

bottom line though IMO is that politics in this country is broken. MP's used to largely have had careers before going into politics, so they knew something about how the world worked, and how to manage things - this lot are virtually all career politicians who mostly couldn't manage a piss up in a brewery - that's why every major project they've tried has gone massively overbudget on and mostly fucked up.

anyway, can't be arsed with any more... how many iraqi and afghan civilians have been killed as a result of your parties decisions? is it over 200 times more than died in the twin towers yet?

Without sounding like a comedown king, this country has such deeply rooted problems that no government is going to be able to solve without destroying the basic political infrastructure of the country and unfortunately that is never going to happen.

The media have the whole country in their back pockets and unless The Sun/Daily Mail change their political leanings/ideologies then things will never change. There simply aren't enough people who care AND are willing to do something about it.

Anyone know where to get one of these masks?