Reading through the announcement of a major road-building programme, and Danny Alexander's enthusiastic support for it, with a sense of disbelief.
I think Danny Alexander has just scuppered the LibDems' chances of recovering any of the support they lost to the Greens. I can't believe it'll do much to attract back those who went to Labour, either.
Hmmm.... After driving north from Newcastle towards Dundee last night on the single lane A1 in the dark with a greasy spray and endless lorries I think I can say that I was fairly enthusiastic. I have never seriously thought about voting Green. Aren't Labour supporters supposed to like all this infrastructure stuff though?
Curious also as roadbuilding is a devolved matter - so one would have expected Mr Cameron to follow the spirit of EV4EL and keep Mr Alexander out of that particular area.
A lot of teachers will tell you they encounter similarly bewildering situations daily.
When a child is in pain or grief stricken, the teacher dare not offer so much as a comforting squeeze around the shoulders for fear it may be misrepresented. In this respect, you really do feel for them, and begin to despise the sanctimonious humbugs who have reduced us this.
My Dad has been teaching in East London for 30 years and the way he was treated by the school he worked for before his current one, was beyond disgraceful. Completely innocent of anything he ended up on police bail on the say so of two kids, whose side the headmaster took. The police actually accused my Dad of grooming children because, as a Premier League academy coach he gave kids from one of the poorest London boroughs free tickets to matches.. because he is a nice guy!
Even my most lefty friend, an arch socialist who cheered when Thatcher died, who wont read The Sun because of Hillsbrough, whose father is North African, said he understood why people buy The Daily Mail when you hear of such loony left madness.
One of the reasons I've actually appreciated Osborne's record in office is that the cuts have been slower than his rhetoric. We'll need to speed up now we approach 5% unemployment and interest rates would otherwise go up though.
I think he's cut spending as fast as was reasonably possible without crashing into the rocks on the other side. You're right that we need to keep going on getting public spending down quite a bit further, although the political difficulty is that, with the health costs and care for the elderly necessarily taking up more and more resource, that leaves the remaining spending under even greater pressure.
When you look at where the spending goes, really the only scope for further significant savings is working-age welfare payments.
I would love to see a graph of spending per capita in each of major segments by country. There's a whole bunch of countries, including wealthy ones like Switzerland and poorer ones like the Baltics, who spend a lot less as a share of GDP. Even our own economy was down at 41% after Major, despite us having a smaller GDP. Yet by all reports, further cuts in our departments are incredibly difficult, and we've been eroding our defence capabilities etc. Where's all the money going?
On looking after the elderly. And since they're the most Tory supporting part of the electorate, don't expect that to change.
Pensioners are in my experience more concerned about the future of their children and grandchildren than they are for their own current well being. So, provided any cuts to pensioner benefits are geared for the long-term benefit, I think there would be far less resistance to them than you imply.
Even my most lefty friend, an arch socialist who cheered when Thatcher died, who wont read The Sun because of Hillsbrough, whose father is North African, said he understood why people buy The Daily Mail when you hear of such loony left madness.
Because the only newspapers that are guilty of Chris Morris style hysteria on these issues are left leaning ones?!
Even my most lefty friend, an arch socialist who cheered when Thatcher died, who wont read The Sun because of Hillsbrough, whose father is North African, said he understood why people buy The Daily Mail when you hear of such loony left madness.
Because the only newspapers that are guilty of Chris Morris style hysteria on these issues are left leaning ones?!
No because the school was run by politically correct loonies.
His actual words were "I thought that kind of stuff didn't really happen, and was only a figment of the Daily Mail's imagination"
On looking after the elderly. And since they're the most Tory supporting part of the electorate, don't expect that to change.
So, let's get this straight, you think Gordon Brown built up all that public spending because he wanted to reward the most Tory-supporting part of the electorate? Or are you suggesting that as soon as Miliband is in power he's going to axe spending on pensioners?
Face it Richard. The Tories are the party of smaller government but the biggest users of current spending are their own voter base. You can hardly deny that's a problem.
And yes I know they've paid into the system their whole lives.
Yes, yes, I understand that. But you seem to be claiming that things would be different under Labour. That wasn't the case under Blair and Brown - quite the opposite, in fact. Brown doled out goodies for pensioners more than any other recent Chancellor. And as far as I klnow there is no suggestion that the two Eds would do anything different.
So what is your point, exactly?
I don't know what Labour would do and I rarely praise them. However given the voting demographics we now have, I'd have thought it more likely that they would tackle this issue rather than the Tories.
Corrected data tables are below, as is an amended summary of the results. In a nutshell, Labour lead UKIP by 29 points in Doncaster North, not twelve; Miliband leads Cameron as best PM by 14 points, not one point; Miliband’s constituents would rather see him as PM than Cameron; they give him the highest ratings of the four main party leaders, not the third highest; and they trust Miliband and Labour more on the economy than Cameron and Osborne, not the reverse.
I hope readers will appreciate that I always aim to conduct my research to the highest standards, that data is always checked, and that instances like this are very rare. As ever, I welcome questions and observations on my research, and will always seek to correct errors that inevitably crop up from time to time.
Meanwhile, my apologies to all readers and especially to Ed Miliband.
Comments
Even my most lefty friend, an arch socialist who cheered when Thatcher died, who wont read The Sun because of Hillsbrough, whose father is North African, said he understood why people buy The Daily Mail when you hear of such loony left madness.
His actual words were "I thought that kind of stuff didn't really happen, and was only a figment of the Daily Mail's imagination"
I had better not say anything otherwise Mr S will be sued.