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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Our big parties need to learn to behave like small ones
The Tories say voting UKIP would let Labour in. Labour say voting the SNP or Greens would only help the Tories. The SNP and the Greens both say Labour are the same as the Tories. The endless and numbing permutations go on and on and on with deceitful Lib Dem bar charts thrown in for fun.
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There, I said it.
Even in economic terms Labour is pretty much admitting that their policies will not be that different from what the Coalition is doing. Their target is to balance current spending rather than the overall budget during the next Parliament which makes a difference of about £35bn a year. This sounds a lot of money until you appreciate that by then government expenditure will probably be about £750bn a year making the difference less than 5% of government spending and just over 2% of GDP. Such is the scope of our sound and fury over economics.
No wonder parties who promise dramatic things in relation to the deficit or trade or whatever sound attractive even if what they are talking about would be impossible to deliver. On the other hand are you really saying our major parties should also indulge in such fantasy based policies which they know they can't deliver? It would explain some of Labour's indifference to serious policy making for the last 4 years.
How do the smaller parties behave exactly, that makes imitating them a wise idea?
Confused - Perhaps I need another cuppa to wake up.
What's wrong with a boring but competent government anyway ?
1. Very few of them think bigger and actually grasp the nature of the fundamental challenges the country faces (deficit, productivity, freedom of speech, etc) but prefer to play party politics / personal advancement games.
2. Precisely zero of them can get elected by proposing policies that would genuinely address 1 above. We need to cut our deficit by 100bn. Where are the votes in that?
O/T
NS&I Pensioner bonds now on sale... DYOR but many of my 65+ clients are lumping on.
The truth is that there is a Blairite/Cameronite consensus in the country which drifts slightly left or right depending on the circumstances. That's why, in the end, EdM could be such a negative for Labour in May. Where there is so much broad agreement, the personality of the politician becomes a lot more important.
Obviously they don't feel very confident they can win votes for their policies on their own merits.
The problem with being the Central Tendency Party, more prudent that Labour, less nasty than the Tories, is it ends up being the Less Anything Than Anyone Party. Passion and intensity it what life is about, being a Cardigan and Slippers Party won't excite anyone, you just get the NOTA vote, until the next NOTA opportunity comes along.
We need to cut unnecessary public expenditure, so that we can improve our infrastructure, (physical and electronic communications), our education and the health service.
Increased taxation of any income level is not the answer, except perhaps for increased taxation on second or third homes in the UK.
Events likely to come include a break up of the EZ, increased technical competency of our Asian competitors, the purchase of many of our remaining industrial and construction companies by the Chinese, a continuing battle against militant Islam at home and abroad, as well as natural events.
The real battle of 2015 is between Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome. The former may help to get us out of the hole we are in, the latter will just dig a deeper hole.
But what do we actually get in Energy? Ed Miliband. Ed Davey. Wind farms and their subsidy. Promises of price freezes! Closure of thermal plants and no serious replacement strategy. The German Energie disaster. No investment in pumped storage. Laughably childlike nonsense. And in the area of policy that determines national success or failure. It's incomprehensible to me how badly governed we are in the realm of energy. Future historians will look back and ask how we became so stupid and trite in the 21st cetury.
Obnoxiousness and silliness seem not to be confined, on here, to supporters of the minor parties.
Oh and Hughes, Huhne, Hancock.
That is utterly insane. The experience of Germany and their wilful self destruction of industrial competitiveness on the altar of Gaia should serve as a warning to all. It seems, predictably, that Labour have learned precisely the wrong lesson. We are destined to have expensive unreliable energy and industrial closures as a result. Well done Ed!
The British people aren't interested in issues that require long and deep contemplation, its the culture of instant gratification, if a politician can't fix something in a year or two, they have failed as far as the public are concerned, and more like 6 months as far as the media are concerned. Everyone expects to get and no one expects to pay, and they expect to get it now.
I dont have a lot of time for most politicians, most of them wouldn't know a principle if it ran up and punched them on their nose. The rolling news coverage doesn't help, over a million people work for the NHS, and yet the Health Secretary is expected to have a view on a particular local difficult with no time to consult his officials or make enquiries. HM Treasury and its reporting organisations like HMRC employ hundreds of thousands of people, and deal in trillions of pounds a year and yet Newsnight expect to be able to ask the Chancellor about some detail of policy in the 1000 page thick Budget Act passed every year and have him understand it in detail and give a coherent answer, its stark raving madness.
With the impossibility of even approaching the public, or the media's expectations, its not a huge wonder that they in effect give up. Its easier and more expedient to do more or less nothing, fob the public off with lies and excuses, and concentrate on the irrelevant minutiae about who said what to whom about immigrants on the M4. The election ceases to be about anything meaningful, because the lack of real chance means both parties are reduced to the same limited actions, and the same excuses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbwcBYT0DI
Also... when did your "race" affect your ability to speak English. Assuming that someone of a different race was less unable to speak English without evidence could actually be considered racist.
Perhaps David Cameron can demand that British courts have supremacy is his renegotiation? He can then back down later and insist that he can accept European judicial supremacy, but he'll make damn well sure European courts serve British tea in the waiting room.
Indeed, and why "secret".
I don't know how often this has to be repeated: the government can run deficits in perpetuity. No point whingeing that this is nonsense - this is the situation through most of recent economic history for western governments.
The absurd fixation on the deficit is causing the problems you whine about in 1.
On the first claim, I think Farage said not hearing any English spoken on trains in North London made him feel uncomfortable. On the second, Mark Reckless said that illegal immigrants should be repatriated. Also, if the immigration rules changed after leaving the EU, those that didn't qualify under the new rules, and didn't have indefinite leave to remain, may have to leave and reapply under the new rules.
Why? If the economy is growing we want a smaller Government with fewer ideas, thank you very much.
I'm personally fed up of politicians driven by ideology foisting unwelcome policies on people only for the next Government along to replace them with something else.
The Government need to steer the economy, raise some revenue and keep costs down. Anything else is largely unwanted.
http://news.sky.com/video/1408057/not-everyone-queues-for-charlie
Courageous.
Wonderful poem, written about religion of course more than politics, although given the year Yeats wrote it the two were intermingled, as indeed now. 'Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold:' how apt!
The habit of British parties of portraying each other as borderline criminal disasters while producing core policies in touching distance of each other does feed cynicism, and Patrick and Danny on this thread, and to some extent Southam Observer, are examples of voters yearning for something radically different. But I think that it's healthy that the differences focus on areas like the NHS and education where there are clearly different models on offer, rather than an unnerving situation in which the alternative governments saw the basic situation entirely differently (which could well mean that one of them was simply and dangerously nwrong).
Politicians only worry about the short term advantage; media outlets are biased, lazy and unreliable (No, I'm not Tapestry). Metro is as reliable as the Daily Mail
Sky News and the BBC all in favour of "Je suis Charlie" until it comes to the crunch, then they become "Je suis Kouachi".
I understand that they "don't wish to offend", therefore they only do it to safe targets. That's their version of bravery and journalistic freedom. I would sympathise more if they were honest. We're right with you Monsieur Hebdo ... until it gets awkward, they we're right behind you - a long way behind you.
I wouldn't seek to offend people deliberately, but now the Kouachis have struck a blow for the Prophet, and their adherents will see that it was successful. The media can be cowed. They achieved their aim.
The truest thing Henry G Manson has ever written: the Lab/Lib/Con parties haven't a new idea, thought or policy in their collective head. Actually they all act as if they were headless chickens. Chickens all.
"Why? If the economy is growing we want a smaller Government with fewer ideas, thank you very much."
a very novel idea from the modern Conservatives, it must be election time.
Running deficits in perpetuity assumes you can find lenders in perpetuity. People have tried it, and eventually they get a visit from the IMF.
Ask Dennis.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/conservative/11346161/The-Tory-machine-is-gearing-up-to-back-Boris-Johnson-as-the-next-leader.html
In the case of Labour v. Conservative both have to deal with the reality of the budget deficit (reality constraint) but only as far as they have to because they have to slice and spend the public spending cake slightly differently to appeal to their respective electoral constituencies.
By contrast, both are in favour of EU membership (chosen constraint) but one is pretending that reform of it is realistic, in reality pursuing half-heartedly very modest reforms, whilst the other would abandon all pretence of reform whatsoever.
The question now is which part of our lifestyle is seen as the next target, which bit is offensive to the fundamentalists and they think a bit of well placed nit of violence will get us to blink again. Supposed for the sake of argument a cinema was asked to introduce segregated seating for men and women, it did it for a week or two but it was unpopular, so they reverted to normal seating, and then the cinema was bombed.. what would other cinemas do then, what would the government do, what would the press do.
http://newstonoone.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/2015-may-and-everything-after.html
"If David Cameron is out of power, he is out of a job: the Conservative party is ruthless that way and anyway too many of his MPs hate him for him to survive. Who will replace him? Much depends on a man whose thoughts are hard to read: George Osborne. In 2005 he declined to stand for the Conservative party leadership, recognising correctly that the public would engage much better with David Cameron. He has established a large client base in the party, and if he stood he would certainly stand a good chance of getting the job. Does he now want to do it?
My guess is that he has not changed his self-assessment and that he would prefer to be a power behind the throne. If he is wise, he will not have changed his self-assessment - he is too disliked on a visceral level by the public and too associated with David Cameron to be able to take the party forward."
Perhaps best not to read the next bit too carefully:
"If he throws his weight behind Sajid Javid, he would immediately become the man to beat. The Conservatives like making unexpected choices and Sajid Javid would tick a lot of boxes that the Conservatives would dearly love to tick. He's also a pretty orthodox Conservative.
If George Osborne jumps the other way, I expect Boris Johnson would get the job. It would be entertaining, at least."
And I'm not sure just how reliable Peter Oborne is on such matters anyway.
Rock throwing - thats all there is from the purples.
To face Islamist terror, we must face the facts about Islam's history
If you don't subscribe to the online edition - it's worth a £1 to read just them and the comments underneath.
I used to buy the Telegraph and Times every day - the % of the same copy that appeared in filler inches was enormous. It's cheap/free content. The Mail uses press releases the most entertainingly. Which is why they're so successful.
But anyway:
- English parliament
- No income tax on the minimum wage
- No tuition fees for science students
- Recall elections after 20% of constituents sign a petition
- New apprenticeship qualification in place of GCSEs for those more vocationally minded
If there was a Politically Correct Nonsense Award - it's surely this.
Nothing on education ? Nothing on defence ? Nothing on pensions ? Nothing on housing ? Nothing on IHT, IT, NI, VAT, corporation tax ? Nothing on law and order ? Nothing on energy policy ?
Just rocks ?
Already responded in an edit.
And now I must go and do my chores.
And Nigel Farage set it out in black and White when he wrote Mein Kampf.
1 sounds like an unnecessary extra level of politicians - just have EVEL at Westminster, scrap MSPs and send Scottish MPs up to Holyrood on Thu/Fri to do Scottish business.
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/hating-the-haters/
Time to end restrictions on free speech in France, establish a Palestinian state and tighten the borders.
Cultural ghettos of group think. Most unhealthy.
27 crews involved.
I do hope your hyperbole is for effect and not sincere.
Just saying like.
Yay.
I think we're on course for the third government in a row to be elected on around 35% of the vote.
That in part explains why other parties are emerging.
I don't think FPTP will survive and the reality of PR will invigorate parties to deal with the issues Henry has identified.
Will I still be OK!