Yikes!
60% Tory
59% Labor
49% LibDem
41% Green
35% UKIP
25% BNP
In the US, I am pretty far left, and I am a minority (South Asian) to boot. This must be an indication of how far right US politics are compared with the UK.
Or this site is seriously croaked.
Its an indication of how far right US politics is. Left wing US is probably centre / centre right here. What might freak you out a bit is that the UK is pretty right wing compared to continental europe. You’d be far right there!
I consider myself centre left here, and i got Green 72%, Lib Dem 70%, Labour 56%, UKIP 45%, Tory 34%, BNP 29%.
Surprised Green was top, although to be honest i don’t know much about their policies. I find myself agreeing with the Lib Dems the most out of all the major parties, and they’re who i’ll probably vote for.
The idea that people are seriously considering voting Labour again is absolutely terrifying. They’ve taken sleaze to a level that the Tories never reached, embroiled us in two needless wars killing hundreds of thousands (and yes, both of those were Brown’s wars as much as Blair’s), in the course of which the snakes leading them repeatedly lied to Parliament and the nation, and completely fucked the economy then squandered the money that should have been saved to spend us out of the “Great Recession” (of course, the labour party faithful are still convinced Brown is the best chancellor we’ve ever had). The clincher? The absolute worst aspect? Mandelson is back in government and arguably the second most powerful man in the country despite never being elected!
Hey! But that’s OK as long as we don’t elect ex-public school boys (ignoring the majority of the Labour front bench who were educated at many of the same establishments :rolleyes:)
Green 62%
Lib Dem 58%
Labour 58%
Tory 34%
No idea how that happened. I even clearly stated I was pro the building of new nuclear power stations.
Well, to be honest, it is due to the terrible effects of the Thatcher years, from which the UK has never recovered, that the UK has changed in such a way that a true Labour Party doesn’t exist.
Or an alternative viewpoint is that in the Thatcher years the country was turned around from the compete shithole it was in the 70s (and it was) and the Labour party realized (eventually, after a dalliance with Foot as leader) that they had to modernize to attract the voters and, yes, had to adopt some of the policies that had helped turn the country around. And so Labour became Tory-Lite.
Blotted though Labour’s copy book is, the right question to ask when you’re voting is not “Do I want to punish the current government?” but “Who’s going to do the best for the country over the next 4-5 years?”. The best demonstration of this principle is the 1945 election, when widely admired charismatic saviour of Britain, Winston Churchill, was voted out to be replaced with a Labour party who set up the Welfare State and the NHS - because that’s what people felt was needed at that time.
So even people disheartened with Labour can look at the Tories and think that despite the fact they’re “a change” they’d still be bad for the country. Especially when you consider that, for example, their MPs were no better than Labour over expenses, they voted for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and they were even more pro-City, anti-regulation than Labour were in the boom years. But even that is looking backwards - the reason I’m considering voting Labour is because I genuinely don’t believe that the Tory economic policy will be good for the country.
That’s my biggest gripe with Labour. Of course, the Tories were pro-war too. It’s a big plus for the Lib Dems in my view that they were against the war. I’m just annoyed that they don’t have a chance in my area where the fight will be between Labour, Tories and Respect. Labour’s a no-brainer in that choice.
It’s true that the Labour Party has done a number of really terrible things since 1997 - Iraq, ID cards, and the economy amongst them, then you might well never think about voting for them again. My thoughts on this though, are that a Conservative government would have enthusiastically pursued every one of these things - the only difference being that the Labour party at least had the decency to be conflicted about it.
And no, that doesn’t absolve Labour of their multitude of sins, but it does give me reason to believe that, under a Conservative government, we’d be even worse off.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a fairly rubbish situation to be in, but until we see electoral reform that’s the choice we’re stuck with.
I’d never heard of Respect before this - thanks. Now I know more: Respect Party - Wikipedia
The Tories were for ID cards? :dubious:
First dreamt up by Michael Howard, no less.
Googles
Wow. So it was. Not even as a security measure.
What is “due to the terrible effects of the Thatcher years”, and if the failure of those years was that obvious, why did Labour not just continue to endorse Thatcherism, but accelerate it, with the likes of public-private partnerships? Is this the Labour party’s main strategy, still? Still blaming their spectacular failures on things that happened the best part of 30 years ago? A party of jokers.
Blaming Thatcherism also neatly ignores the reason why it was needed in the first place. Every time Labour gets into power they fuck this country up.
After being told that there’s SUPER SECRET but incontrovertible evidence that Hussein was a grave threat to national security, and could launch WMDs at us within a moments notice, by the Labour snakes in parliament. Of course they were going to vote for the war, as any vote against would have been turned against them by the Labour PR machine (Lib Dems, widely considered an irrelevance, not withstanding). Besides, did anybody really have any clue that we’d be nation building in Iraq the best part of a decade later? That wasn’t how the war was sold to the pubic, nor to parliament.
It probably wasn’t sold to the public in that way neither, regardless of how it was sold to the pubic.
:smack:
They’re mostly anti-war (which is good) and I agree with a number of what few other policies they have but their candidate for my area this time is George Galloway:
He’s always seemed a bit loony to me and the image of him dressed up as a cat pretending to lick milk on Celebrity Big Brother is how I’ll always remember him (and where I lost all respect for him).
Even after it was clear there were no WMD the Tories still said that going to war had been the right decision. It’s one of the few things they applauded Labour for.
They seriously want to renationalise the railways? Holy shit! Maybe they can bring back the cattle wagons BR used to provide for us to ride around in as a reminder of the good old days.
I used to work for the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising (later the Strategic Rail Authority) and can report that while privatisation swept out a lot of the old BR crap that needed to go, it brought in a whole new bunch of crap. As with pretty much all the PPP initiatives of the Brown-as-Chancellor years, they were sold as transferring the risk and costs to the private sector and the profits to the public sector. In practice this always worked out the other way around. Of course, the way in which the infrastructure was sold off was even worse and a recipe for utter disaster (as indeed it proved to be).
That said, I wouldn’t vote for Galloway even if he offered me a diamond-studded pony. He’s a slick political scrapper but not to be trusted any further than you could spit him. You may or may not remember his appearance in front of the US Congress in which he basically revealed them to be a bunch of lying crooks attempting to use forged documents to link him to Saddam Hussein, which only served to demonstate that when George Galloway holds the moral high ground, everyone else must have sunk deep into the Earth’s mantle.