Can someone give me a brief description of how the SNP differs from the Labour Party, except in the one area of Scottish Independence?
No, it doesn’t. There’s no suggestion, from anyone, that any group of people will be prevented from getting healthcare that is funded by the taxpayer. None whatsoever.
It’s this sort of nonsense which is why so many people do vote Tory. They - we - are able to see through the lies, see through the bullshit which claims there will magically be more of everything for everyone pulled out of the arse of a Milliband, and realise that if a party will outright lie about what’s happened over the last 5 years when it’s clear to see that those years have been spent fixing someone else’s fuck-ups and slowly creating a stable base to build on, then there’s no reason to believe them about anything.
As opposed to the bullshit claims that everything is better when the private sector runs it, despite ample evidence to the contrary. The Thatcher and Major governments severely ran the NHS into the ground through underfunding and many of the privatised functions resulted in such poor quality service it actively endangered the lives of patients. One of the reasons the Blair government spent so much was that it had to rectify the effects of that underspend, with the result of a significantly improved health service.
But sure - let’s go through all that again. And hope it’s not you or your family in hospital when the next MRSA outbreak happens.
For those of you interested in a proportional count, here’s what I get using D’Hondt based on total vote divided by (1 + seats already won), and not counting the seat (but counting the non-Speaker votes) in Buckingham:
Conservative 244
Labour 201
UKIP 83
Lib Dems 52
SNP 31
Green 24
Democratic Unionist 3
Sinn Fein 3
Plaid Cymru 3
SDLP 2
Ulster Unionist 2
Alliance 1
The numbers are slightly different if you use a “direct proportion” method (i.e. multiply 649 by the party’s fraction of the total vote and round down, then award any leftover seats to the parties with the highest “fraction of a seat” (see “Alabama Paradox” for why this isn’t usually done): Con and Labor lost 3-4 each, and National Health Action, Traditional Unionist Voice, and one or two other small parties each would have gotten a seat.
I’m not going to say your wrong about that, necessarily, and I’m no fan of Thatcher. My point is that privatisation is neither inherently destructive not inherently amazing. What needs to happen is for the NHS, and other government services, to be well managed, and it’s pretty clear that UK governments have not, at least in my lifetime, been good managers.
Which isn’t to say that any old private sector management team would be any better, it’s clear that a lot of them are crap. But it’s also clear, to me at least, that the best private sector management, and the management techniques they use, are superior to anything the public sector has to offer. The trick will be to combine the best of both worlds without making decisions based solely on ideology.
Whether that will happen with a small Tory minority is another matter, that small minority quite possibly gives more power to the Thatcherite ideologues, which could indeed be damaging to the country. Con/Lib actually fit with my views pretty well, and my choice would have been for that to continue.
I would agree with you on that, and in fact for a time I was actively involved in the privatisation of the railways (both under OPRAF and its successor the Strategic Rail Authority - while the current system has major issues, people often forget just how bad British Rail was). Conversely, however, neither is public operation inherently incompetent nor inherently amazing.
The problem with both health and education is that governments feel the need to tinker endlessly with them, often trying to apply their pet theories regardless of whether they’re really appropriate or not. What privatisation does is merely outsource the tinkering.
Except that the government can’t afford “the best private sector management” and even if it could, private sector management will always enrich itself first while performing the minimum contractually obligated services allowed. It has little incentive to do otherwise, whereas the public sector can focus on performance outcomes rather than profit margins.
I used to think that Con/Lib was a good thing too until it became apparent that the Libs were about as effective at mitigating the excesses of the Cons as a hedgehog would be on slowing down your average Eddie Stobart lorry.
Well, I did my bit 
Sadly most everything else went to shit.
Honestly, you spend a few hours phoning out voters and you wonder how the hell democracy works at all.
What are the success stories of the Liberal Democrats in the last 5 years (both in legislation they got passed and in legislation they prevented from happening)?
Republicans in 2014 and Tories in 2015. But the former was anti-incumbent and the latter was pro-incumbent.
The question is whether they can afford not to get the best management. Good management - really good management - gets the best out of people, finds better ways to do things, and saves money.
And the idea that a private sector manager, who’s job depends on getting results, is going to be less motivated than a public sector one with a union-backed, guaranteed job is absurd. There are flaws on both sides, as well as strengths. It’s not exactly trivial to break the link between profits and management, or to build in incentives that reward outcomes other than maximising profit, but neither is it impossible.
Ideological opposition to private sector involvement in the NHS, or other public entities, is simply refusing to use things that are proven to work. You mention the improvement in the NHS under Blair, don’t forget the private sector was involved with that - public/private partnership was the buzzword, and it worked.
I suppose you’ve all seen the ‘Maggie Simpson’ meme by now.
It’s a big improvement on the Simpsons-related meme we had during the Olympics.
The Labour Party is still generally leftist, although devoted to the capitalist way. The SNP is whatever it wants to be according to the moment. At present it includes anti-austerity and anti-Trident because that gets in the votes: in power in an independent Scotland they could be as far right as Thatcher. Basically they are a pragmatic corporatist party. Over history they have adopted many policies, disparate but all subordinate to nationalism.
The Lib-Dems are more difficult to explain. Basically it depends if you have ever seen one of those charming ceramic cats with a hitler salute in the windows of a Chinese restaurant. They bear the same relationship to politics as do those animals to cooking the food.
Well, they got that dead wrong, didn’t they?
Balls Out
Balls To The Wall
Balls Takes A Licking
the headlines write themselves.
It’s interesting. Pollsters are getting it wrong, and not just somewhat wrong, but spectacularly wrong, everywhere. US, UK, Israel - the three last elections the pollsters were off way outside their margins.
If they don’t manage to get ahead of this somehow and find a way to poll close to the real results, they are risking of losing credibility completely and no one will pay them anymore.
On the other hand, it seems that the gambling sites have been a lot more accurate than the pollsters in predicting the final results, in all three of these elections. Maybe that’s the wave of the future…
You reckon?
Don’t take on J.K. Rowling at election time - or any time, really: Memo to Twitter trolls: Do not fuck with J. K. Rowling - Vox
I wonder what this election would have looked like under AV.
Also, now the Tories govern alone, we can see whether Liberal claims of neutralising the more Tory of Tory policies is actually true.
Anyone else fancy the Etonians doing a Mark Cavendish - have the team bear the brunt of the wind and let Boris Johnson take over with 15 months to go?
Another thing that happened in 1979 was that the SNP got a lot of stick for supposedly letting the Tories in. And for all the talk this time of Conservative scaremongering about an SNP-influenced Labour government, I reckon the SNP were quite happy to go along with it themselves. Doesn’t hurt them at all in Scotland, and a Tory win means they can carry on as usual, fomenting resentment against that nasty government in Westminster, rather than being in some kind of awkward support arrangement with Labour. Every time Nicola Sturgeon went on about “locking the Tories out of government”, which she did often, she actually helped the Tories, by fomenting another kind of resentment, this time in the minds of the fabled Middle England. She’s not stupid, she must have known that.