Elections 6th May...

[PAULW]

so, they're both as bad as each other then?
pretty much what I thought

Yes Taff your right old labour and nu labour have both ended up running the country into the ground and leaving it bankrupt

[pigletwillie]

Quality.....

[reetnproper]

For the first time in my 'voting ' life, I have absolutely NO idea who will get my vote.

I have emailed ALL the 3 main parties over the last few months to try and get clarification on their policies about things which matter to us, as a family and haven't recieved a satisfactory reply from any of them - replies yes but NO clear information in respect of their views.

Hopefully, as the election draws nearer, policies will become clearer and the choice easier because I WILL vote whatever happens but it may well be for a marginal party.

Reet
x

[valmarg]

My MP is Charlotte Atkins - a trougher and expenses gouger who is as bad as the neighbouring Wintertons...The Wintertons are retiring through choice: hopefully Ms Atkins will be forcibly retired...

You may well get your wish re Mrs Atkins Madasafish.

We moved in to Alton in 1973, at that time we were in the Staffordshire Moorlands constituency. For some reason, best known to the Electoral Boundaries Commission, by 1997 we were removed from SM, and dumped in the Stone constituency (Bill Cash, another trough guzzler).

As we pay our council tax to SMDC and they are responsible for all our local services, we felt disenfranchised by the boundary change.

The town of Cheadle, and outlying villages (including Alton) are now back in Staffordshire Moorlands.

Until 1997 Staffordshire Moorlands had always been Tory. Looking at your later posts, it may not be the result you wanted, but you should get rid of Mrs Atkins.

valmarg

[taff]

Yes Taff your right old labour and nu labour have both ended up running the country into the ground and leaving it bankrupt

with a sandwich of greed in the middle.....

[organic]

People aren't disenfranchised with voting - just ask Simon Cowell. Politicians just need to re-engage with their 'audience' in a way that their audience want to see them, not how they believe they want their audience to see them.

In my opinion of course.

Lines will close at 12am, all calls made after that time will not count, but you may still be charged.

Agree and disagree.

Agree that people aren't disenfranchised with voting per se, and Cowell is living proof of that...

...however, I don't think the two are parallel. If you actually look, people who vote on these overblown talent shows actually feel like their vote counts. They vote for Billy Bigvoice to stay in and keep singing and if they get in they keep singing. Come to the finals they vote for him to get a record deal, release a single and an album in quick succession and if they win - that happens.

Voting for politicians is entirely different though.
You vote for your local <insert party name here> candidate after lengthy doorstep discussions with them or their activists and deciding that they sit the closest to your views - and then they contradict everything they and you agree on and follow the party line.
So four or five years later you ignore what the candidates say and instead look at the party's official line. You vote on the one you agree with and then they break any promise that seems even remotely bothersome, act like they own the country and we're all serfs and generally abuse their power in ways unconcieved of at election time.

The problem is - the Simon-Cowell-Show winners truly serve the people. If they suck they vanish into obscurity after six months to a year to be replaced by the current "favourite". Sometimes they don't get the Christmas Number 1 after "the people" get sick of the monotony of it all and put Rage Against the Machine into the top slot instead. The people vote for a winner and the winner does exactly what is expected of them. They release the single... the album... go on a sold out tour and then, usually, vanish from whence they came.
They don't have any "power" at all - they just do their job and then either go or stay depending on what the people want.

The very root of the problem with politicians is the POWER they inherit. Truly they are just a replacement for the all-powerful monarch they replaced.

Remove the power and the kind of person running for election will change - instantly - from power-hungry "we/I know best do what we tell you to do" types to the kind who genuinely want to serve the people and keep their job only as long as they are deemed to be doing it properly.
We'd get genuine servants who wouldn't be interested in being seen to be doing something and who spent the last few months of their career trying to line up big-money consultant roles in the private sector... but instead would do everything in their incredibly limited power to keep criminals off our streets, potential invaders at bay, invite in as many major companies as possible (no unemployment problem when there's a surplus of well paid jobs) and ensuring people don't infringe on the personal and property rights of others.



Oh and as for the gap between rich an poor. I'd like to paraphrase the author of some money type book my brother's got. (Could be Frakonomics... could be Barefoot Investor... could be something else entirely)
"Remember, you're already one of the wealthiest people in the world."

When people moan about the amount of money the wealth have and the "poor" don't have - they are almost invariably talking about the "poor" in this country.

Reality check: Even the homeless junkie sleeping in the doorway of an abandoned Woolworths shop is practically a millionaire compared to a truly vast proportion of the population of the world.
The single-mum scraping with two part time jobs and trying her hardest to raise her kids properly is well into the top few percent of the world's rich-list.
(I'll not comment on professional benefits-claimants and those who outrage when it's suggested that those who won't work shouldn't be paid a penny as the contempt I hold for them is liable to offend some people.)

Talking about the unfairness between a banker's* wage and the wage of the majoirty in this country (11k to 15k per year) is like Bill Gates complaining that Warren Buffett has more money than him.


* I choose bankers only as that's the current target of hate. I couldn't care less how much they earn - but taking big bonuses out of banks that have been bailed out and bought by us does grate. I don't blame the bankers for that though... I blame the politicians. THEY are the ones who not only let... but made it happen.
Capitalism works... but this is not a capitalist system. Under capitalism - be it restrained and limited or laissez faire - the banks with toxic debts could have failed. It'd have been a mess if they did, but even having that possibility present would more than likely have meant this current mess wouldn't happen.
When they are considered "too big to fail" they have NO reason to avoid failure because if they are going to fail - the government steals our money and hands it over. They keep getting their bonuses and the party keeps on going.
It is not the fault of the bankers... greedy though they might be... they did not take the money from the people and saddle us with generations of debt. The politicians did.

If they did not have the power to do so we would not be in the state we are in now.

[organic]

And now the google ads are throwing political propaganda at us!
Hilarious!

[PAULW]

with a sandwich of greed in the middle.....

Dont remember that bit, there was us the sick man of europe being sent food parcels from India because people over there thought we were starving, then Maggie came with a big bottle of medicine she said this is going to be nasty but it will make you better held every one by the nose and spooned it down their throat and thing did get better, she cut the tax and gave people more of their own money to spend which they did buying goods which created employment which raised the hopes and expectations, if wanting to better your self or your living conditions is greed then yes there was greed in the middle.

[taff]

It's the generation thing though isn't it? You remember the seventies better, I remember the eighties better, and coming from a small mining village, I remember them vividly.

[its hilly]

My tuppence worth

If all politicians were told that they had to actually PROVE they were working a 5 day 40hr min week 44 weeks a year, with set expenses of £5000 a year, and a wage cap of £25,000 a year....
within six weeks we'd have no politicians left.

When the majority stop getting paid or claiming obscene amounts of money for simply following 'party policy' like sheep insead of standing up, using common sense, and doing what is RIGHT instead of politically correct...

When there is a party that really actually does exactly what it says it will instead of wriggling round to make what it said into what it wants

Then it would be worth voting.

Until then stick a pin in some junior school list and give those kids the job instead. They wont make any more mess and we might even get a straightforward honest answer occaisionally.

[Madasafish]

Valmarg
Thanks for the reply. Following boundary changes, Ms Atkins has a notional minority of approx minus 2500 (? more) at the last GE in 2005. So unless there is a big swing to Labour - and in Staffs at the EU elections last year, Labour were nearly wiped out - she's toast.

I hate thieves.

(In any other walk of life she would be in jail)

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Thing is, I remember the 80s pretty well too... I grew up not far from Agecroft Colliery, my grandparents house backed onto the pit, I used to play on the slag heaps (usually getting in trouble for doing so as I wasn't allowed down that part) and though I was very young I do have memories of the strike.

The main memories I have from that and from other union stuff around these parts were unions being completely unreasonable - one builder I know had a flying picket bus turn up with pick handles and hammers to shut their site down... another who refused to down tools working for an employer who paid well and gave good conditions had to stand up to flying pickets too... I seem to recall he ended up on TV as a result. As he put it, he saw no reason to strike when he had a good employer who should be supported, not punished. That kind of positive thinking was extremely unpopular.

I've known people who've had to literally fight (and I don't mean "have heated words with" - I mean physical fighting) union reps to avoid losing their job because they didn't want or need to pay up and "show cards". "For the workers" my eye... two hard working lads who commuted for a couple of hours each way being bullied into handing over their hard-earned to a group they wanted nothing to do with. Nice. I'm just gad they didn't pay and istead gave the rep every reason he needed to never come back to that shop.

I'm a long way from anti-union... I just think the unions in this country have it all wrong. It's all "more jobs, more money" and subs for the union bosses. Unions elsewhere are FAR more beneficial for the workers... acting as representatives in talks with employers and rather than needlessly striking and trying to hold to ransom they work with employers to retrain workers when jobs are to be lost. Someone I know has experience of unions here and in Sweden. He's got very little good to say about our lot and very little bad to say about theirs.

The tales and experiences I've got of unions paint a very different picture to the one so often found in mining towns and places with large numbers of tradesmen from unionised fields.

[PAULW]

It's the generation thing though isn't it? You remember the seventies better, I remember the eighties better, and coming from a small mining village, I remember them vividly.

You will remember then that arthur scargill started the strike with a small house and a big union, when the strike was over he had a big house and a small union.

[taff]

I was quite young...
but the unions were not entirely blameless.Having a prime minister stacking up coal in order to provoke the situation that happened is a bit naughty.
And I have very little to say about unions in general,except sometimes they're useful, and sometimes they're not.

[organic]

Taff - why was the stockpiling going on though?
Was it because she was being a b**** or because the union had held the entire country to ransom once before and she was going to make damned sure they couldn't do it again?

I say that as someone who thinks both sides had and have it wrong (as should be clear from my other comments in this thread) but it needs pointing out that Thatcher didn't just decide to stockpile coal just to be antagonistic but in preparation to take on a union that was undermining the government.
Again I'm not fan of the government, but to have it undermined by a handful of union bosses just isn't on.


Good point about Scargill's house, Paul.