Politicians in general were a much higher caliber in those days. Howe did have more respect but then so did the alternatives. Howe took a lot of flack during the bad days and if the tories had lost the election he would have been badly damaged. All the downside he was blamed for at the time was later seen as wise.


Here is a fun snippet from wiki

You more or less said austerity was merely deficit reduction. Thats deficit reduction, not austerity. Its earlier in the thread.

There is nothing I disagree with here. You argued earlier in this thread that deficit reduction was austerity. No one disagrees with deficit reduction, merely the methods.


Raise taxes? Seize oil? Legalize drugs? These are all pretty good ideas.
The only argument against raising taxes is some bull**** laffer curve, which fails to see how far off we are. Capital flight won't take place if we do it properly, and smartly.
Legalizing drugs is a no brainer. On so many way.
Seize oil= We could be Scandinavia rich if we didn't nationalize it.
I'm for borrowing if we can do it correctly, but we probably can't as you say. That doesn't mean we turn to austerity.

True that.

There's talk of getting rid of Ken Clark which would be the worst move ever. I love that guy. But it would mean moving IDS away from Welfare.... Oo apple and oranges.

Also, big news regarding the Tories and Lords reform. Dropping it=end of Nick Clegg? Anyone wanna bet on lines on this-
1) Nick Clegg leader of Lib Dems next election?
2) Coalition over by New Year?

They might (very debatable imo apart from the legalize drugs which is a no brainer) be good ideas, but they are for all intents and purposes fantastical ideas(apart from raise taxes LDO), that have no relation to a possible political reality and the seizing land one is very dodgy on ethical grounds and probably raises didley squat in terms of reducing a 24B a month deficit.

1)2/3
2)6/1

Plucked out of my arse though.

Someone "in the know" tells me Clegg was offered a choice between Lords reform or scaling back the Health and Social Care Bill and chose the former. Of course it's only heresay but if it's true, and someone comes out and says it, Cleggy would be finished.

Louise Mensch retires after 2 months.

Some MP's are such fckwits. Seriously, how did she not realise she would have to work hard?
Also find it hilarious how kids seem to be with her, and her hubby is in New York as manager of RHCP. I don't know much about managing rock bands, but couldn't the husband be the one travelling lots? Her job literally has to be in UK, I'd presume he could easily to and fro

CITE innit

Source on how much revenue legalising drugs. No idea about the quality of sources. £1/tab on ecstasy vs £15/gram on cocaine is pretty interesting.

Here's visualisation on link

Would make 1/2bn a month. Good start!
The seizing land issue wouldn't happen, true that.

lol..you crazy bro

Legalizing drugs is obv one of those sensible things that no sane politician can ever go near. The press would tear them to shreds. No amount of rational argument will make a difference in the short-mid term.

I really hope Ken Clark takes over from Georgy O'

And Gove gets moved to justice or something where he'll do less damage than schools.

lollocalelections and all, but UKIP are doing work.

The big three are really making it easy for them, a master class in how to alienate yourself to the average voter and open the door for protest parties.

Powww. Ukip killing it in New Orleans

An election for an MEP is pretty much the exact opposite of a local election.

Anyway, UKIP can go suck a Bulgarian dick and anyone who voted for them can do so twice. ****ing racists.

Lol UKIP is winning because the other parties are elitist or blame the lower middle classes for their own problems. The UKIP would be wise to run a Nixionian 'Southern Strategy' because it appeals to working class white Brits who face increasing competition from immigrants. It really doesn't matter that the politicians from UKIP are elitist, they are speaking a nativist populist language.

UKIP wins because the mass media is ****ing garbage when it comes to immigration where at best they dont correct the lies, at worst (Daily Mail) they are at least as racist as UKIP.

They literally ran a campaign that had adverts with tag lines like 'vote UKIP to stop 25 million unemployed Bulgarians from coming to take your job'. Farage has said he would prefer less immigrants even if it was worse for Britain. They are just a bunch of racist ****s and the people who vote for them are at best braindead drones.

UKIP mostly taking votes from Tories ftw tho.

Yup, UKIP has pretty much become the acceptable face of racism in the UK and it's ****ing disgusting how much support they get. There's a reason that no-one mentions the BNP any more.

The agenda of much of the right wing press is 'here are the immigrants - stealing your jobs, stealing your benefits, coming over here to use the NHS and generally not speaking English'.

I had hoped that we were better than this, it's a sad state of affairs when this kind of rhetoric becomes almost mainstream.

I hate the way that 'immigrants' has become this sort of acceptable catch-all term for anyone 'not like us'. Whilst homophobia and racism are not acceptable things to express it seems to have become acceptable in some quarters to broad-brush attack this section of the community without the opprobrium that such attacks would generate were they levelled elsewhere.

I'd like to punch Farage in his smug, arrogant face.

results that came out last night and today were for the locals. EU results come out on Sunday or Monday.

Don't underestimate how many they're taking off Labour too, pre-2010 they were taking more from Labour than the Tories. There's still a non-zero chance the Tories and UKIP will do some sort of deal, although you'd imagine that a deal would really hurt UKIP's standing as the protest party.

Sure it sucks that UKIP are gonna get a bunch of MEPs and increased councillors, but don't get too worked up about it. They are still drawing dead in a general election unless they severely alter the level of nuttiness in their policies. A huge % of the people who vote in generals but not local/Europeans are moderates who don't hold strong enough views on any particular party to turn up at the 'minor' elections but want to have a say on who their MP or PM is. Very unlikely that these people vote UKIP and that's why they always slump in a general election. All Labour/Tories need to do is stop being such idiots in terms of alienating their voters by constantly sounding like ****ty PR robots. Whichever of those 2 does that best will win next year imo.

Maybe if they do that, and hadn't both lied about giving us a referendum on major EU issues, people wouldn't vote UKIP. But why do that when they can just peddle racism smears and similar garbage, it's much easier

The problem is they shift the line to the right. Even Labour is far to the right on immigration policy, pretty much where the Tories should be. **** even the Lib Dems are quite far to the right, they should be the policy party talking up the benefits of widespread immigration, largely copying the policies of the other two larger parties in a basically three party system is just pathetic.

The problem I have is there is a general election in a year and whilst my area is a lock to vote Labour (making my vote effectively meaningless) I will still do so on principle and immigration is one of the policies I will evaluate on.

I refuse to vote Labour for running a huge deficit much of it off the books during a boom, at least until we are a full generation away from the Blair and Brown years.

Lib Dems have slid backwards as they decided to transition from never expecting power to really hoping for another coalition government so they have more realistic policies - no tuition fees was a ****ing joke policy but the rest was decent and principled social progressiveness, they have actually done a lot of good in the coalition and should be 100% proud of everything they have had implemented such as removing the income tax on the lowest earners, of course they then went and got behind the ****ing bedroom tax and all that other bollocks.

While the Tories are doing well on the economy given the difficult starting position they are seriously in danger of losing my meaningless support if they move to the right on social policies to block UKIP drawing away support. I fully support NHS reform and the idea by Labour that everything is great and doesnt need to be changed, just throw more money at it is a joke.

-----

Anyway, I figure this all comes down to what Scotland decides. If they vote yes to independent its Conservative all the way down, hopefully they are smart and abandon the fringe right and start talking sense, I would dig that. If they vote no then I figure we are in a Lab-Lib coalition short of the economy doing really well (and people feeling it).

Agreed that the racism/homophobic card is being played more than is probably warranted. But it is not completely untrue. There are only so many major gaffes a party can make without getting this tag. Bloom, Silvester and very recently Farage himself are obvious examples. You hardly see the 3 big parties making these kind of comments ever and only in the very recent past there are numerous examples of UKIP saying these things. So you can't just dismiss it out of hand. They need to deal with it. Also wrt smears, **** is being flung both ways, you just have to look harder to see the crap UKIP has tried to pull.

Obviously people are going to assume that because more people voted UKIP those people are very interested in having the EU referendum. I mean it's basically all that UKIP are about. tbh I don't see this as necessarily being the case. There are the hardcore UKIP supporters who hate everything the EU stands for and then there are the people who wanted to make a protest vote against the political classes. Often in the past those votes would go to LibDems but that was never gonna happen this time so they basically all went to UKIP. Tough to know the exact proportion of UKIP voters that fell into each camp but imo the protest voters make up a big %.

Tonnes of sense in that post Phill.