Re: The UK General Election Thread

[Guest]

Reluctantly have to agree with merls here, Hague is pretty shit hot at debating.

[Merlin]

Reluctantly have to agree with merls here, Hague is pretty shit hot at debating.

Why 'reluctantly' FFS ... are you afraid of catching Tory leperosy?

Be brave, hangs your balls out and get counted out there, vilks ... tell it like it is ... not "reluctantly" !

[LeFromage]

Reluctantly have to agree with merls here, Hague is pretty shit hot at debating.

Can't say I've ever seen much evidence of it.

Perhaps he should've used his amazing skills when he ran for Prime Minister...

[Guest]

Reluctantly have to agree with merls here, Hague is pretty shit hot at debating.

Why 'reluctantly' FFS ... are you afraid of catching Tory leperosy?

Be brave, hangs your balls out and get counted out there, vilks ... tell it like it is ... not "reluctantly" !

Shut up or I'll rob you.

[Merlin]

Reluctantly have to agree with merls here, Hague is pretty shit hot at debating.

Why 'reluctantly' FFS ... are you afraid of catching Tory leperosy?

Be brave, hangs your balls out and get counted out there, vilks ... tell it like it is ... not "reluctantly" !

Shut up or I'll rob you.

There you go .... now you've got me all

[LeFromage]

If you send just £1000 a month to my Nigerian cousin's butler, he'll quadruple your money in twelve minutes and you'll be able to afford some state of the art home security.

Which you can buy from my Nigerian cousin's butler for £4000.

[Allan D]

The Debate - The John Redwood View

A Hung Parliament would be dead from the neck up

30-30-30 we were told was the scoring at last night’s political X factor show. The Lib Dems and their sympathisers in the media are working hard to say people want a hung Parliament. We are told that floating voters in the audience expressed approval when Mr Clegg appealed to politicians to work together for the public good.

There are several different reasons why some people want a hung Parliament. The most common, that we would be better governed if politicians brokered compromises instead of arguing it out, is perhaps the most dangerous. In my experience this country’s biggest mistakes in the last 20 years have come from policies backed by more than one political party. There is nothing as dangerous as the whole political establishment agreeing about something. They impose a suffocating blanket on anyone who disagrees and who might be right, as they cannot bear to be shown up as wrong.

Good government needs strong opposition. It is the need to face challenge and to listen to criticism which hones policy and improves administration. Agreement creates laziness and sloppy thinking.

Consider three big errors. The first has been the boom and bust presided over by Labour. They should take the main blame, and it was their policy of changing the regulatory and monetary arrangements which caused it . However, the Lib Dems agreed with Labour’s policy of a so called “independent Bank of England”. Conservatives opposed it at the time, but subsequently stopped challenging it. Lib Dems always liked it. The MPC has regularly failed to hit targets, the government has called the big shots over money printing, the Bank was stripped of its powers to regulate the credit creating banks, yet intelligent people sitll talk about the “success of Labour’s independent Bank”.

The second was the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq to stop weapons of mass destruction-weapons which turned out to be illusory. Conservatives did the “decent thing” They supported the Prime Minister over a matter he said was one of national security on the grounds that the Opposition should co-operate at a time of war, showing national solidarity. They took the PM’s claims and intelligence on trust, instead of opposing.

The third was the Exchange Rate Mechanism. All three main parties pursued this damaging policy which gave us inflation followed by a needless recession. Nick Ridley and I from within the government followed a lonely course trying to stop the folly. We watched in horror as the whole UK political establishment became gripped by this absurd idea that the UK currency could be kept stable agaist the DM, and that this would create a stable economy!

Please spare us more of these establishment disasters. I have had to fight too many battles against the establishment tribal view – it always takes too long, and if you do eventually win it is usually because the damage done by the consensus has been so great.

The second reason some people want a hung Parliament is that they are fed up with the whole system and want to change it. They think change would come from the deadlock a hung Parliament could create. They too might be disappointed. A hung Parliament might simply end up delaying any difficult decisions, thinking they could carry on spending and borrowing too much and pretending there is no deficit problem to be tackled. Ask politicians to compromise and they usually do so at the expense of the electors – compromise will probably mean spending more, regulating more and passing more power to Brussels and quangos, given the views of the Lib Dems.

The third group who say they want a hung Parliament are UKIP. They should grasp that we can only have a hung Parliament if the federalists have yet again won a majority of the seats. Far from getting us out of the EU a hung Parliarnent will ensure we drift even further into it.

With acknowledgements to http://www.johnredwood.com/

[Merlin]

If you send just £1000 a month to my Nigerian cousin's butler, he'll quadruple your money in twelve minutes and you'll be able to afford some state of the art home security.

Which you can buy from my Nigerian cousin's butler for £4000.

Phurt ...!
My brace of Rottweilers only cost me £500.
But I do need a decent barrister to protect them from being put down following writs from three dead postmen's families; a mauled gasman; two Jehovahs witnesses who converted to Buddhism (seeking to return as Rottweilers in the afterlife) and a vagrant looking for a meal, who endled up faceless after trying to pinch the Winnalot granules from their food bowls.

Perhaps your Nigerian cousin's butler might know a decent legal eagle.
Failing which, I'll settle for a cheap hitman.

[Basil]

So, hello Prime Minister Milliband...

Will the last person to leave the UK please turn the lights off

[Allan D]

So, hello Prime Minister Milliband...

The Miliband Brothers, the Mike and Bernie Winters of British politics with Gordon Brown as Schnorbitz .

For the benefit of younger viewers:

[LeFromage]

Sun/YouGov poll one day on from the 2nd debate: Con 34% ( - ), Lab 29% ( - ), Libs 29% (+1)

As you were, then.

[Allan D]

Opinion polls gradually coming into line with the debate ratings turning the election into another version of "The 'X' Factor". The Greens, UKIP and the BNP will insist on being included next time and will go to the courts if they aren't.

[Allan D]

Harris poll in the Daily Mail (natch) shows Cameron recovering some ground:

Conjs 34% (+3) Lib Dem 29% (-1) Lab 26% (nc):

Cameron regaining lost ground

Bad news for Labour as Brown is polling a lower percentage than Michael Foot got in 1983. Labour faces a meltdown as they are caught in a two-way split between a revived Conservative Party and resurgent Lib Dems. Also I see Ken Clarke and others in the Conservative Party are talking about offering a deal to Clegg including electoral reform. I expect to see a minority Conservative government after the election with another election in either October 2011 or May 2012 which will signal the final death-throes of New Labour with Clegg replacing Alan Johnson as Leader of the Opposition (as Lib Dems go ahead of Labour in terms of seats).

[JKLever]

A Lab/Lib coalition has first dibs before any Tories can think about a minority government though Al.

[Allan D]

Why? Not if Labour lose most seats and come third in the popular vote. Clegg would be crazy to sustain Brown in office in those circumstances. Equivalent of being shackled to a corpse.

[JKLever]

Why? Not if Labour lose most seats and come third in the popular vote. Clegg would be crazy to sustain Brown in office in those circumstances. Equivalent of being shackled to a corpse.

Because the incumbent PM has first crack and Clegg would be more likely to get concessions on reform from Liebor.

[Zat]

One for the Lib Dem supporters:

Which part is the funny bit?

Perhaps Allan was amused by the 'electro-pop' girl music.

[Allan D]

Because the incumbent PM has first crack and Clegg would be more likely to get concessions on reform from Liebor.

Well. strictly speaking, in the absence of an overall majority the leader of the largest party (in terms of seats) should form the government but if Brown were foolish enough to try and stay on he would be in exactly the same position as Ted Heath was after the "Who Governs Britain?" election of February 1974.

Faced with a miners' strike and an oil embargo following the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 Heath called an election for the last day of February 1974, some 16 months before he needed to go to the country, hoping to win an increased mandate to push through crisis measures.

In the event the Conservatives lost over one and a quarter million votes from the previous election dropping 8.5% in their share of vote whilst Labour lost half a million votes and dropped 6% in their share of the vote. The main beneficiaries were the Liberals who added 4m votes and gained almost 12% in their share of the vote.

This resulted in Labour having 301 seats (up 14), the Conservatives holding 297 (down 33) and the Liberals 14 (up 8 ). However the Conservatives received just over 229,000 more votes than Labour in the popular vote and Heath stayed bunkered in No.10 over the weekend following the election deciding whether or not to do a deal with the Liberals and Ulster Unionists (whom he had alienated and who had split from the Conservative Party following the abolition of Stormont and the imposition of direct rule in April 1972). Harold Wilson and Labour refused to contemplate a deal and simply said they should form the government as the largest party and that the popular vote didn't enter into it (hadn't Churchill formed a government in 1951 despite the Tories having 230,000 fewer votes than Labour?) and called on Heath to quit immediately.

Finally on Monday, 4 March, four days after the election had taken place Heath summoned Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, to 10 Downing Street to broker a deal . Heath reportedly offered Thorpe a seat in the Cabinet (possibly Home Secretary, although that has always been denied, which would have been ironic in view of the fact that Thorpe was later unsuccessfully prosecuted for conspiracy to murder). Thorpe pointed out that even with the votes of the Liberal MPs Heath was still 5 short of an overall majority. To Thorpe's credit he gave a final rejoinder which closed the discussion:

Labour may not have won the election but you, sir, have most definitely lost it

An hour later Heath went to the Palace to tender his resignation and Harold Wilson was invited to form the new government. I would expect Clegg to behave in the same way as Thorpe did (at least in 1974!) and utter much the same sentiments if the party roles were reversed and Brown called him into No.10 after the election.

Eventually, of course, Jim Callaghan, Wilson's successor, did do a deal with the Liberals in 1977 when the bare majority of 3 Labour had won in the October 1974 election disappeared due to bye-elections, although it did not involve electoral reform. The deal proved unsustainable as Liberal support plummeted and, in the long-term, proved fatal to both the Labour Government and a third-party revival which had to await the formation of the SDP in 1981.

[Guest]

Good to see Paxman actually focussing on BNP policies in his interview with Nick Griffin rather than just being on a witchhunt (a la question time).

[JKLever]

Yes, I see the BNP are pro-death penalty. At least they stopped short of gas chambers then...

[taipan]

Yes, I see the BNP are pro-death penalty.

What is wrong with that?

[filosofee]

Good to see Paxman actually focussing on BNP policies in his interview with Nick Griffin rather than just being on a witchhunt (a la question time).

Yes, Paxman asked Cameron good questions yesterday too, including 'when did you decide politicians were deceiving the public, when you worked for Maggie Thatcher ..?' or something like that.

Griffin's definition of indigenous,1000 years of Britishness excludes Muslims and coloureds but envelopes assimilated Russian Jews or Huegonauts . £18 billion for repatriation, that's cool by me, would rather live and work adorned in a hijaab in Saudia than an England governed by the parochial and myopic BNP.

[filosofee]

Theresa May looks like Patricia Hewitt in a bob and sounds almost as wobbly as Ann Widdecomb, awful!

[Basil]

Shed load of polls out tonight - most put the Tories on or around 35%, Labour anything from 25 - 30% and Lib Dems on around 30% - apart from one for the News Of The World, which puts the Lib Dems on 23% - they haven't registered anything that low since before the forst debate - so I'm tempted to call that one a rogue.

[JKLever]

Definitely a rogue poll, unless the Toryboys can take some support from the Libs they're not going to get a majority

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