Opinions such as this belong in the dark ages.

Typically predictable comment from a typical economically illiterate tory.

When I say a "poorer society" I mean in the context of it being an inevitably - not a desire, but because you have a picture of Thatcher, you won't have an understanding of how wealth disparity happens and understand that Thatcher's legacy is a country on the road to default.

It is fact that the biggest gain of wealth for asset holders happened from the late '80s up to the financial crash - a large proportion of these asset holders where obviously baby boomers gained their wealth through property prices and pensions with large holdings in UK Government bonds.

So this group of people with their "I've worked for what I've got attitude" lack the understanding that they haven't actually "worked for what they've got" they've simply fell into the "rentier class" as a result of loose monetary policy and wealth transfer schemes such as "Help to Buy" which means hard work young people feed asset prices so baby boomers can use their pensions to go on their two holidays abroad a year.

A collapse of the bond market will simply be the laws of mathematics taking the course of "reverting to the mean" so all these pensions will get wiped out and the country will have to start producing again which will create jobs for young people.

Make no mistake about it; there will be no reflation of the bubble economy next time round.

As so happens when I debate with Tories, they act as if they're smug and knowledgable with their stock phrases such as "we have a strong economy" and as soon as I start schooling them they disappear - I expect you'll be no different.

Yeah, I'm incredibly worried about a party which effectively exists within a vacuum, hyper-inflated by outside cash which can be withdrawn just as easily as it was injected in the first place, threadbare in terms of core infrastructure, policies etc. - not to mention meager ties to the establishment which, say, the Tories can boast going back centuries through blood ties. UKIP is just another in a long, long line of political implements meant to hoodwink the electorate into an expedient belief system. Like all implements it will be tossed aside the moment it has served its purpose.



Of course Labour saw it coming and if you seriously believe the grandees of the Labour Party went "all in" behind The School Prefect because they honestly believed he represented the best hope for the nation you're a fool. It was a job none of them wanted. So they gave it to the eager beaver kid who doesn't mind taking dirty jobs if it'll propel him three steps up the ladder of power.

This election has been a sick joke from the beginning. And the joke's on us.

Just like Labour you seriously have underestimated the public feeling on several core issues. 4 million people voted for Ukip amost twice as many as voted for the SNP and many of them switched from Labour.




The only fools here are those that cannot except that Labour was routed in Scotland and embarrassed in England because is was represented by oddballs and incompetents touting out of date rhetoric and unable to put up a serious case to deal with the important issues of the day.

Thats the really inexplicable thing - right wing party appears on the scene, further right than the Tories and attracts core vote from dirt poor traditional working class Labour supporters because of their Nationalistic jingo, borderline racism and absolute xenophobic policies, and will now quietly fade from the scene for another five years.

I call conspiracy theory...

In five years time we'll be looking back on UKIP as we now do on the BNP. UKIP's high-water mark was the last Euro elections

You have to actually know what you are talking about before you can start schooling anyone - something you quite clearly don't.

Agree with that - their vote is a reflection on the abysmal quality of the two major parties.

I would have liked to have seen Len McCluskey interviewed after his engineered Labour leadership performance. It would have been almost as funny as when Jim Ratcliffe put him back in his box.

When I predicted riots by summer 2017 I meant by "real" people not those posh kids who are rioting today.

So you are "excited" about repealing these rights then?



Or is it to be some kind of a simpleton's pick-n-mix?

Our government has already overridden Art. 8!

Now we all know that the vote in Thanet was rigged against Nige.

A combined operation by MI5 and the CIA conspired to rig the vote by stealing the ballot boxes and then burn them in a Paris tunnel. Joe Biden knows exactly what happened but is desperate to cover it up. And we all know it's a conspiracy anyway. Jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt paper.

If only there was a thread I could find some evidence of this...perhaps someone has read a book uncovering evidence of this dreadful conspiracy and might be kind enough to post a link whereupon I might find said publication...

It's not take long for the first protests to begin.

Kicked off in London this evening.

BBC were strangely quiet in reporting the protest until it went viral all over twitter at which point they had to report it due to accusations of censorship

And not the other middle-class s parading around in Anonymous masks.
It's got to be raw, vibrant and from the streets Toxtethtian and Brixtonian like.
We live in hope.

Break my post down then if you disagree.

A quick comparison between FPTP and PR:

Number & share of votes:
Conservatives - 11.3m - 36.9%
Labour - 9.3m - 30.4%
UKIP - 3.9m - 12.6%
Liberal Democrats - 2.4m - 7.9%
SNP - 1.5m - 4.7%
Green - 1.2m - 3.8%
DUP - 184,260 - 0.6%
Plaid Cymru - 181,694 - 0.6%
Sinn Fein - 176,232 - 0.6%
UUP - 114,935 - 0.4%
SDLP - 98,809 - 0.3%
Alliance - 61,556 - 0.2%
TUSC - 36,327 - 0.1%
NHA - 20,210 - 0.1%
TUV - 16,538 - 0.1%

Number of MP's under FPTP
Conservatives - 331
Labour - 232
SNP - 56
Liberal Democrats - 8
DUP - 8
Sinn Fein - 4
Plaid Cymru - 3
SDLP - 3
UUP - 2
UKIP - 1
Green - 1
Independent - 1

MP's under PR
Conservatives - 242
Labour - 199
UKIP - 82
Liberal Democrats - 51
SNP - 31
Greens - 24
Others - 21

YES!!! Bloody brilliant result. The cherry on the rather large cake was seeing Balls get booted out.
The bleating of Jones, Toynbee et al is music to my ears.
Hopefully this'll see the Labour party and it's band of hypocritical acolytes banished to the margins for a good while.
At least those on welfare will be spared Rachel Reeves and her plan to hit them harder than the Tories, what sort of heartless, socially bereft would vote for a party that would do that?

Haven't laughed as much since Quisling Benn popped his clogs.

The Labour party pulling itself apart with half of them wanting to lurch further to the left and the other half wanting to move back towards the centre. Whatever happens half of them aren't going to be happy.

It also looks like there will be open war as to the ongoing role of the trade unions in the future of the party.

It's going to be a long way back into office for the Labour party.

The problems of the Labour party will be like a vicar's tea party compared to the interfighting that will now ensue in the parliamentary tory party. Once the dust has settled (should be after the summer break), then Camoron's real problems will start to surface.

He's going into the next five years with a smaller majority than Major enjoyed and an equal number of right-wing nutjobs. Farage won't be needed to "hold Cameron's feet to the fire" over Europe, he's got plenty on his own team to do that. He'll no longer have the LimpDems to blame for not being able to implement ALL of his manifesto commitments. Now the UK public will see him for the sneaky, conniving bully that he is.

Labour may be looking at a few years in the wilderness but the last thing they should do is even consider a return to Blairism. No matter what the likes of Mandelson may say, Blair was 20 years ago and thanks to him and his bessie GWB, the world is a completely different place. Labour have suffered far worse defeats, they'll get over this

I agree Labour cannot go back. Blair was the right man at the right time. But times and needs move on.

In the short-term it is difficult to see where Labour can go. Over time they have got to hope that the union doesn't break, PR is introduced and / or the Tories sh*t on too many people that people have nowhere else to turn.

Even without an elected leader, the first thing any incumbent Labour MP or prospective candidate should do is engage with the electorate. Blair ushered in the "professional politician", the PPE graduate who became a SPAD and then went on to be given a party nomination. Sean Woodward should never have been offered a seat anywhere, he should have been told to defend the seat he held before his defection. I reckon the main reason Ed Balls lost was the fact that his opponent sold her house and moved into his constituency two years ago. She was seen far more often in Morley than he was. Greg Mullholland was one of only eight LimpDems to retain his seat and that had much to do with his engagement with his local electorate.

The public's "feeling" is whatever the media chooses. I knew something was fishy the moment UKIP arrived and instead of the press ignoring these fringe cranks it instead embraced them like a cup-winning team just returned from Wembley.

Despite the fact they didn't even have enough followers to outnumber the likes of Socialist Labour they were given wildly disproportionate coverage. If I had the heads of the major media companies here right now I'd ask them - precisely WHY - despite never showing the slightest interest in fringe parties before (other than Martin Bell's silly white suit nonsense) - did you devote so much air space to UKIP early on?

From the outset UKIP had truckloads of cash to spend, but all the money in the world couldn't buy the kind of coverage the BBC was prepared to give Farage. Indeed, the BBC has served as a booster for UKIP throughout this Tory government.

And when the Beeb wasn't obsessing over Farage dunking a pint of bitter in some East End boozer it laid siege to just about every port, rail terminal and airline arrival lounge in expectation of the next breaking "Fuzzy Wuzzies At The Door" story.

The moment the Tories jumped with in the Lib-Gones we've had this self-fueling cycle of UKIP->"Polish Freebooters"->Farage->"Asylum Seeker Benefit Cheats"->UKIP->"Fuzzy Wuzzies Jumping The Fence At Calais"->Farage->...

All through the election week (in two cases immediately after Party Political Broadcasts) we've been inundated with images of France and the issues they are having over there. Now, I'm NOT saying this isn't newsworthy. But what we've seen goes above and beyond reasonable journalistic endeavor.

As I keep saying - UKIP is an election-rigging tool. Used in conjunction with the wholly aligned mainstream media which has sought to heighten the public's fear of immigrants (whether they be legitimate or not) at EVERY OPPORTUNITY it's worked to [uPERFECTION[/u.

I forgot to add - as well as an election rigging mechanism the UKIP/MSM combination serves to create a social and political climate which provides the Tory Party all the excuses it needs to trample human rights jurisdiction and more importantly - conduct NHS reforms (btw, a "reform" is, by definition, something we are meant to like).

Personally I've always thought the NHS is the primary target. UKIP invariably leads on the issue of foreigners but when you look closely they really do spend an awful lot of time talking about NHS privatization.

Now that UKIP is firmly ingrained on the national psyche I think you'll find they'll gradually begin to tone down the xenophobia whilst cranking up talk on the NHS.

It'll be the old "Good Cop, Bad Cop" routine. First "Bad Cop" - MSM reporting "yet another NHS failure"->UKIP proposes radical solution (which everyone will hate)->MSM reporting "more NHS failure"->UKIP ... another self-fueling cycle. Step forward now, "Good Cop" - David Cameron defending the honour of the NHS whilst denouncing UKIP extremism on healthcare reform - yet all the while inching further and further toward UKIP's position with a series of mini concessions which, whilst not as drastic as UKIP's proposals, ARE AND ALWAYS HAVE BEEN THE REAL GOAL.

With the impending arrival of TPP I think the pressure was on from every angle to finally put the NHS to bed. No Labour government could EVER be involved with such reforms and hope to be elected next (or any other) time around. So the party threw in the towel. Once the dirty deed is done it'll "re-invent" itself once more - just in time to save us from those beastly Tories.

After smashing the NHS for good this country won't need too much encouragement to leap into Labour's clutches once again. More than likely it'll be for eight or nine years.

Do I really need to pen this charade out much further?

no.


Shouldn't this stuff be in the "conspiracy theory" thread, rather than the General Election thread?