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Local Elections
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
Are we surprised by the result? Labour have lost all the county councils in England, including some big ones that have been Labour run for nearly 30 years.
Personally though, I'm a bit gutted. Nationally the country has been run to the ground, locally though? Locally things where i live are/were actually quite good. Council managed money well, lots of iniatives to reduce crime, improve roads, give things to young people so they've got stuff to do and a pretty good education authority.
Now the Tories have got in, I feel it's all going to go down the pan, they're already talking about cutbacks and knowing the Tories it'll be frontline things that suffer.
Any thoughts?
Personally though, I'm a bit gutted. Nationally the country has been run to the ground, locally though? Locally things where i live are/were actually quite good. Council managed money well, lots of iniatives to reduce crime, improve roads, give things to young people so they've got stuff to do and a pretty good education authority.
Now the Tories have got in, I feel it's all going to go down the pan, they're already talking about cutbacks and knowing the Tories it'll be frontline things that suffer.
Any thoughts?
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
It is possible that Labour has underperformed at a local level in every single council. But like you say that is extremely unlikely.
As for whether most councils have been badly run under Labour, I'd say yes, if Newcastle's anything to go by. Since Labour went our Council Tax hasn't ever gone up by more than inflation, we've gone from one of the biggest bills to one of the smallest bills. Every Labour controlled council I know is simply fleecing the local taxpayers and the day can't come soon enough that there isn't even a Parish Council controlled by Labour.
Why? The PM has little say about what happens at local level. My labour run council has been doing a cracking job. Like I said before, my county was in a good state in most areas.
As soon as the Tories get in they announce cuts in funding to front line services.
How on Earth anyone can defend that I don't know. But, we reap what we sow. People get fixated on one issue, and ignore the good work that was being done. The difference between you and Aladdin and myself is that we can tell the difference between an MP who does work at a national level and a councillor who does work at a local level. We voted based on things that were being done locally, and not based on things that have been SAID nationally.
ie with our heads and using facts/reasoning rather than relying on sleaze, corruption and back biting amongst the big boys.
Some of us still believe in the idea of putting people before profits.
Out of the main / serious parties; conservatives, labour, and liberal democrats - labour still imo best represents the socialist ideology. Of course if you believe the leader of the party is all what a party is then you are going to get mixed signals as David Cameron comes across as a saint but the conservative party has before and will again if given the power - shaft the lower class, lower income people of this country in preference of the middle classes.
I'm under no illusion that labour could win the next election but even as I describe myself as a 'moderate' on facebook in that I have no fixed party alleigances I still believe that labour for better or worse are marginally better than the conservatives and liberal democrats.
The Prime Mentalist is just as tainted - yes, the man who is by now so out of touch with reality that he believes thousands of American soldiers lost their lives at Obama Beach. He would also be the man who claimed for lightbulbs, a Sky Sports subscription and paid his brother £6,500 to do some cleaning. I wonder if his fake Presbyterian conscience thought putting things like that on expenses was wrong? The only one who has shown any kind of dignity during all this is Nick Clegg, leader of the LibDems. Shame about their policies - the usual nannying, state control sort of policies which have failed so many times before.
The "socialist" agenda, as you wish to call it, is going to be safe in the hands of Cameron or whichever idiot we're all going to hate anyway is coming up once Gordon's been carted off by men in white coats.
Great statement - doesn't mean a thing of course.
People are helped by profits - its where we get our tax from, it allows us to improve services, both public and private to people.
Of course it means something.
Of course profits are good. But sometimes it comes down to a tough choice:
do we do a) and have a greater overall wealth to society but at great detriment to this individual at the bottom or do we do b) and have lesser overall wealth, but this individual at the bottom is better off.
If that were not the case then there would be absolutely no need for laws that protect those at the bottom from exploitation. Because surely, if we solely seek to maximise our returns that should in turn if everyone is doing this, maximise the economic growth of the country, then why should we impose legal limits on what extent we can do that? Why impose a limit on working conditions? Why create a law that says a company that pays millions in taxes has to spend some of it's millions on health and safety gear for it's employees? Isn't that just going to create less money and so overall we will be worse off?
Gee, what a silly way to run a country.
I am not sure why you keep using the term 'mentalist' for GB ... Derren Brown is a mentalist. GB certainly is not.
What an odd day. You couldn't deny that it's been coming.
Cue the tirade against the BNP for winning seats in a legal democratic manner...
Anyone who is so abject at controlling his temper that he throws an inkjet printer at a wall when he gets bad news should be in a secure psychiatric institution, not running the country. We are being run by a psychopath.
They won because the other parties have ignored working peoples' anger at what's happening. People at the bottom see their factories and their shops and their call centres being bought at rock bottom prices by foreign companies. People see their jobs go, farmed off to India, or Poland, or Holland. People see this asset stripping going on, with Government approval, and nobody but the BNP says anything about it.
When HP Sauce is made in fucking Holland you know that this country has gone to the dogs.
The BNP don't have any credible policies on how to deal with all this, but that doesn't matter in an election. They're paying attention, and that's all people want.
That sounded dangerously close to you being in agreement with me
I hate the BNP and all they stand for, but I'm not stupid enough to think that people are voting for racism. Unlike the numbnut I'm arguing with on Comment is Free :banghead:
So he is 'mental' as opposed to 'mentalist'?
I use the word mentalist to describe nutters like Broon though.
Exactly. BNP actually got less votes in Yorkshire than last time, it was the major failings of the other parties (particularly Labour) and a lower turnout which gave them the seat. Still 16% of Barnsley voted for them......
The BNP has the Establishment against them. Church of England and Mayor of London spoke out in public against voting for this party
In the 1980s, MPs who left the main parties to form the SDP said Labour was finished. Yet again people are saying Labour is dying- I ask really?
The sentiment as I understand it generally expresses the idea of the use of productive capacities and surplus for the betterment of human beings, raising of quality of life and the alleviation of suffering.
People are only helped by profits when capital is recirculated within their communities and areas. This can be done in marketised economy and does not neccessarily imply complete economic equality, but there must be a commitment to minimum standard of living, and a guarantee of at least some measure being returned, as you say, through taxation.
Where these things do not exist and unbridled free markets allow capital flows to break open and exploit local populations - witness the myriad economic examples in the global south, which even World Bank and IMF researchers now readily admit were a disaster.
Market economics are a means, not an end. Shyboy's statement I think contains that recognition, and I do not think it's an empty statement for this reason, not do I think it's in conflict with your statement either if it's viewed in this way.
I almost have more sympathy for those who vote BNP because they're fascists than those who do 'as a protest'. If you want to protest vote against the main parties, there are many different parties they could have chosen. You don't vote for fascist scum, end of.
The more I think about it, the more I agree with your sentiments that some people are probably too stupid to vote.
What if the case - however harrowing - is simply that this is a fair democratic representation of our society? Everyone keeps making excuses 'its a protest vote' but as Aladdin says if people wanted to protest they could vote green or liberal democrat or some other party like that. They didn't, they voted for the far right, racist, nationalist party.
Yep, same in Lancashire. The BNP got less support than last time. It's the people who didn't vote who are responsible for the BNP getting in. It's also a huge failure of European politics. Who can honestly say they really have a clue about it? I consider myself to be pretty clued up about politics generally, and don't really know much about the European parliament. But ultimately, there shouldn't be much of an excuse for not voting in Europe. You're not voting for an individual, and there's got to be one party you generally agree with.
1) Ignorance
2) Sour grapes from the lefties that the far right are garnering support in a major way.
Whilst some of them are undoubtedly fascist thugs (I imagine it's a very small but vocal minority), you'd do a lot worse than read this from the Speccy. Despite the author continuing to contradict himself by portraying the BNP, or at least a select number of its supporters as normal while tainting the article with derrogatory words, it does give a very interesting insight to what I think might be the less-visible majority that makes up the BNP's numbers.
Asbestos suit? Check. Chubb 'Old Red'? Check. Flame away.
Despite a huge increase in reasons for ordinary hard-working (or more often nowadays, not working) people to feel disillusioned, there has been no increase in the BNP vote, so that makes me call bullshit on the often-cited claim that BNP voters are mainly a bunch of people who feel that the main parties don't pay any attention to them. That's a feeling that has undoubtedly increased in the past few months, and yet there has been no drift towards the BNP. People with genuine concerns about immigration and Europe vote UKIP, or possibly Tory.
Mr Darling has already put in to motion cutbacks that will dwarf Thatchers.
The country is broke and will declare bankruptcy anytime soon ...certainly before the years out.
There's then the matter of Gordon's temper. There are countless reports of him having tantrums - he refused to speak to Blair for days on end when he was Chancellor, for example. He was described as "psychologically flawed" by a prominent member of Tony Blair's government, and not without reason. He has a Macavity-like tendency to disappear when things go wrong, something you simply can't do when PM. There's the reports of Gordon throwing mobile phones at walls and his staff when things go wrong, of breaking laser printers, (anyone else who did that at work would be sacked and forced to repay the cost of replacing such equipment) and of swearing at Downing Street switchboard operators. One of the aforementioned Downing Street staff who's since left the bunker spoke to a Sunday newspaper over the weekend and didn't dispute a single word of these accounts.
There is Brown's pathological inability to admit he ever did anything wrong. This, in turn, has made him become a pathological liar in the last few days. This is why he was able to stand in fronf of ITN's Tom Bradby last Friday and say he wasn't planning on sacking Alistair Darling and replacing him with Ed Cunt. This is why he said the reshuffle occured in a "calm and orderly" way - another bare-faced lie. Several ministers resigned in the days beforehand, and the Cabinet was effectively reshuffling itself.
And there is, of course, the infamous clip of Gordon Brown in Parliament when Tony Blair was Prime Minister picking his nose and then eating a bogey when all the cameras were on him. With that sort of record, you have to question his sanity.
Is Derren Brown also a mentalist? Yes. But that mentalist isn't running the country.