Be Excellent To Each Other

Nope, can't be arsed with this fucking ding dong when you're in tit mode.

That smiley is just awesome.

@Mark - no ding dongs with me mate, just saying that UKIP or Tory voters don't have a monopoly on stupid.

And I totally used it on the wrong forum.

Er - oops.

I agree.

People who waste their vote annoy me.
I'm talking about the people who vote for someone that they don't believe in, be it a protest vote or to stop someone else getting into power etc...

The calls from people on Twitter etc... to vote for anyone other than UKIP to stop them getting in, are just as dangerous as the UKIP voters in my opinion.

I've long thought it would be good to have (anonymous until they're all over) presentations on what the people you might vote for do actually stand for before being allowed to vote.

Sadly not really a feasable suggestion, but some way of guaranteeing that a voting person has actually bothered to find out what they're voting for would be good. (and perhaps get a bit more sympathy when they turn round.later and claim that what they got wasn't what they voted for)

Of course what I'd actually like is a diverse group of people working together to find decent solutions rather than the seesaw tribal bullshit and jeering that we currently have.

So very much this. It appears to me that you rarely see someone in politics talking about what we should do to solve a problem when, instead, they could just spend loads of time slagging off their opponents idea instead; as if being negative about other shit was somehow a positive contribution. Or you get the media making a shitstorm out of stuff like whether David Cameron eats fucking sausage rolls or not. Put it all together and trying to give a shit is an uphill struggle.

Yeah, but diverse committees don't tend to work so well, unfortunately. All you end up with, for much of the time, is a hamstrung, directionless, impotent talking shop, when actually, shit needs to get done. How many companies are (successfully) run like this?

Nice idea, but I prefer the much riskier option of actual leadership, conviction and coherent political vision/objectives - but you've just got to hope you're being led by a skilled, educated politician with a plan, like Thatcher, as opposed to some media crowd-pleaser guy like Blair. (Or Brown, who wasn't even a crowd-pleaser).

(As for would-be voters having to give a presentation before casting their vote...? Meh! I don't think so; I bet half of the electorate wouldn't even be able to deliver a presentation on anything, let alone contemporary politics!)

If they left the name of the party off the slips so you actually had to know who you were voting for it'd be a start.

I think you missed the entire point, there.

Not so much 'missed the point' as 'misread the point'.

No, I think I understood it perfectly well.

If you're going to introduce such impediments to people voting, you might as well scrap voting altogether and have done with it. The average person is clueless, lazy, badly educated and full of apathy, yet this isn't entirely their fault. They've probably gone through a lousy education system that's ill equipped them for anything much, if they're younger than 30.

Well you've mistyped something somewhere then. Dave was talking about voters sitting through a presentation made by the candidates before they were allowed to cast a vote. You then said:



Those two things aren't the same.

Ah right, yes, sorry I did misread it. My apologies.

Trouble with that is you'd have candidates squabbling over who goes first, last, could they be arsed, could voters be arsed sitting through up to six presentations etc etc = not practical.

It's definitely not practical for a few reasons as Dave himself admitted but I quite like the idea as a concept. Anything to try and make voters more informed before they make an actual decision, and I include myself fully in that judgement.

Just get some scientists to make a decent online poll about your opinion on certain issues, including their importance, and let it choose who you should vote for.

I did this survey thing today. It seems pretty neutral.

I'm 33% green apparently...

Yeah, it reckoned I should vote for the liberal democrats.

And that I shared two opinions with UKIP (One of which is because I misread the question as the opposite thing, so yeah...)
And I thought it was giving me a surprising amount of agreement with the conservatives, until I reliased I was looking at the results for the green party.

Here's that flyer. I reckon it's Labour

Heh.

Croydon is unsafe and a dump

Way to win over voters there.

Although Croydon is unsafe and a dump

I never criticise an honest politician.

Doesn't seem too bad, actually. Got these results…





First result's quite funny, as I'm a member of Labour and have never voted LibDem.

Across Europe I'm most closely matched with the Belgian Parti Socialiste, according to the poll.

This right here is the kind of thing I was whining about earlier. I don't want to know why I shouldn't vote for X, I want to know why I should vote for Y. Don't just sneer from the fucking sidelines about someone else's idea, tell me what you idea is and why it's excellent. Negative fucking pricks dragging the whole thing into the gutter.

Fascinating; got it absolutely right for me. Virtually nothing to choose between Conservative and LibDem, almost identical scores and both a "weak match". Labour a long way behind in 3rd place, then UKIP and the Greens last.

Explains why I'm a big fan of the Coalition, I guess, with no one single party wholly reflecting my very Liberal, old school Patrician Tory-wet views.

They'd just argue about what the answers mean forever, though.

And it might be that whilst the candidate's party represents your views, he himself is not suitable for legislative or executive office and that would outweigh everything else. One of the reasons I'm against closed party lists.

Unsurprisingly, I am a close match to the Greens and Labour.

Surprisingly, I was a positive match to all the major parties, even the The Kippers (2% )

Malc

I would never have thought my labour was so high, and conservative so low.

Malc

Of course, these are scores based against a party actually following through and delivering on its ideals, instead of launching a blitz on civil liberties and going to war a lot.

Which is pretty much why I'll never vote Labour.

(or any party that's been in power for 2 terms unless they've been doing a flawless effort)

Not to mention lying/misleading about it on a grotesque scale, causing a mass exodus of good manufacturing industry/jobs from UK, completely reorganising then woefully failing to regulate the City of London (precipitating the worst economic damage and crisis for 60 years), making a total arse of immigration policy and the economy such that even they had to apologise, yet failing to apologise for the mess they left in so many other areas, be it multi-billion botched public projects and contracts, PFI, Defence, IT, abortive ID cards, lousy health and education records with rife falling standards/grade inflation, failure to build houses, failure to manage housing and credit boom, burgeoning public sector costs, long term unemployment, scandalous youth unemployment, disastrous University/funding policies, complete failure to prepare for even an economic downturn (let alone a Depression), never having even once returned a Budget in surplus, not even during 10 years of (Tory-induced) prosperity. Oh, and near constant divisive squabbling, briefing against each other even at the highest level, and so-called 'sofa government'. And selling all the gold at the bottom of the market, pensions raided, public sector final salary pensions completely funked (leaving this, and just about everything else to the Coalition to resolve), gulf between rich and poor never more pronounced.

Apart from that, superb.

and this guy

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/thi ... 15_2979714

http://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewtucker/f ... d-miliband

made me chuckle

Lulz. Love some of the comments too...

*waves*

1998: Budget surplus of 0.7bn
1999: Budget surplus of 12bn
2000: Budget surplus of 16.5bn
2001: Budget surplus of 8bn

Now you can certainly say that they were partly the beneficiaries of Ken Clarke's rather Keynesian approach to managing the economy post-Black Wednesday. And you'd be right! But the fact remains that they returned more surplus years and more total than a certain Iron Lady.

(relurks )

Hey, don't relurk chap! (Someone needs to be talking sense around here, let's face it, it's never going to be me... )

Must admit, I've heard it trumpeted so many times by senior politicians that Labour never returned a single surplus Budget (and this was never even challenged), so I simply assumed it was the case! I stand corrected, however. I'll believe you every time over them.


Cavey

Data is from here, btw: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablo ... owing-data (via ONS)

It does seem to have fallen down a memory hole, probably because the financial crash was so hard, but also because it's tempting to view the Labour 97-01 Government as something completely separate from the 01-10 Government. If you look at the difference - between 97/01 you get civil liberties expansions concerning the FOIA, Human Rights Act, equalizing age of consent, the minimum wage, et al, and then in 2001 something snaps in Blair's mind and we get all that followed. It's a little too simplistic, as it belies the reliance on PFI, the desperate need of Labour to cozy up with big business, Pathfinder, and all that fun that was there since May 1997, but it is odd how most of the 'good' things of New Labour happened in their first term...

(sadly, I'm out laying gravel and trying to fix an air conditioner in the American South today, so I will be a little occupied )

I'd rather be doing that than what I'm doing.

Fundamentally, Labour were very much "on probation" during their first term - people (rightly) did not trust their economic competence following previous disastrous administrations. This is why they adopted the Conservative Party's spending limits for this entire term (i.e. they emulated the Tories to a very great extent), and it's where Brown got his "Iron Chancellor" and "Prudence" nicknames - because he was essentially a Tory Chancellor by proxy!

From their second term on, though, we basically got REAL Labour - prudence was well and truly out of the window and the buggers let rip big time, believing their own publicity (not to mention "no more boom and bust"). The rest, as they say, is history...

Reading this thread?

Fascinating; got it absolutely right for me. Virtually nothing to choose between Conservative and LibDem, almost identical scores and both a "weak match". Labour a long way behind in 3rd place, then UKIP and the Greens last.

Would seem it is official. I am Cavey.

Welcome aboard, brother!

We're all doooooomed!

Worst Scooby Do, ever.

Here we go!
That's me on the left.

I was there a few weeks back and they had them out in force handing out leaflets up by Allders, no demonstrators or any trouble at all, though no one really took any notice all.

On a side note, if that steel band is the same one I saw while down there they were awesome, it sounded like they were playing Prodigy's Out Of Space (or Max Romeos original) on the steel drums.

North-East Oxfordshire this morning:



I was the second person in!

(About the Hogarth)

Nicely done, chap.
We've just cast our votes as well, though I worry that the weather is so bad that many people will stay away, leaving a disproportionate number of swivel-eyed Kipper voter/nationalist types who'd vote even if it was hailing meteorites.