Fewer.
Unless you mean that for some reason posting in here reduces the size of the boobs posted in the VD which would be really strange.
</grammar tw4t>
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Politics, politics, politics
- Thread starter markysimmo
- Start date
Unless you mean that for some reason posting in here reduces the size of the boobs posted in the VD which would be really strange.
</grammar tw4t>
Depends on your viewpoint. I think that short-term, Milliband's policies could be better. More investment in public services than the Tories are offering. My worry, however, is that Milliband (and to be fair the other left-wing parties like Greens and SNP) are rejecting austerity. Austerity is essential right now. I think we are paying something like £86billion worth of interest on our deficit. Imagine what that could be spent on? I'm afraid that cuts, while they are going to hurt me in the short-term, are absolutely vital for my future, the country's future and long-term my kid's future.
I'm willing to bear a bit of the pain now for that to happen.
I also think there are a lot of efficiencies to be found in the public sector. I don't necessarily believe that privatisation of parts of the administration of the NHS and other parts of the public sector is a bad thing. I think the need to make a profit can focus people's minds and prevent bloat. I wouldn't ever want that scenario placed within a health-care situation, but for administrative functions, then sure.
I just thing that I went through a terrible few years, without a pay-rise and with rising costs in terms of inflation. I saw the city I live in (Bradford) reduced to a shell. There was literally nothing in the city centre, as in 2006 they knocked a load of it down to build a new shopping centre, but the crash occurred and it went tits up and there's been a massive hole in there ever since. Work started on it again in 2012 and it's due for completion late this year. There has been loads of construction going on in Bradford since 2010, there's been a new college and university buildings, new residential buildings. In 2012 they reopened direct services from Bradford Interchange to London Kings Cross. The new City square was completed. Businesses are moving back into the largely abandoned business park that had been thriving pre-recession with large RBS, Aviva and Lloyds offices, which were all closed in the late 00's. A £500m urban regeneration grant has been approved by the government for the City Centre 'growth zone' that includes the redevelopment of the Broadway shopping district, Ivegate and Kirkgate. A further grant has been approved to regenerate the Little Germany district. New bars are opening up in the city centre and a bit of a momentum has been generated at last in a place that was literally on its knees by the time of the last election.
This is a Labour heartland we're talking about. And it's a city that will remain red. But the coalition has overseen the beginning of a recovery of a city that has literally had the heart and soul torn out of it. It makes you think that. I am genuinely excited about Cameron's plans for a 'northern powerhouse'. I just don't want to put all that at risk by changing, particularly because I have no confidence in Milliband.
One thing I have to pull Scara up is about Thatcher however. Even Cameron has acknowledged that her 'ground-breaking economic policies' as you call it, pretty much equated to making London and the South East an impregnable powerhouse at the expense of investment anywhere else, pretty much killing many of the northern industrial cities and forcing the more prosperous ones to abandon their routes and turn to the service industry en mass in order to survive.
Cameron's 'northern powerhouse' project is an acknowledgement even from the Tories that Thatcher got it badly wrong, in that she has created a country that is almost entirely reliant on one city for it's global economic status. It's an unsustainable and unbalanced situation that requires addressing.
I don't see any grand plans for the country from Milliband. I do think that the northern powerhouse project has already have a hugely positive impact in the city that I live in, with huge government investment that just was not seen under the last Labour government. The M62 has had an overhaul, Leeds is now the biggest economy outside of London and continuing to grow. Regular flights have started again from Leeds/Bradford Airport to London Heathrow again, the electrification of the Leeds/Bradford Interchange/Manchester Victoria line has been announced. Things are starting to really buzz up here and me, my family and our friends seem to have spare money and a good life for the first time in years. My wife was made redundant in 2009 and spent 3 years doing maternity covers unable to find a permanent job until 2012, when she finally got one. Countless of my friends lost their jobs late 00s and all of them now have permanent ones. Things are looking up and yet there just seems to be loads of people that feel that the current government (and i'm including the Liberals in this) are doing a bad job. I just do not understand it.
AuroRaman
Chris Armstrong
As a grammar taco myself, I should be ashamed of myself. So I'm going to go with your secondary reason and run with it.
I should be a politician.
Bullet
Andy Thompson
what responsible family up and down the country doesn't understand the concept of having to balance the family's budget every month? They understand they can't spend money they don't have without dangerous consequences. We need to make the emotional contact that governments have to obey the same rules and that spending money we don't have today will mean restricted opportunities for future generations.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...gensian-language-austerity.html#ixzz3X52u7yae
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For too many people, the concept of government borrowing seems a painless one. We need to remind them that, just as there is no such thing as government money, only taxpayers' money, so there is no such thing as government debt, only taxpayers' debt.
There are too many people who believe that it is acceptable to spend money today that we do not have and pass the bill on to the next generation.
Yet even those who believe in this basically immoral proposition need to understand that this year, every taxpayer in Britain is paying around £1,900 extra tax for the interest that the Government has to repay on its debt.
That is £1,900 that they could have spent on something they need for themselves or their families, or money that they could have used to pay off their own debts or put aside for a rainy day. At government level, we are paying around £58 billion in debt interest this year, much more than the defence budget and around half of our total spending on the NHS.
‘I’m not about to hand over the keys to No 11 to Ed Balls, saying, “Go and wreck all the good work we’ve done and ruin the lives of the people of this country.” Absolutely not!’
He says that if Labour wins, Britain will become an economic basket case like France did after socialist Francois Hollande won power.
‘France is an example of how quickly the mood can turn sour, jobs go, debts pile up. People will say, “My GHod, Britain is going backward instead of forward.”
Osborne is in his stride now, spitting venom.
‘All this sanctimonious rubbish you hear from Labour about standing up for the many not the few… the people who suffer most when Labour governments screw up the economy are the poorest.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ury-bunker-knew-come-fight.html#ixzz3X53BYzvd
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...gensian-language-austerity.html#ixzz3X52u7yae
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
For too many people, the concept of government borrowing seems a painless one. We need to remind them that, just as there is no such thing as government money, only taxpayers' money, so there is no such thing as government debt, only taxpayers' debt.
There are too many people who believe that it is acceptable to spend money today that we do not have and pass the bill on to the next generation.
Yet even those who believe in this basically immoral proposition need to understand that this year, every taxpayer in Britain is paying around £1,900 extra tax for the interest that the Government has to repay on its debt.
That is £1,900 that they could have spent on something they need for themselves or their families, or money that they could have used to pay off their own debts or put aside for a rainy day. At government level, we are paying around £58 billion in debt interest this year, much more than the defence budget and around half of our total spending on the NHS.
‘I’m not about to hand over the keys to No 11 to Ed Balls, saying, “Go and wreck all the good work we’ve done and ruin the lives of the people of this country.” Absolutely not!’
He says that if Labour wins, Britain will become an economic basket case like France did after socialist Francois Hollande won power.
‘France is an example of how quickly the mood can turn sour, jobs go, debts pile up. People will say, “My GHod, Britain is going backward instead of forward.”
Osborne is in his stride now, spitting venom.
‘All this sanctimonious rubbish you hear from Labour about standing up for the many not the few… the people who suffer most when Labour governments screw up the economy are the poorest.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ury-bunker-knew-come-fight.html#ixzz3X53BYzvd
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
Robspur12
Nick Barmby
I do remember Leeds being viewed as a "Northern Powerhouse" during the Blair years. And the regeneration you talk about in Bradford, I'm sure the Labour controlled Council has more to do with that than the Coalition government. The last Labour gov were talking about infrastructure projects and would have implemented them faster. In fact one of the reasons that the coalition started on infrastructure investment was that they acknowledged belatedly that austerity had gone too far and the economy was not picking up fast enough. To give the Coalition sole credit for turning around the North is going way too far. I agree we need to pay down the debt, however while you say that not doing so will leave our children with a terrible legacy, so will a depleted health service ,cuts to education as well as defence and community cohesion projects with our more children facing dangers of grooming from perverts or radicalisation from fanatics. Paying off the debt therefore has to go together with maintaining good public services it is absolutely one eyed nonsense to just focus on one thing and not the other. I don't see that the Labour Party are rejecting the need for cuts but they are saying they will pay off the debt by a combination of cuts and tax rises, while the Tories are just promising to cut taxes for me that is more irresponsible.
Robspur12
Nick Barmby
Look let's bust some myths here. The Labour Party is not just filled with tree hugging, uneducated, communist, economic dunce types. Their front bench in the main, were educated in the same universities as their Conservative counterparts. They DO understand that you need to pay off debt. Labour's economic record in the Blair years before the financial crash was pretty good. If we have avoided some of the disaster that has afflicted other economies in the eurozone we have Mr Brown to thank for resisting taking us into monetary union with the rest of Europe. But they have more of a social conscience and understand that to create a fair, safe and successful country you can't just cut public services and reduce them to nothing. Look back a hundred and fifty years at British social history to see society before some of the public services we have today were in place.
Gilzeantoscore
Justin Edinburgh
Tories constantly go on about this. Household debt and the debts of nations are not the same, but even if they were, I guess you paid cash for your house, didn't borrow a penny.
You're kidding right? Not economic dunces? Brown thought he'd ended boom and bust - that's like saying I've ended gravity.
It was Labour's profligacy with our money that meant there was nothing in the pot when the brick hit the fan. Using the family analogy again, Labour were maxing out all of the credit cards they could get their hands on when all of a sudden, the car and the washing machine both broke in the same month. Labour's answer to that is to hire a limo and run off to Prada and stock up on some clothes. Then to make up for it they'll just pay off less on the credit cards. Eventually only payday loan companies will touch us and our interest payments will swamp our attempts to pay down the debt.
As for heaping more money into public services. Like the struggling family in a recession, we can't have everything we want. I'd really like a Quattroporte but I can't afford the £1,250 it would cost me in tax every month so I have to have something more sedate and less frivolous. I'd like to shop at Boateng all the time but I've had to cut back during the recession and buy slightly cheaper brands. We've had to stop shopping in M&S/Waitrose all the time - the lost goes on. The country needs to learn that money is finite and that we can't just spend spend spend. As lovely as it would be to have the best health care and education systems in the world, we don't have the best economy and have to get used the the fact that we cannot afford it.
That's not to say we could never afford these things - the Conservatives have done a very good job of keeping stability and growing the economy. If we keep this up then we should be able to increase spending as the economy goes but to do so before we've balanced our books is both stupid and dangerous.
I really don't think you can isolate the effect of public spending over the last 150 years. You could just as easily say that without the division of labour we'd be where we were 150 years ago (in fact, that's probably the biggest improvement in our lifestyles).
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I'm having a look at the wiki pages of Osborne and Balls, because I am curious what qualifies either of them to be Chancellor.
Osborne studied Modern History at Uni. Balls studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Uni, and then "he attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, where he was a Kennedy Scholar specialising in Economics."
Balls then joined the Financial Times as a lead economic writer. Osborne "intended to pursue a career in journalism. He was shortlisted for but failed to gain a place on The Times trainee scheme, and instead did freelance work on the Peterborough diary column of The Daily Telegraph. Some time later, an Oxford friend of his, journalist George Bridges, alerted Osborne to a research vacancy at Conservative Central Office."
You can carry on reading their respective wiki pages if you like, but it's not clear to me why Osborne was made a Shadow Chancellor and then subsequently became Chancellor. And I don't know what he's done since being in the job that overwhelmingly qualifies his opinions either. Ball's academic and early career, including his early political career, were all related to Economics. Yet Balls is portrayed as the one who doesn't know economics, and we should just all accept whatever Osborne says.
Osborne studied Modern History at Uni. Balls studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Uni, and then "he attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard, where he was a Kennedy Scholar specialising in Economics."
Balls then joined the Financial Times as a lead economic writer. Osborne "intended to pursue a career in journalism. He was shortlisted for but failed to gain a place on The Times trainee scheme, and instead did freelance work on the Peterborough diary column of The Daily Telegraph. Some time later, an Oxford friend of his, journalist George Bridges, alerted Osborne to a research vacancy at Conservative Central Office."
You can carry on reading their respective wiki pages if you like, but it's not clear to me why Osborne was made a Shadow Chancellor and then subsequently became Chancellor. And I don't know what he's done since being in the job that overwhelmingly qualifies his opinions either. Ball's academic and early career, including his early political career, were all related to Economics. Yet Balls is portrayed as the one who doesn't know economics, and we should just all accept whatever Osborne says.
Gilzeantoscore
Justin Edinburgh
It's all part of the Tories self perpetuating mythology, that they are the great economic managers.
Aside from overseeing the creation of a metric fvckpile of jobs, a drastic reduction in our deficit, a reduction in tax for low and middle earners, ensuring the security of our economy, keeping our credit rating intact, keeping inflation and interest rates low and the fastest growing economy of the developed world?
While we're asking, what did the Romans ever do for us?
The number of jobs created isn't in question, but the nature of those jobs might be. Are they mainly low paid, insecure hours type of jobs? If not, then I guess the tax take will have gone up, whilst the number of people claiming tax credits and housing benefit will have dropped. If this didn't happen, could you take a guess at why?
The reduction in tax for low earners was a Lib Dem policy wasn't it? Credit where it's due, surely?
I don't know what 'ensuring the security of our economy' means, but I do know that our credit rating dropped under Osborne, from AAA to AA+. This was in 2013, so most definitely on his watch.
Fastest growing economy -- did Osborne not inherit an economy that was growing under the plans of Alistair Darling, only to then unravel those plans and slow growth completely. It was only due to a 'loosening' of austerity plans that the economy began to grow again. Now the Tories tell us to brace for many more spending cuts than have occurred in the parliament just gone. If the start of the last parliament was anything to go by, this will have a bad effect on economic growth.
Low interest rates and inflation -- interest rates are at historic lows world-wide. In the UK, these are set by an independent Bank of England. Inflation being low has more to do with the fall in the price of oil than George Osborne, or does he control this as well? What a miracle worker!
While we are on the subject of Osborne, isn't it interesting how Labour get accused of fantasy figures, when they are willing to cost their spending plans for the NHS but the Tories are not. Osborne refused to specify where his £8billion of extra cash will come from when interviewed by Andrew Marr earlier today. Here is a link to the transcript of that interview:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...osbornes-nhs-pledge-wordforword-10170755.html
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The tax take probably won't have gone up because taxes have been cut. I can take plenty of guesses why there are still plenty on benefits - stupidity, laziness etc. There's apparently been quite the increase of people on benefits because they're fat too (although I haven't had a chance to check the sauce) - I'd have stopped that a long time ago.
This "wrong type of jobs" nonsense is starting to sound really pathetic. "Dear Tories. We don't care that you've helped create millions of jobs, only 7 jobs were created for men name Jeff who are between 53 and 58 years old and live in the region between Liverpool and Manchester. Those were the kind of jobs we wanted"
So they claim. It's very important for them to try and appear not to have been the tea boys for the last few years but everyone knows that they were.
Some agencies dropped, some didn't. Importantly they all rated us as stable. It was no surprise we dropped though - we were in a recession and had massive debts thanks to those Labour tossers vomiting our money all over the workshy. It was remarkable that we did as well as we did and continuing to throw good money after bad would probably have dropped it further.
What happened was that growth was dragged down by Europe and its inability to ditch fvckwit governments like the Greeks. Osborne (through the necessary cuts) put us in a position to grow well and grow quickly when the wider economy picked up.
Interest rates are set independently and are low in most countries but not everywhere - look at Russia and Argentina. Independance doesn't mean that the Bank wouldn't have to react to market conditions - had Osborne fudged up the economy like Labour wanted to then rates would be high.
It's a stupid thing to promise but unfortunately the public are stupid and sometimes you have to lower yourself to their level to get elected. I really hope that's a promise they break if they win the election.
On a different note from UK politics, I see the next president of America is going to formally announce her intention to run. Not too sure about Hilary, though good for the yanks to have a woman president at last.
I think Elizabeth Warren would be better though (but she has repeatedly said she won't run). I wonder if they would put two women on the ticket?
I think Elizabeth Warren would be better though (but she has repeatedly said she won't run). I wonder if they would put two women on the ticket?
Leeds has and will be economically strong, but it's nothing compared to London. London probably accounts for over half of our entire country's GDP.
Cameron has said repeatedly that he wants to improve infrastructure and links to create a Northern Powerhouse, by creating a network of fast and reliable links between Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Bradford etc in order to balance the country's output and infrastructure.
There was nothing on the table that was similar from the last government or from any of the other parties this time around.
Ed wants to invest more in public services but he will borrow a lot more to do so, there will not be the investment in infrastructure and long-term economic growth under Ed, it will go on public services but unless our economy is better balanced and our infrastructure upgraded we will degrade economically.
Public services will get funding, even under an austere approach. But I think we need to concentrate on securing a long-term economic recovery which will give us the money for better investment in services.
BTW, Bradford didn't get any infrastructure improvements or investment under the last Labour government. In fact, do you know what happened to Bradford under the last government?
Direct Rail Services to London from both Bradford Interchange and Bradford Forster Square were stopped (now restarted since 2010)
Direct flights from Leeds/Bradford Airport to London Heathrow were stopped (now restarted since 2010)
Immigration was allowed to increase from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, this directly led to tensions between the growing Pakistani community and the white British community leading to riots that destroyed part of the city centre and caused segregated communities, damaged trust and reputations damage the city is still just recovering from.
In the 00s, Aviva, Capita, RBS and N&P all closed large offices in the city as the city's economy faltered.
In 2006 part of the city centre was demolished to make way for a new shopping centre. It was never built, leaving a huge hole in the ground. In 2011, a buyer and contractor was found to begin the project which is due for completion this year.
Since 2010, the city centre has been partially regenerated with a new city centre water park, new hotel, new Provident headquarters, the college and uni have both been completely redeveloped.
This isn't due to the council, this is all due to increased investment from central government that has allowed these plans to be put into place. There has been a huge urban regeneration grant been obtained from central government. The city has needed something like this for years but neither the Thatcher/Major, nor Blair/Brown governments were interested in investing in the north of England.
Robspur12
Nick Barmby
I can guarantee you, having worked on regeneration projects the local Council is absolutely central to any plans. They will have put together the plans, sought private and public investment and decided on the schemes, central government mostly sign the cheques. Regen does not happen in a town without effective local government. Yes the money has to be made available but all governments have money and initiatives available for regen if the Councils are competent enough to put bids together. I very much doubt that the Coalition came in with a "regenerate Bradford" plan.
I think your immigration comments are totally disingenuous. Bradford has had one of if not the largest Muslim population in the country long before the last government.
markysimmo
Johnny nice-tits
We're now in a global economy. If we can't offer competitive tax rates then we just lose the whole tax take.
Looks nailed on for her, but then it did last time. If she can learn from her husband and take a little more advice from her experts I think she'd make a fairly good president.
The Republicans will probably have a lot of ammo with the private email debacle as well as the foreign donations she's been receiving.