The Politics Thread

[RB]

See, short memory or too young to have lived it.
All your links do is back up what I've said. I never said the Tories have eliminated the debts that Labour ran up because they haven't, although it has come down a decent amount as your pretty graph shows.

If you think Labour can spend billions on unicorns for all on the national credit card, then you're deluded.

[Ekona]

I sit somewhere between you guys. No way Labour were ever going to be able to do all the shit they promised, and tbh I don't know too many people with half a brain who believed they would. They essentially bought a lot of votes based on bribes, helped by the single worst election campaign by any party in the history of the world. Masters of their own downfall doesn't even come close. Thankfully Labour are still a billion years away from being properly elected, and the SNP seats were decimated so no help there. That said, I'd genuinely rather have had a Labour majority than the clusterfuck we have now.

The Tory austerity plans weren't great for many people, but they also weren't half as bad as some make out. JC's plan to increase Corp Tax is the big killer for me, it would absolutely have stifled growth in this country. No way would be be able to afford employing people on the same wage they're on now if we were paying 30%+ more CT.

[Helios]

I've annotated the graphs to help you understand what I'm saying, RB.
So please answer:
- When will Tories stop blaming Labour for everything? They've had seven years to fix it.
- How do you think the Tories will reduce the deficit and then bring down the debt when all they do is push their targets back?
- Why do you look up to people that earn money with successful businesses here (a good thing) and then hide it away overseas rather than pay full taxes here? (a bad thing)

I'll answer your point:
- No, I don't believe Labour will fix the UK and make everything hunky dory. I'm just tired of a Tory party that thinks that I'm too stupid to see through their lies and strong and stable red white and blue Brexit shite. I'd like to see someone different in charge now who might try something different even if it doesn't work out. It might not be worse than the way this country is going now.

Feel free to interpret the graphs to mean that it's Labour's fault the whole world went to shit in 2008.
I'd like to see how you think the graphs prove the point you're making about everything being Labour's fault and the young people being too ignorant.
Why not try explain yourself and alleviate the ignorance a bit instead of looking down on people all the time?

Edit: Oops I've got borrowing and debt the wrong way round in parts.
I really should have re-read it before uploading.
Anyway, read borrowing as debt in the debt graph and debt as borrowing in the borrowing graph.
I deleted the files and don't want to edit them again.

[RB]

I've annotated the graphs to help you understand what I'm saying, RB.
So please answer:
- When will Tories stop blaming Labour for everything? They've had seven years to fix it.
- How do you think the Tories will reduce the deficit and then bring down the debt when all they do is push their targets back?
- Why do you look up to people that earn money with successful businesses here (a good thing) and then hide it away overseas rather than pay full taxes here? (a bad thing)

1) The Tories will never stop blaming Labour and vice versa, that's politics. There is some truth to the blame though.
Going back to the graphs, excluding the 2008 crash, Labour were increasing borrowing long before the crash and although the debt graph increase during that time was shallow, it was significant and not sustainable over time. It's one of the reasons why we were hit quite hard by the crash, because our economy was seen by traders to be overstretched. A similar thing happened last week, when the pound dropped in unison with Labour becoming more likely to win, traders knew that a return to public spending if Labour won, would weaken our economy and they ran a mile from it.

2) The staggering amount of debt we are in will take decades to come down because we are essentially only paying off the interest as we have no money to pay more. I agree the Tories have missed targets but at least they have targets and aren't planning more borrowing and spending beyond their means. It sucks for everyone including me that we can't easily afford everything we need in this country but we can't just run up debt because it will be the young that voted for Labour that end up paying.

3) I don't but I'd rather have 50,000 millionaires paying some tax and spending their money into our economy than 5,000 millionaires paying 50%+ tax and 45,000 more Swiss millionaires paying nothing here.

[Helios]

OK now I understand your point of view a bit better.
Thank you.

[Joe]

I'd say this is probably a more balanced assessment of Labour vs Tory economic policy - http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7568/ ... 1997-2010/

Take from it what you will.

[Ekona]

Not an unreasonable assessment. What worries me is that people see that debt has risen massively under the last couple of governments without the real understanding of why: Sure, it looks like that's because the Tories are actually bad with money after all, but actually it's purely because we're still running a massive deficit so the the debt has to be growing. There had to be a massive amount of borrowing at the time of the crash in 2009/10, and to be fair it wouldn't have mattered who was in power then at all.

References to the '50s are pointless though, it was post-war so of course there was massive amounts of debt but also huge growth. There couldn't really fail to be otherwise.


I just really, really wish TM hadn't screwed up her election campaign so badly. She's made such a mess of this, and now it's just going to be political squabbling for the next 18 months until Brexit is done. If she does go before then, I can only hope that Boris gets the seat as although he's the wrong man to lead Brexit, he's the only one in the Tories who could galvanise the public again.

[Joe]

I think yesterday's stunt with the "leaked" WhatsApp messages was a reaction to the election fallout by Boris' team to show he has leadership potential and some (extremely tenuous) youth creds - at least more than anyone else in the party has, anyway.

That said, he's been shown up time and time again when it comes to false promises and contradictory statements so I don't see how his cult of personality could possibly overcome the huge trust issues the public now must have with him. Confident speaker he may be, but it is by underestimating the 18-25 and 25-44 voter brackets that the Tories suffered so heavily last week. You can dismiss them as economically illiterate and susceptible to populism if you like, but you cannot deny that they are now politically active and a very real threat to Conservative power.

If the Tories are ever going to recover from May shitting the bed they need to massively re-think their campaign strategy. Two successive Tory PMs willing to gamble the future of the country for intra-party gains does not reflect the "strong and stable" line they've been putting out. Similarly "Brexit is Brexit" and "no deal is better than a bad deal" haven't done the trick with the electorate. Top it off with the frankly batshit crazy DUP alliance and they've got some huge challenges ahead to fix the damage done over the last couple of years..