UK General Election called May 6th

[Prestwick]

Rebellion is impossible because that must be organised with a central or source of co-ordination to concentrate popular anger.

However, civil disorder and disobedience most definitely is possible as we have seen multiple times over the past 30 years. Last week was the 20th anniverssary of the Poll Tax riots, the culmination of a process of spontaneous civil disorder which started with a bunch of elderly ladies who had voted Tory all their lives in Surrey refusing to pay their Poll Tax.

Interesting facts a'comin'

How much does the British Prime Minister get paid a year? As has been mentioned previously around £190,000 a year.
How much does the Canadian Prime Minister get paid a year? £205,000 more or less.
How much does the New Zealand Prime Minister get paid a year? £178,000 with a £9000 "allowance" apparently.
How much does the Australian Prime Minister get paid a year? £156,000 a year give or take.

Now, how much do you think Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowan get paid?

€310,000 a year. Thats £270,000 in proper money.

Think about that for a second.

As for Britain's financial situation, we're definitely not alone in Europe and any one of multiple apocalyptic events could cause massive impact across the EU. You have huge British debt, the inability of the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece & Spain) to manage its massive budget deficits, Germany hogging internal Eurozone demand, a broken Euro currency system with no way to discipline, eject or treat members who consistently break the rules with the potential to force the entire Euro to the brink of collapse. You have bad debt building in Eastern Europe threatening Central European and Scandinavian banks, political indecision in the EU's highest echelons and not one but three fundemental policy rifts between France, Germany and Britain on how the EU should recover after the financial crisis and Lisbon.

To focus endlessly on Britain as the main culprit is to complain about the lack of lifeboats on the ***ainic when the real danger is the huge iceberg up ahead.

 

[shtove]

I have been reading up recently a lot on lawful rebellion... and honestly believe it is only a matter of time until we go through a rebellion..

There are alot of things wrong with this country, and I could make a long list of them...

Bring it on! Compare that list to mine, without sounding ... y'know ... DailyMailish.

First off, you can't rebel if you got no guns. Try marching peacefully on parliament, that should work.

Alot of posters on this forum are students. Do they earn Ginger's £15k a year? Or are they stuck in Tesco on min wage topped up by tax credits, which are a benefit set up by NuLab to subsidise big, competition-crushing employers? And how's the student loan thing going? Not so bad, because the idiots who stumped up the money have been bailed out by the state and don't yet need to jack up the interest rate to cover their losses. But the debt isn't getting any smaller, and the credit sharks can wait for years when the blood of compound interest is in the water. Bet the students wish they'd applied for those government job ages ago. I hear they're still going.

Notice how Ginger excuses the One Eyed Idiot? He's not overpaid. Compared to whom - Bernie Madoff? Will he be joining Peter and Tony at the high table in a few years time, raking it in for his support of the banking industry? The collapse of the credit system is not his fault because it's a function of capitalism - which was regulated by his buddies in the credit industry when the economy was soaring on bad credit. It's a system, but not capitalism - the word we're looking for is Ponzi. Our only option in the face of this disaster? More bad regulation by the same bad players. Want to pay for things yourself, instead of handing it to the government? That would be way more expensive, according to the people who take your money and waste it on benefit scroungers and credit industry fraudsters.

Labour my arse.

 

[Cymro]

 

[Feicarsinn]

Oh you British folk, you do have it good. Compare your situation to ours and then complain. At least you get the chance to get you incompetant eejits out of government in a few months, we're stuck with ours for the next year and a half.

If I were British I'd probably vote Lib Dem. New Labour has bollocked up the country by appearances and having family that lived in Manchester throughout the 1980's I'd be very cautious about voting for the Tories. Fact is, in many ways Britain's current recession can be traced back to the "Credit Culture" that emerged under Thatcher's reign and their current leadership does little to inspire my confidence.v

So with that in mind, I'd vote Lib Dem. Nick Clegg seems to be a capable politician and what with my complete lack of fate in the other major parties, they would seem to be the only remaining choice. Also at the very least having a third strong party would be good for the democratic process.

 

[Saints1]

£270k for the Irish PM?

Ah to be sure, you can kill our economy but you'll never kill THE CRAIC!

 

[Feicarsinn]

Ahem, Morris Dancing.

 

[Saints1]

Skip to 2:21.

 

[Thingimubob]

This is a kinda wierd one for me because some people in my year (year 13) can vote for the first time. I miss out on it by a couple of months, still doesnt stop Labour and the Conservatives phoning me and sending me letters trying to get me to vote ¬¬ If I could vote I'd probably go Plaid Cymru, mostly because I like their policies and I'm a proud Welsh speaking Welshie Not a fan of David Cameron, because he's a *** tbh, though I did get a few laughs at him trying to get ''in wif da young peoples'' with his Desert Island Disc choices :L feel slightly sorry for Gordon Brown, I mean he's far from perfect, but I think it's harsh to say all Britains problems are down to him.

 

[Teh Mite]

feel slightly sorry for Gordon Brown, I mean he's far from perfect, but I think it's harsh to say all Britains problems are down to him.

That criminal Blair still has to carry some of the can for a lot of modern social issues, but that doesn't undo all the wasteful spending and incessand taxes set in motion by the then chancellor over the last decade.

 

[dullonien]

I'll be voting for Plaid Cymru, as I always have done. I supose us Welsh and Scottish members have a viable alternative to the 'big three' which English posters do not. Unfortunately we'll see another increase in people voting for the BNP, as the uneducated, benefit scrounging racists complain that immigrants have somehow taken the jobs they didn't want in the first place!

Overall, I hope Labour are re-elected, mainly because they'll do a better job than the Tauries and some of the Lib Dem's policies are pie in the sky! The Tauries have probably shot themselves in the foot by sticking with Cameron, anyone else, and I could see them sneaking it. Not clued up enough to understand how or what happens with a hung parliment.

 

[Saints1]

I can't see the BNP profiting this time around to be honest. When they made gains in the last election they had been banging their drum for months and months in advance.

 

[dullonien]

I hope your right St Helens... I have however seen quite a few BNP banners in windows around where I live during term time in Lincoln. It's an area dominated by students and Polish people, and there's obviously some who don't like that!

The main reason I can see the BNP increasing their following this time round is a combination of lack of jobs (with alot of people blaming Polish immigrants taking those available) and a lack of confidence in Labour and the Conservatives.

Hopefully I'm wrong, because Britain (and every country) should be becoming less racist, not the other way round.

 

[Saints1]

I wouldn't vote BNP if they were the last political party on earth, a vote for them is a vote for voiding my grandad fighting in World War II, but at the same time, I understand the dissatisfaction people are feeling as I'm feeling it myself. However, there's a difference between being cheesed off and complaining about it over the internet to Bullitt and going to the polls and voting for the BNP.

Under no circumstances.

 

[Prestwick]

The interesting thing to note that during the European Elections the BNP's share of the vote in the North East actually went down but because the vote fragmented so much Labour, Tory, UKIP, Lib Dem and Green the BNP just about snuck over the threshold for qualifying for a seat.

One of the big pitfalls of proportional representation I'm afraid.

In a First Past The Post environment the odds are much more heavily stacked against them and they'd have to engineer vote swings of roughly 6 - 10% to get some of the seats their aiming at.

Edit: also, its a bit depressing that Cameron gets most of the stick on here being a "***", etc while Gordon Brown is apparently hard done by. Daaaaww, he doesn't deserve all that stick he's been getting, poor Gordon Brown! Doesn't matter that it was him who has done a lot of damage over the past 10 years in encouraging a runaway housing market boom, soft touch regulation on banks and financial institutions, having more or less no respect at all for the lads of the Armed Forces who have to go out there and carry out HM Government's dirty work and not having any respect for either Parliament or the British public by refusing to allow a proper referendum on the Lisbon treaty, he's got a red rosette on so therefore somehow he's a more sympathetic figure than David Cameron who because he has a posh accent, went to University and wears a blue rosette is a bad man. A very bad man. And a twat.

What total double standards. You guys do realise New Labours spent 13 years basically pretending to be Tories, right? Right? These guys aren't Michael Foot and Harold Wilson anymore. Labour only sticking up for the Unions because they're absolutely potless and can't survive without Trade Union money. Otherwise they'd tell them to **** off and head to the center-right.

A lot of the random, unjustified hate for David Cameron is about 20 years out of date. Everyone still remembers Thatcher and all the crap she pulled so probably for the next 50 years every Tory candidate even if they say "we'll nationalise everything and give what gold reserves we got left to the unemployed of Widness and Scotland!" will still apparently be a "Thatcherite" and a "twat" simply because he said "unemployed" in a posh accent.

And then we'll all whinge because apparently we're being discriminated against by the "upper classes" and won't realise that we're all guilty of blatant hypocrisy.

 

[Saints1]

All the more reasons to stop the Lib Dems introducing PR!

 

[Feicarsinn]

PR is a far fairer system. Take the North as an example. Under first past the post the nationalist minority could never have hoped to be fully involved in the political system while labour movements and parties with less sectarian aims than the Unionist party of the first half ofthe 20th century could never prosper. Under PR, the cultural differences present in the statelet are far better represented.

 

[Prestwick]

I wouldn't say its fairer, the result of having STV in Ulster has meant that sectarian parties have essentially confirmed their stranglehold on politics North of the border with a very cushy power sharing agreement. Neither now wants to rock the boat because the pork from Dublin, Westminister and Brussels is simply too good to pass up. Parties like the SDLP and the Alliance are now sidelined and barely have a say. I'd say therefore that PR has amplified the divisions rather than emphasised different cultures.

Further examples of PR being unfair can be seen in Israel. You've had right wing governments, you've had left wing governments and you've had center ground governments but all have been hamstrung by the system of PR that allows tiny extremist parties to get seats in the Knesset. No party has a majority big enough to govern even as a minority government so they have to get the support of parties who for example would like Israel to re-invade the Sinai or parties that want to ban motorway construction if it passes nearby ancient Jewish graveyards. And these small parties demand decent Ministries which is why the current Minister for Housing in Israel is a member of an extremist far right party.

The problem is that people fundamentally misunderstand the whole idea of politics both domestic and international. We all want people to work together, we hate "punch and judy politics" and people stitching everyone else up for self gain. We apparently hate the way that the House of Commons is designed in the "adversarial" style where the government and opposition face off from opposite sides and we'd prefer to see everyone in harmony and happiness in these nice and delightful horse-shoe debating chamber designs we see at the Scottish Parliament and in the European Parliament. We want everyone to have their say and everyone to work together and be "fully involved."

On the international stage we want to see everyone working together to make poverty history, to solve HIV/AIDS and global warming and make war a thing of the past. We'd like to think that we're all "European" than Irish, British or French and that in the EU we're all working together towards a happy future.

So when people talk about PR, they talk about it because they feel that somehow magically everyone will pull together and work for the common good and everything will be fairer and nicer and the sun will always shine and so on.

The problem is all of that is a sham. Its never happened and it never will happen. Ever.

Politics is dog eat dog. Its about stabbing each other in the back. Its about protecting your own. Its about fighting your corner. Its about bitter argument and compromising through gritted teeth with sworn oaths for vengeance. Its about swapping sides and allegiances if given a better offer.

This is the reality. In our home leigslatures its every man for themselves and in the EU its every country for themselves. If there is co-operation its France & Germany working together to screw everyone else over and the rest of the Eurozone working together to cut Greece loose.

PR is part of a utopian pipe dream that will never be acheived and as a result only exacerbates division, infighting, vested interests, marginalisation and betrayal. DUP/Sinn Fein have betrayed Ulster because they've carved the place up for themselves. Belgium is on the verge of disintegration due to bitter division and stalemate caused by PR, the Arab-Israeli conflict has arguably been prolonged by the inability of successive Israeli Prime Ministers (Olmert, Sharon, Barak & Peres) to form strong governments thanks to PR.

And thats why I prefer First Past The Post. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

 

[Saints1]

Parliament and Punch and Judy politics rules. In order to promote this environment every MP should have their own WWE like theme every time they want to speak.

 

[Prestwick]

This is what PMQs SHOULD be like...

 

[Saints1]

John coina! Yew said that yew would lower taxes, coina!