General Election?

Looking good. I hope I wake up to see a labour victory.

Matheson back in easily with a hugely increased majority, great result for Labour.

Congratulations Chris Matheson . . . brilliant result. And cracking 77% plus turn out in Chester.

I'm very much enjoying all the spluttering and panicking going on among Conservative politicians and the front pages of the Tory rags. This really has shut a lot of people up - all those saying Corbyn is 'unelectable' and the country doesn't want a left-wing government.

It's just a shame it wasn't quite enough, and that the Tories got a few seats in Scotland and the SDLP were wiped out in Northern Ireland, but far more positives than negatives for me.

Funny that the press paint Corbyn as a terrorist sympathiser. May herself saying he would 'invite terrorists round for tea' yet 5 minutes after the election she's inviting a group with paramilitary links into the House of Commons to prop her up...

Unbelievable hypocrisy, but am I surprised? Well she sells weapons to the ISIS funding Saudi Arabia so nothing surprises me anymore.

I wonder what NFBF would have to say about all this? "It's all the young people's fault, don't let them vote, blah blah blah"

I find the man to be a pompous idiot. like a big baby too, says his piece and then says he's won't be responding to threads again. "The chairman" infuriates me with every post. I'm glad he does not post on this site. 

Here's another thing to consider - most people are voting for left-leaning parties.

If you look at percentages of the votes, you've got Labour on 40%, Liberal Democrats on 7.4% and SNP on 3% - that's already over 50%. You could then add the Greens (1.6%), Plaid Cymru (0.5%) and SDLP (0.3%), and it becomes clear that the majority are rejecting right-wing politics.

Instead, we're left with a coalition voted for by only 43.2% of the electorate (Tories 42.3%, DUP 0.9%). We could add UKIP's 1.8% as well, but it's still not representative of what we voted for.

Is it time to review the way our elections work and actually use a system that reflects one person, one vote? It would encourage people to vote for who they really wanted to as well, rather than to vote tactically. I'm sure more people would vote Green if they weren't so petrified that doing so could help the Tories win.

I think most of their voters are even if the party itself is a bit confused.

I said as soon as the exit poll came in that if that's accurate then it's down to Northern Ireland. It's a shame the SDLP couldn't hold onto their three, and that a few Scottish constituencies surprisingly turned blue.

Am I right in thinking that because Sinn Fein don't take their seats, any they win come off the majority needed to win the election, so the majority needed was actually only 322 (half of 643)?

I think most of UK is about to get a lesson on how strange Northern Irish politics is. It seems like they've never really managed to celebrate politics and religion over there.

Just going back to the whole NFBF/youth vote debate I found this article interesting...

The Duran - It's Not Just The Young That Voted For Jeremy Corbyn

These wide-eyed youngsters who have blindly voted for Corbyn's populist,rhetoric and uncosted nonsense have clearly not lived through a labour government and witnessed the devastation and chaos thatit leaves behind.

You want to tell us which part of the Labour manifesto was uncosted because I'm really struggling to work it out?

You do talk nonsense, if you want to debate politics and argue for a right wing pro liberal globalist agenda that is your right, but at least put forward an argument containing some facts, not a rant, and don’t question the mathematical competence of strangers of which you can have zero knowledge of the level of qualifications they may, or may not, possess.

As every chancellor knows, predicting tax receipts is not an exact science, not one has ever got it exactly right. Labour itemised the projected costs of their programme using treasury models, and like all models they are deeply flawed and give out educated guesses at best. However, in the context of total government spending a few tens of millions either way is trivial.

As for the nationalisations, how could you price the cost of a ‘bonds for shares’ nationalisation of Water or Royal Mail in advance? To do so would require knowledge of the price of the shares. To expect those costs is not a mathematical failing, but is a huge F in logic.

The whole programme is realistic and doable, though possibly, in the case of the nationalisations, not all in one parliament. And contrast the Labour manifesto with the Tory one. The only numbers in that appalling document were the page numbers, in short, it was 100% uncosted.

What Labour proposed is a different vision for Britain; it is simply a step plan to return to a social democratic mixed economy. For those not sure, what that means is democratic control of the economy in the interests of ordinary people, the buzz word during the social democratic era 1945-79 was always SECURITY.

That outlook contrasts with the neoliberal era, an era in which co-ordination is left to ‘market forces’ based on an ideological blind faith that all government controls, regulation or interference in the economy is damaging. An ideology promoted by those that gain from deregulation, privatisation, the creation of a panacea for rent extraction at the expense of the majority. A word that well describes the affects of this failed ideological experiment is INSECURITY.

To take just two example areas, regulation of financial institutions were not introduced on a whim, they were legislated for in response to real and specific problems, many in response to avoiding the conditions that led to the great crash of 1929 and following depression. Deregulation predictably gave us its logical consequence, the 2008 crash.

Then we have the governments much heralded wish to hold a bonfire of Health and Safety regulations, seeing them as burdensome ‘red tape’ that hits business profits. Again these regulations were introduced in response to real incidents leading to deaths and injuries. That Health and Safety regulations are vital and worth every penny of any cost were made terribly real by the horrific Grenfell Tower fire.

You can disagree with the social democratic vision if you wish, but try using positive arguments for YOUR vision of how Britain should move forward.

I challenge anybody to defend the economic modelling used in the post 1979 era, specifically the premises and assumptions of neo-classical economic models.

Why don't you try and use a few of them when you construct your political arguments then?


It would make far more interesting reading than your current level of depressingly ignorant and out of touch debate.