Matthew on 18/4/2010 at 17:40
Quote Posted by Ulukai
he
hates the precious would like to get rid of Trident nuclear submarines now that the world works on the honour system. Which it doesn't.
To be fair, it's more that he doesn't want to spend £X million on developing the
replacement for Trident. Surely someone has a decent payload delivery system we can buy / get MI6 to steal the plans of?
d0om on 18/4/2010 at 19:17
If labour comes 3rd in the popular vote, but first in the number of MPs I would be very disappointed if the LibDems formed a coalition with Labour over the Conservatives. The party with the lowest number of votes shouldn't get the most MPs ><
They could just form a temporary coalition, introduce PR then call for new elections. Hopefully they could both agree with that.
jay pettitt on 19/4/2010 at 09:20
Rock on JK - that's a fantastic piece of writing.
If I may be so bold - I think the Tories are more election engineering than social engineering with their family values thang. There have been a bunch of very popular reports in various parts of the press, church magazines and whatnot in recent years noting that children from single parent families are prone, statistically speaking, to having worse social outcomes than those from two parent families. Clearly what we need is more, good old fashioned, nice, stable, two parent families. Grist to the well intentioned middle england Christian married family values mill and many of the folk that Tories want to associate themselves with: good, decent folk with values.
The thing is, if you stop focusing exclusively on the worst offenders in terms of divisive and unequal societies - like the US and UK - and instead look at more equitable countries (like those in Scandinavia), the differences in social outcomes between children in single parent and two parent families disappear and everyone does better. If you want to say - here's the evidence and here's my policy response - then you've got some explaining to do if a significant chunk of your available data is telling you something else entirely. Desirable social outcomes almost always track with societies with greater equality, they don't track with societies with less single parenting.
So the conservative chappy Liam Fox was on (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rz0kl#synopsis) Any Questions over the weekend and, after being picked up on the fact that the policy was nothing more than half a billion quids worth of political tokenism, hit back with the old chestnut that if you don't like his 'pro family' policies then you must, therefore, want a society with no values at all. Which is odd, because I don't support his policy and yet I have strong social (and political) values - so who knows how I managed that.
Concentrating on the most unequal societies is going to produce all manner of alarming statistics for politicians and interest groups to get exercised over. But you gotta be careful because spotting associations between statistics is not the same as identifying cause. I'm sure stable family relationships are great - but if you're actually interested in improving outcomes for children who have been traditionally disadvantaged in the UK, then further increasing inequality, even by a token amount, by giving a £150 tax break to couples who get married and not to single parent families, isn't going to be helpful.
Namdrol on 19/4/2010 at 11:44
Annual tax break for married couples - £150
Average cost of UK wedding - £20,000
steo on 19/4/2010 at 13:43
Better start getting married pretty early then.
SubJeff on 19/4/2010 at 20:00
Quote Posted by Namdrol
Annual tax break for married couples - £150
Average cost of UK wedding - £20,000
Yep, we can totally blame the Tory party for how much people choose to spend on their weddings.
Brian The Dog on 19/4/2010 at 21:00
Never understood why/how people spend so much on their weddings - I've been to a few in London for friends, and the most I've heard anyone spend is around £10,000. One couple managed it for about £1500. One couple did it to please their parents so the total cost was about £200 :)
I'm guessing the Tories have looked at the stats that (iirc) show that married couples' children are statistically less likely to go to prison etc, and see it as a good investment. Correlation != causation though, so dunno if this is the right thing.
Vernon on 22/4/2010 at 03:18
I love Alastair Campbell:
"David Cameron has junked tonight's planned party election broadcast in favour of one that 'responds to the public mood.'
Now what does that remind me of? Where was I? Oh yes, Southampton, April 16, 1997 ... with TB, when news came through that John Major had junked that evening's planned party election broadcast in favour of one that responded to the public mood.
What do these two events have in common, beyond the obvious link of two not very good Tory leaders? The answer is strategic failure requiring a tactical shift which turns out to be a mistake.
All Cameron's current problems are rooted in strategic failure. So were Major's. But to be fair to the Tories' last (hopefully) Prime Minister, he was dealing with a party that was literally falling to bits, a media kicking him hard, and a powerful and attractive new political phenomenon in TB and New Labour.
David Cameron by contrast has a party longing for victory, a media willing him to win, against a Party that has now been in power for 13 years. Yet despite all that, precisely because he has not sorted his strategy, he is having to junk doubtless well laid plans (these broadcasts don't happen overnight and don't come cheap) in favour of what sounds like a rather desperate attempt to do the 'who I am' thing. Er. Again.
My guess is that the Tories had done a clunking great negative attack on Labour and GB, but the focus having shifted post TV debate to Nick Clegg, and George Osborne having claimed yesterday that they were going to go more positive, they have been forced to junk it. Needs must.
What it is all going to show is that you can have all the money Lord Ashcroft can give you. But if you don't have a strategy, and you don't know how to lead, you'll get found out soon enough.
Enjoy the broadcast"
Shakey-Lo on 22/4/2010 at 13:50
Ok I'll say right off the bat that I'm in Australia (I was born in the UK) and highly apathetic about politics on a practical level (because it seems clear to me the current model of representational democracy is hugely broken) but I have a few links that haven't been posted in this thread yet and thought I would bring them to UK voter's attention and see what the feeling is.
The (
http://www.voterpower.org.uk/) first illustrates how broken the system is.
The (
http://positivevoting.com/) second attempts to overcome it. [I have no idea of the LibDem's policies but I take it they are 'the cool guys']
I do believe the internet can lead to open,
direct democracy once the current guard of digital-immigrant, lobbyist-pandering, techno-illiterate luddites grow old and die out. Maybe I'm naive. I do doubt the success of current attempts at "Democracy 2.0" because the tech-savvy hipster self-important bloggers are far outnumbered by balding television-watching newspaper-reading fuddy-duddies. But that will change.
