Poolie of Kent wrote:
TheGingerPoolie wrote:
So you're basing your political bias on an event that happened 7 or 8 years before you were born, didn't affect you and evidently isn't understood past the clichés bandied about by Ben Elton and his Saturday Live cronies?
As far as things are going now, Labour have suffered failure after failure. I'll never vote Tory especially with that smug bastid David Cameron in charge, but don't you think it's more viable to support a political party for how it affects your life now and not how the opposition didn't before you were born?
It's like voting Barack Obama because you preferred Carter to Reagan.
No, I agree with what you say there, while I grew up Blair reduced unemployment, Brown as Chancellor meant that this country had our longest period of sustained economic growth, we solved the Northern Ireland problem and more young people are going to university under a Labour government than under Major's Conservative government.
It's America's fault that the global economy has suffered, as well as ours, we've jsut got to ride out the storm and then evrything should be fine once Obama wins the Presidency. Obama is too charismatic a candidate to lose in November.
You've pretty much quoted word for word what I said myself about Labour, but it doesn't mask the problems of the last two years which has seen the loss of over 30 million records (with 4 million unannounced losses), the unions taking issue with public pension and payment schemes and the lowest positivity in opinion polls in post-war history. Add to that the response to Northern Rock, the Iraq war as a whole and the 10p tax rate and you've got a lot of unhappy voters with a right to believe what they do.
Minimum wage was good. Northern Ireland was ten years ago. University comes at an astronomical price. Major was simply picking up the pieces of a fragmented party... much like the one currently in charge.
Either way, you can't judge a party on merits before - it has to be consistent. Recently it's been anything but. Either way, the political make-up of this country has to change, whether it means the return of true Labour or the loss of it completely so that they can rediscover exactly what's needed as a political force. The more I think about it, write about it and report about it in my job, the more I prefer the latter option.
And it's not America's fault that the global economy is how it is. Capitalism in its nature is boom and bust as greed drives up prices. It may be worth checking out today's report that shows America is growing at a rate higher than the presidency itself predicted. The dollar's gotten a lot stronger in the last couple of months too.