Ed Miliband Has Wrecked The Labour Party.

[Manlinose]

No, changed the boundries to be fair, like they are trying to do.

 

Do you think it's fair that more votes are needed to elect a Tory MP than a Labour MP?

 

do you think it's fair that it takes even more votes to elect a lib dem or a ukip or a green or a monster raving looney

[Happ Hazzard]

Sheffielders deserve what they get. They keep voting Labour, and then moaning about there not being enough jobs and services in the city not being good enough. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

[Clown Shoes]

Sheffielders deserve what they get. They keep voting Labour, and then moaning about there not being enough jobs and services in the city not being good enough. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

 

Like ive said again & again.

 

Sheffielder's fear change. They wish everything was just like a Hovis advert.

 

[WeX]

do you think it's fair that it takes even more votes to elect a lib dem or a ukip or a green or a monster raving looney

 

the last time I checked it was one vote per person. the boundary changes are there so that the number of voters in a constituency is the same across the country, meaning each MP represents the same number of people in the parliament.

 

disproportionate population growth means the constituencies are not equal, this is why the Boundary Commission for the UK (now England) was created as a none political government department who can advise on what changes need to be made to balance the numbers. There is always losers and this time round its Labour and the Lib Dems who are refusing to let any change take place. In effect stealing votes.

[Manlinose]

the last time I checked it was one vote per person. the boundary changes are there so that the number of voters in a constituency is the same across the country, meaning each MP represents the same number of people in the parliament.

 

disproportionate population growth means the constituencies are not equal, this is why the Boundary Commission for the UK (now England) was created as a none political government department who can advise on what changes need to be made to balance the numbers. There is always losers and this time round its Labour and the Lib Dems who are refusing to let any change take place. In effect stealing votes.

 

all of that is fine and dandy, but doesn't address the point i was making (incidentally, they aren't stealing votes, but they are, arguably, stealing seats)

 

however, in the last election,

 

10,703,654 people voted conservative and they got 306 MPs - 34,979 per MP

 

8,606,517 voted labour and they got 258 MPs - 33,358 per MP

 

6,836,248 voted libdem and they got 57 MPs - 119,934 per MP

 

265,243 voted green and they got 1 MP

 

919,471 voted ukip and they got no MPs

 

the point i was making was that, before conservatives bleat about the unfair electoral system and try to encourage changes to give them more MPs at the expense of other parties, they should be addressing the more fundamental unfairness of the system which causes the votes of millions of people to be ignored

[Hillpig]

LOL at the tories, or rather people who think they're tories, trying desperately to influence public opinion. panic panic panic

 

Quietly confident Mecky, (well not quietly.)

 

---------- Post added 20-09-2013 at 14:27 ----------

 

all of that is fine and dandy, but doesn't address the point i was making (incidentally, they aren't stealing votes, but they are, arguably, stealing seats)

 

however, in the last election,

 

10,703,654 people voted conservative and they got 306 MPs - 34,979 per MP

 

8,606,517 voted labour and they got 258 MPs - 33,358 per MP

 

6,836,248 voted libdem and they got 57 MPs - 119,934 per MP

 

265,243 voted green and they got 1 MP

 

919,471 voted ukip and they got no MPs

 

.

 

the point i was making was that, before conservatives bleat about the unfair electoral system and try to encourage changes to give them more MPs at the expense of other parties, they should be addressing the more fundamental unfairness of the system which causes the votes of millions of people to be ignored

 

 

They are not ignored, they are counted. Its a first past the post system. We had a referendum but no one was bothered

 

---------- Post added 20-09-2013 at 14:29 ----------

 

Sheffielders deserve what they get. They keep voting Labour, and then moaning about there not being enough jobs and services in the city not being good enough. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

 

 

You are absolutely right, pathetic, don't you agree?

[RutlandFlyer]

I think Miliband's doing a decent job and increasingly looks like he might have the backbone to be PM, if not the charisma. It looks like he's being proved right on Syria and the changes he's proposing to party membership from Unions is certainly brave. I suspect it's all going to be for nought as the Tories have pulled too much wool over too many eyes.

 

While the recovery does now, finally, seem to be underway and the Tories are quick to take credit but really they've very little to claim credit for. Economies will nearly always exhibit a natural bounce in response to recession; shops drop their prices to attract customers, those still in work start spending, which leads to more people getting back into work and so on. The Tories' early policies - slashing public infrastructure projects, public sector jobs and freezing pay - put more people out of work than needed to be and rocked consumer confidence, which did a fine job of suppressing that natural bounce and is the real reason we were one of the last developed economies to get out of recession.

 

On the face of it, it sounds like Plan A was foolish but the Tories' plan for this term was always a game of two halves. They knew that the economy would always pick up on its own eventually, so in the meantime they set about making their own bogeymen on which to blame Britain's ills. Men of straw that could be knocked down (or would fall down of their own accord), so they could embed in the public psyche the idea that they had driven the recovery. The two biggest of these are benefits and immigration.

 

Benefit fraud makes up a tiny fraction of the overall welfare bill and the long-term, 'unwilling', unemployed are actually pretty rare, so the Tories' broad-brush and regressive reforms have made a lot of sick, disabled and legitimate worse off to try and get at the small minority who are abusing the system. The Tories set themselves a target to cut the benefits bill and they've cut it. Hooray for Conservatism! But let's think about that for a minute. For one thing, benefits spending has never actually been much of a drag on the economy. Whichever way you cut it, it represents a pretty small slice of public spending so the modest reduction we've seen was never going to be the difference between the economy growing and not growing. More importantly though, what else might cause the welfare bill to come down? That's right, a growing economy, easily the most powerful force for reducing benefit spending there is. The Tories said they would cut spending on benefits knowing it would happen even if they did sod all. But they didn't do sod all, they flogged the 'strivers and skivers' pony for all it was worth, so Barry d'Ailymail on the street would know that they were tough on benefit claimants and that's why the benefits bill has gone down and that's why the economy is getting better.

 

It's a similar story with immigration. The truth is, the large majority of migrants to this country cause a net gain to the British economy, and our economy (in particular the state pension and care for the elderly) is reliant on a growing population, so it's not really true that more people coming in is bad for the British. But that's not where the Tory straw man is standing this time, not quite. The truth is that migration from Eastern Europe has been falling since before the Tories came into power. The UK was an easy ride in the boom years but since the crash, with the property bubble deflating and credit harder to come by, it's been a much tougher gig and as a result, a lot of those East European economic migrants have decided they're better off at home. Last month, WizzAir cut 16 of their weekly flights back to Poland because of falling demand. So once again, the Tories made a promise to cut net migration knowing full well it was falling anyway. I suspect that one could come back to bite them in the next two years though, as the economy picks up and potentially we see an influx from Bulgaria and Romania. How are they going to blame Labour for that?

 

Speaking of blaming Labour, the oft-repeated mantra that Labour's spending and borrowing was the root of all evil also doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. In 1997, Labour inherited large defecit and high public debt, both of which decreased steadily until the crash started in late 2007, by which point national debt was lower than when they took office. Labour increased public sector spending substantially, but against the backdrop of a steadily growing economy and a neglected public sector which was suffering from the 14th smallest public sector spend of the 15 EU nations at the time. There's a lot of public sector demonisation about at the moment, but the truth is that in places like Sheffield, where a large industrial sector has all but disappeared, are more reliant on the public sector than most for employment. The Tories will always cut public sector spending. A cut in public sector spending is bad for Sheffield, even if you don't work in it yourself the local economy will still suffer. Voting Tory in Sheffield is like a turkey voting for Christmas.

 

As for the bleating about boundary changes, while it is true that they are slightly against the Tories at the moment, 2014 could see the mother of all boundary changes if Scotland becomes independent and their MPs all bog off back to Holyrood. That'll swing the pendulum further in the Tories' favour than the boundary commission ever will. Not that the Tories aren't already moving the goalposts in their favour with this £26k benefit cap. What do you suppose happens when people are forced to move to poorer areas? The area they leave behind becomes more blue, but the area they're moving to is probably already red!

[Mecky]

Sheffielders deserve what they get. They keep voting Labour, and then moaning about there not being enough jobs and services in the city not being good enough. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

 

Well the wishy washy libs were in charge a few years back, things had never been so worse with them in council

[RutlandFlyer]

Well the wishy washy libs were in charge a few years back, things had never been so worse with them in council

 

Too right, they were bloody awful. Looked after their own wards and to hell with the others. When I saw the new roadmending projects were starting in Dore, Totley, Crookes and Crosspool first it made me wonder if the Lib Dems had snuck back in.

[Happ Hazzard]

As for the bleating about boundary changes, while it is true that they are slightly against the Tories at the moment, 2014 could see the mother of all boundary changes if Scotland becomes independent and their MPs all bog off back to Holyrood. That'll swing the pendulum further in the Tories' favour than the boundary commission ever will. Not that the Tories aren't already moving the goalposts in their favour with this £26k benefit cap. What do you suppose happens when people are forced to move to poorer areas? The area they leave behind becomes more blue, but the area they're moving to is probably already red!

There's nothing unfair about the UK minus Scotland having a Tory government when that is what the majority of people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland want. It's nothing at all like boundary changes.