Off Topic Political Debate

I think a lot of people from places like Liverpool and Manchester would want to join the Northumbrians in that case.

 

You're correct - The Wicked Witch is Dead was of course used as a loving endorsement of a right wing politician by the charmers on the left.

 

I repeat - your tory masters have really done a job on you, haven't they? Scotland's success would not be reliant on oil revenue as they have led you to believe. However I'm sure you're aware that the oil price fluctuates constantly & what goes down generally goes up again. It will be nice to think that the revenue from that could be spent on repairing the industrial ravages inflicted upon the country by your tory mistress, rather than being spent on London sewers and pointless high speed trains etc.

 

Don't write the tories off just yet. Their best long term chances would be boosted if the outcome of the election is Labour as a minority government propped up by the SNP who are hell bent on devolution. The price of their support would galvanise the English into a reaction against the socialists and the scots. Of course this is the full intention of the SNP to gain a majority in the next vote which will probably be within the next five years.

I'm afraid some of the policies of the left deserve to be called loony, they normally involve spending large sums of money that the country does not have. We also have history where some left wing politicians and union leaders have been financed and presumable advised from the soviet Union in an attempt to make the UK less stable. I am not aware of such practice on the right.

The lack of knowledge which the average voter has is staggering. They normally rely on headlines in the newspapers. One consequence is the popular misguided view that there an alternative to austerity, which in the UK has not been severe enough to make much difference to the country's debt. Ireland had a greater level of austerity and their economy seems to be improving.
Failure to address the country's debt is like telling an alcoholic to carry on drinking but give up some time in the future.

 

Maybe Scotland should worry more about the headlines that have appeared in The Scottish press this month.
Scottish whisky exports fall 11% to £1.77bn
SNP accused of gagging own MPs ‘like Stalin’

I know that whisky exports have grown over recent years, but 11% drop is rather dramatic. Shows up the fact that no country can go against the tide of others cutting back on imports.
The gagging story is interesting in view of the new party members believing that they were supporting a new political system if you think back to the independence debate we had on here.

 

The alternative to austerity is the belief that growth has to have a basis ie. nothing comes from nothing. When there is no infrastructure then you can have no growth - this is the basis of Keynesian economics and is, and has been, believed in by many people more able than yourself. Had there been such an ideology of austerity after World War 2 then Germany would never have recovered to become an industrial power. You are also so wrong about some of the 'financing`on the right, which has seen almost any dictator, anywhere,anyone who was considered as a bullwark against socialism eg. Saddam, Pinochet etc. supported by the USA and their puppets - even to the point of giving them chemical weapons.

 

Well I may have exaggerated somewhat about all Tories being liars but in my experience there is a significant history of untruths coming from them -I could write a book about it. I start from being brought up in Bushey where Cecil Parkinson was the MP. He of course had the affair with his secretary yet continued to preach morals to everyone else. The local Tories (of which mum was one) declared it was all her fault as she must have seduced him. My experience of Parkinson (I met him through work on a number of occasions) was he was an utter womaniser. Then of course there was Thatcher and lies about the miners, the sell off of council houses (never caused a housing crisis - did it), the privatisation of railways (now poorly run and expensive - something denied by her at the time) - I could go on. Getting up to date Cameron's sell off of the post office springs to mind as another lie to line the pockets of the rich. But also the so called jobless figure which fail to include those not working on zero hours, excluded from benefits and those who are disabled. I could also mention the bankers causing the financial crisis and Cleggs college fees but I,m running out of room. Tory Blair also lied about Iraqi arms of course and most businesses people I've ever dealt with are fixated on avoiding taxes but happily use the nhs. So you see it is my experience that many many Tories are liars - much more so than others.

 

Politicians of all parties have affairs and tell lies just like normal folk.

Thatcher set ordinary people free from state control and enabled them to enjoy the independence conferred by ownership. It was the fault of successive governments not to re-invest the proceeds into housing which gave it a slight negative. There are many families very grateful for the opportunity to secure their financial future including my socialist minded in-laws.

The miners were led badly by Scargill. His priority was to overthrow the legitimate government of the day rather than the furtherance of the interest of his comrades. He did enormous damage to his industry and the country. The kremlin were financing the strikers prolonging their hardship.

The post office was a financial basket case and needed urgent reform. Blair's government tried to privatise it but lacked the guts to complete its sale.

I'm sure many tories are liars but i'm afraid so are the others.

COYH

 

Scaremongering ofh?

The 11% fall was for the first six months of 2014 only - exports recovered in the second six months of the year, although still showed a 7% fall over the full year. The export value you quote - £1.77bn - would have resulted in a far higher percentage drop had it been for the full year, for which the real total was £3.95bn. Had your figures been accurate, the percentage drop would have been somewhere around 60%...

Hardly surprisingly, the 11% drop coincided with Westminster hawking off fracking licences in Scotland - against the wishes of 99% of the population - causing world-wide uncertainty in the product due to the effect of fracking on the water quality. The SNP halted fracking in January and I'd fully expect that, come September, exports figures for the first half of 2015 will show a reversal of that fall.
In Nicola we trust...

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You see that's exactly what I mean. It was Thatcher who sold off the council houses for rock bottom prices so there could be no 're-investment as she was warned at the time and refused to listen. Blair (who in my mind isa Tory) May have wanted to sell the post office but he didn't't and certainly not for such a low price that it instantly gave excessive profits for caamerons business mates. The miners were attacked by Thatcher in their own homes and just how many Tories have preached morality whilst behaving immoral -Parkinson, curry, Mellor, archer, major - the list goes on...

 

At least in a post independent Scotland we will be able to limit the number of scots entering England as they will have their own mickey mouse currency and without the protection of being part of the EU.

Should be fun.

 

It was the LABOUR PARTY that thought up the idea of selling council houses, being in their manifesto in 1959. It was common practice to sell council houses in the 1970's, 45,000 alone in 1972, way before Thatcher came to power. She did however widen the choice nationally giving working class a massive boost. This practice has been supported totally by Labour governments since.

 

If the Tories get in we probably won't be in the EU for much longer.

 

You're making a rather large assumption there - that Scots would actually want to cross the border and have to deal with that sort of idiotic attitude.

 

Most people in the EU would rather have Scotland in than England. As far as I know a referendum can only take place in the event of a Conservative majority government, which is unlikely. It's also difficult to imagine both the Tories and Ukip having a good election, because, fortunately, one can only be at the expense of the other. What nobody seems to be considering, Farage, least of all is that there are over a million Britons living, and working, in other EU countries - what would their status be in the event of Britain leaving ?

 

Do you really think a Tory majority is that unlikely Cologne? Given the showing of SNP and Plaid Cymru, Labour could be in trouble in Scotland and Wales. On UKIP I would like to think they sink without trace. Rather changes the landscape.

 

I love this debate - so full of accurate statements and statistics so well researched and with no generalisations. Best yet is "in my mind Blair was a Tory". Funnily in my mind Miliband is a Martian.

 

Sorry, but in my opinion, based on having lived abroad for 25 years, I would say that most of the people I have spoken to on this subject prefer the Scottish to the English. Mainly because the Scots feel themselves to be more European than the English do - and so, many Europeans reciprocate this feeling. Is that better ?

 

Yes, I do think it is unlikely because they would have to better their result from the last election to do it. They failed to get a majority last time against the second lowest Labour result since the War - there is no chance of them improving on that with Ukip having come into the reckoning. The problem has become that the Liberals will probably no longer be the third strongest party in Westminster (up to now they have been stronger than all other small parties combined) so, we are entering an area of uncertainty because they may no longer be able to prop up any coalition.

 

The other parties are also guilty of slightly "interesting" behaviour

Ron Davies – gay pick-ups when denying he was doing it
Nick Brown – paying gay prostitutes
Allan Roberts – visits to German gay clups in Nazi outfits
Harold Wilson – with Marcia Falkender
Nigel Griffiths – using parliament buildings for sex trysts
John Prescott’s affairs

The Liberals / SocDems / LibDems are no better
Jeremy Thorpe, anyone.

What is telling though is the Tories tend to get embroiled in sex scandals and most of the Labour party scandals are money related, to through a shockingly bad generalisation in here, it must be childhood influences of schooling or living in rough/poor areas to blame - not that power corrupts and it is easier to pin certain types of scandal on certain types of politician.