General Election 2017 | Cabinet reshuffle: Hunt re-appointed Health Secretary for record third time

How do you intend to vote in the 2017 General Election if eligible?

  • Conservatives

    Votes: 80 14.5%

  • Labour

    Votes: 322 58.4%

  • Lib Dems

    Votes: 57 10.3%

  • Green

    Votes: 20 3.6%

  • SNP

    Votes: 13 2.4%

  • UKIP

    Votes: 29 5.3%

  • Independent

    Votes: 3 0.5%

  • Plaid Cymru

    Votes: 2 0.4%

  • Sinn Fein

    Votes: 11 2.0%

  • Other (UUP, DUP, BNP, and anyone else I have forgotten)

    Votes: 14 2.5%
  • Total voters
    551
  • Poll closed .
The importance of valence issues in 4 images...

 
berbatrick said:
That game played out in a single page of the Corbyn thread too.
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In fairness there's been minimal time for the public to find out about them, could change over the next month. But also large support for the Tory pledge to reduce immigration to 10s of thousands.
 
I don't think most people have strong opinions on anything but taxes, benefits and immigration.

Tories could be proposing scrapping all workers rights, legalising bullfighting and privatising the fire service and they'd still win if people viewed them more positively on the aforementioned three areas than the other parties.
 
Ubik said:
This is also true

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I get the sentiment for the first one (though too far imo) but a big problem for with the first one is that because of how low wages are in some jobs and the rules in place, financially it makes no sense for some people to accept employment as they will be worse off. If you have bills to pay, children to look after, then not sure how people can complain.
 
saivet said:
I get the sentiment for the first one (though too far imo) but a big problem for with the first one is that because of how low wages are in some jobs and the rules in place, financially it makes no sense for some people to accept employment as they will be worse off. If you have bills to pay, children to look after, then not sure how people can complain.
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When you ask those same survey respondents about that, they'll immediately say 'well not those people of course'. Polling on policy is largely bullshit.
 
Kentonio said:
When you ask those same survey respondents about that, they'll immediately say 'well not those people of course'. Polling on policy is largely bullshit.
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Thing is I suspect there's quite a lot. Doubt many people are turning down good paying jobs. I have a family memeber who has a disability (not severe, lives on his own etc,) and is now working part time after taking him a while to get employment. He'd like to be working full time, but the way it's set up, he ends up being worse off. He does overtime and that again makes him worse off. I'm not sure people are even aware that some people are in these situations.

When I found out about him, I was pretty shocked and it certainly doesn't help with his wellbeing. It's a whole other topic as we were on about polling, but one of those things people don't realise or seem to care about when it's not close to home.
 
saivet said:
Thing is I suspect there's quite a lot. Doubt many people are turning down good paying jobs. I have a family memeber who has a disability (not severe, lives on his own etc,) and is now working part time after taking him a while to get employment. He'd like to be working full time, but the way it's set up, he ends up being worse off. He does overtime and that again makes him worse off. I'm not sure people are even aware that some people are in these situations.

When I found out about him, I was pretty shocked and it certainly doesn't help with his wellbeing. It's a whole other topic as we were on about polling, but one of those things people don't realise or seem to care about when it's not close to home.
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Exactly. Every single policy issue you poll people about will have those same gaping holes in, where people think they believe one thing, but when faced with an unexpected counter-example they realize they don't actually believe it in all cases. It's one of the main reasons why direct democracy is such an abysmally bad idea, people generally have at best a surface level understanding of issues. They don't have experience working in most fields, so they can't anticipate the countless edge cases and exemptions and repurcussions.

For all that people bitch about representative democracy, its actually a good system when it works well and the public actually pay attention.
 
saivet said:
I get the sentiment for the first one (though too far imo) but a big problem for with the first one is that because of how low wages are in some jobs and the rules in place, financially it makes no sense for some people to accept employment as they will be worse off. If you have bills to pay, children to look after, then not sure how people can complain.
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Which is exactly what the conservatives have fought tooth and nail to stop.

By cutting benefits like Homer Simpson managing a little league team
 
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rcoobc said:
And I hate to say it, but it's still Labour's fault. In the Blair days, they would work the media, an work with the media.
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Corbyn seems like he's never really gotten to grips with leading a national party after all those years of being the outsider. When it comes to the press, he seems woefully naive. Like you say, you can't just whine about how unfair the press are, you need a coherent media strategy that forces them to change their coverage.
 
Help my country is swinging towards voting Tory, what do I do? It's hugely depressing.
 
Nick Robinson has had an absolute mare this morning. If this campaign was a few weeks longer he'd be screaming that he's as mad as hell and not going to take this anymore long before the first vote is cast.
 
altodevil86 said:
Help my country is swinging towards voting Tory, what do I do? It's hugely depressing.
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Find your nearest marginal. Campaign.

Also, masses of people don't have a clue about politics. You could print out a list of policies from the manifesto and keep them in a pocket. When the time is right, ask people down the pub, or friends of friends wherever you happen to meet them in a social situation, if there's anything there they would really, really want to see implemented by government. You might just want to leave it at that. Don't even tell them they're Labour policies. Sow the seed of political thought in their minds and allow it to grow on its own. Let them discuss it with other people in their circle who might also not be politically engaged. Maybe talk politics with them again prior to the deadline for registering to vote on 22nd May and again before June 8th.
 
rcoobc said:
Labour's problem is at least 50% a media one at this point.

They just can't make positive headlines. Obvious but important.
And I hate to say it, but it's still Labour's fault. In the Blair days, they would work the media, and work with the media.
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You have to remember, by the time he ran for PM, blair was godfather to murdoch's kid. He was exactly where may is now, in the pocket of the media itself, which is why they supported him.

The labour manifesto that leaked said they would implement the leveson recommendations in their entirety. That is why they are going for corbyn even harder since. They know he means it.
 
Unmutual said:
Utter rubbish. Labour very consciously went to war with an MSM that had destroyed Foot and Kinnock, and for the better part of a decade, won that war. Try reading Alastair Campbell's diaries for a blow by blow account of what was involved.

Also, he became a godfather 3 years after he left politics, and no-one can say that the press took it easy on him in his final years.
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My apologies, I got the godfather part wrong

But as you can see, he was already courting murdoch from 1994 onwards.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/murdochs-courtship-of-blair-finally-pays-off-1144087.html
 
So far i've not seen anything on areas I think we'd do well to develop;

1. Green energy - it's the future, what are we doing at government level to make it easier for homeowners to use green energy and for the market to provide green energy cheaper than it's carbon based alternatives?

2. This might be the secret communist in me, but I do think we should work with the private sector to fund cheap pharmacuticals. The big companies like Astrozenica etc have no interest in making drugs cheap, they just want to make them available at the price governments will pay. The state should create it's own drug company, collaberate with smaller private companies on research and challenge big pharma in the open market. Long term we could reduce the NHS bill on pharmacuticals by half at least.

3. This leads neatly on to outsourcing, particularly in the NHS. It costs far too much money to hire temp staff from nurses to cleaners, to cooks and even the laundry. State owned companies need to be created to deal with this. I think about schools and the cost of stationary etc, i wonder if they could get it cheaper if local councils did all the buying in bulk and then distributed on to schools, rather than schools doing individual purchasing?

4. Defence. Lots of talk of Trident, but in reality it's not going to keep us safe, it'll be the last resort - if someone has the bottle to use it, and even then the response from the enemy will mean mutually assured destruction. Britain is a small country, it needs to focus on defensive arms, making it harder to hit Britain. Laser missile defence (more accurate than using a missile to shoot a missile), UCAV's (unmanned planes can pull more G's, carry more weapons and have more stealthy design), long range air defence system, investing more in eurofighters rather than trident. All this R&D will need investment and if we make the products before our allies, it'll generate customers too.

Sometimes I'd like to see politicians talk a bit more pragmatically about stuff like this!
 
Unmutual said:
This is a curious point that the Resolution Foundation picked up on. Labour's draft manifesto had no firm commitment to reverse or unfreeze the benefits cuts implemented by Osborne, just a commitment to review them.

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Was just about to post this. Bizarre when they splurging money everywhere else.
 
Nogbadthebad said:
My apologies, I got the godfather part wrong

But as you can see, he was already courting murdoch from 1994 onwards.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/murdochs-courtship-of-blair-finally-pays-off-1144087.html
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It's more than just being murdoch's lap dog though.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6638231.stm

Blair, Brown, Mandelson and Campbell had watched Neil Kinnock being torn to shreds by hostile journalism, abetted by a pretty ruthless Number 10 operation in the Thatcher era, and had resolved "this will never happen to us again".

And that was understandable. Journalists should not complain too much: most of those at the other end of the telephone were well-paid people who could stand up to spin doctors if they chose to.

New Labour was the most media-obsessed government Britain had had in modern times.

With Alastair Campbell, a former tabloid newspaper journalist, and Peter Mandelson, a former television current affairs producer, working so closely with Blair, this was hardly surprising.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6638231.stm

But fundamentally, Blair would do most anything to get public support and to elected. He was a populist, and his government embraced populism (long before Trump). No where was this better seen than with ASBOs, if every something was designed to appeal to the tory voters it was that one. If the Tories had introduced that, there would be riots in the streets. Of course a decade after their introduction, the media began to move on from "ASBOs" being needed to "benefit fraud"

Tony Blair in 2006 said:
Nine years on as P.M and many pieces of legislation later, I find myself in a curious and not entirely comfortable position: attacked both for failing to be tough enough; and for being authoritarian; and sometimes by the same people on both grounds simultaneously.

The situation is complicated still further by the fact that, in Government, it is true that crime has fallen. Indeed we are the first post-war British Government that has seen crime fall during its term of office. In addition, the asylum system that was in virtual chaos when we arrived in 1997, is on any objective basis, substantially better run now than then.

But unsurprisingly, given the publicity, no-one would believe it. The truth is there have been improvements, there has been progress, but the gap between what the public expects and what the public sees is still there.

And the political and legal establishment is still in denial. I know what large numbers of such people believe.

They believe we are on a populist bandwagon, the media whips everyone up into a frenzy, and if only everyone calmed down and behaved properly the issue would go away. It may well be true that politicians can be overly populist; it may be true that, as I know more than most, the media can distort; but actually neither reason is the reason why the public are anxious.
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And that flip flopping, u-turning Tony Blair was completely true
More worrying was the tendency to tell different newspapers and proprietors what they wanted to hear.

With Rupert Murdoch, Blair seemed robustly anti-euro. With pro-EU papers, he seemed strongly europhile.
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Don't really know what I'm trying to say, except that Blair was a media obsessed populist.... not in the same vein as Donald Trump (Trump is a media personality playing politician, Blair a politician playing media personality)...

But yeah, Corbyn is a million miles away, and will soon learn the lessons of Neil Kinnock
 
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