Labour, Conservative... Can someone summarise them I am confused!

BLAME GAME IS pointless. No main party wants serious change. A party could be formed called REAL CHANGE ESSENTIAL> (Parliament first)

Both main parties are vying for the middle ground voters. They will need to kick out the personal greed monkeys in parliament to make any sense to me. (And they are NOT going to do that) What price progress?

Ismebut

On a more serious note, your blaming of Labour for the decline of British industry is partial.

It is true that manufacturing has declined as a percentage of the UK economy, but that is so in Germany and other countries too. Over time, manufacturing has become more efficient, and requires less labour. I read somewhere recently that Sheffield produces as much steel as it ever did (by value). Low-skilled mass employment in heavy industry hasn't just vanished from the UK but most other comparable countries too.

IMO, this is a better precis of UK manufacturing decline.

1950s: UK is one of the biggest manufacturing nations, exporting mostly to the Commonwealth. Continental Europe is rebuilding with the help of Marshall Aid money. By contrast, the UK is having to pay back war debt to the US, who want to cripple British power.

1960s: UK economy booms, along with the rest of the developed world, but gets overtaken by the big continental countries. UK manufacturing is hampered by a mixture of increasingly militant trade unions and complacent management, and the reputation of its products fall behind those of Germany and Japan for example. Breakup of the Empire means loss of traditional export markets.

1970s: This is where it gets interesting. In the early 70s, the economy tails off. Ted Heath's Tory government introduce financial stimulus to jump start the economy Am bolding this next sentence because a) the Tories did it and b) look what happened next. To avoid inflation, the Tory government instituted price controls. The scheme blew up in their faces, and caused 30% inflation. In 1974, Harold Wilson (who probably wasn't well) become PM. His government nationalised various industries to save them. Workers in those industries went on strike for higher pay as inflation was making them poorer. Their higher pay resulted in even more inflation. The result was that (for example) British Leyland workers earned 3 times Ford workers, and the former only remained solvent due to government injection of capital. Same was so for various other industries which by 1979 were on goverment life support.

1980s: Thatcher turns off the life support. Various industries go to the wall. I wish to note as a Londoner, that 50% of all London manufacturing jobs were lost by 1983. London used to be more than Whitehall and a big casino.

1990s: Manufacturing continues to contract, but more or less in line with other countries.

2000s: ditto.

If you've reached the end of this, the point to note is that it wasn't the Tories or Labour who destroyed British industry. It was mostly just the natural progression of things, assisted by the fact that in the past Britain tended to export to its Empire, mostly because British people ran it, and assisted also that British industry had its own internal problems: management, and Marxists.

The second point to note is that if government was to blame for this decline, both the Tories and Labour are to blame. The Ted Heath's Tories caused hyper-inflation and Harold Wilson's Labour perpetuated it. The one person I don't blame is Thatcher. All she did was switch off the life support.

But in any event, British industry itself was also to blame for its non-competitiveness. You can't legislate to remove bad managers or slow workers.

Here's my take.

Conservatives Pro big-business, low taxes (particularly for big business and the wealthy), Atlanticist foreign policy, Eurosceptic (except where commerce is concerned), low social spending.
Run by ex-public school posh boys with a few useful idiots from the lower orders and from the North.

Labour Pro big-business, low taxes (particularly for big business and the wealthy), predominantly Atlanticist foreign policy, moderate on Europe, high social spending funded by economic growth.
Run by luvvies from North London plus assorted cultural Marxists who want to remould society according to various uncomfortably-coalescing ideologies, and who want the State to interfere in everything except big business

Liberal Democrat Neutral on business, pro-environment, political and constitutional reform (ie, federal UK, electoral reform, reform of HoL), pro-local government, pro-Europe, moderate social spending, reformist
Mostly teachers, academics and people with beards who only drink real ale, and who like the idea of promoting things in the knowledge that they won't be put to the test.

UKIP Pro small-business, low taxes, isolationist foreign policy, hard Eurosceptic, traditional moral values, traditional education, anti-environmental, low social spending, small state, plus a dash of working class Toryism.
Blokes in a 1950s timewarp plus a few rats leaving the sinking Tory ship

Greens Strongly pro-environmentalist, anti-business (to the extent that it harms the environment) State-led root and branch reform of society in general, pro-Europe, pro-just about any international group the UK is a part of except NATO, pacifist foreign policy, high taxes, high spending.
Green socialism that only makes sense in a cloud of marijuana smoke

Probably not relevant to you but..

SNP Independence for Scotland, pro-Europe, low taxes, high spending, big state + state-led reform, identify as left-wing progressives.
Dog-whistle nationalists who combine the moral certainty and rhetoric of a nineteenth century Church of Scotland revivalist with sundry egregious lies about how the horrible, tyrannous English oppress the worldwide beacon of light that is the Scottish nation

I have just explained Labour, Tories and UKIP to 6-year-old, but could not for the life of me say what the LibDems currently stand for. (We'll discuss Greens tomorrow as well, so there is no rush.) Please, help.

Before I get flamed, DS read in his comic book (this is no joke) how cool Ben Franklin is and wanted to know about "politicianers".

What jinsei said.

Left wing politics is about society, supporting each other. So we all contribute for communal benefit. The further left you go, the more redistribution occurs until you get to the 'all are equal' apart from the pigs bit.

Right wing is all about the individual. Striving to be the best and benefiting from your hard work. Those who don't work hard, don't get.

So parties publicly say they occupy the middle ground, thus giving the best of both worlds.

What is with all the capitals and underlining?

Whether rich or poor we all rely on transport, roads, education, housing, NHS, the welfare state etc, none of us live in a bubble. The party that historically maintains and improves these things is the labour party and the party that dismantles and undermines these things is the tory party.

Conservatives are for the rich and Labour is for the poor and consistently both parties have created more of their target demographic each time they have been in power.

Shockinglybadteacher ….. may I remind you that this thread is mainly ‘big picture’ about the Conservative & Labour Party’s (positives and negatives), as whether we like it or not one of them will form the next government in 2015 – you appear to be taking my generalised ‘big picture’ posts personally, and have even started putting words in my mouth re ‘not caring’ etc.

So frankly you don’t seem to be taking in the points I’m making, about how much money was available for social projects in the 2000’s, but were wasted.

Re Trade Union’s in general (and your point ‘they are really pussycats’) Google The Winter of Discontent taking on Labour in 1978/9 there, re current funding the Labour Party, I’m not sure how up to date this is, but look at the figures within the link, whether your union is involved or not.

"The £120m (from 2001) paid into party coffers revealed as union barons face losing Labour leader block vote"
• More than £24million donated since Miliband took the top job

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2380561/The-120m-paid-party-coffers-revealed-union-barons-face-losing-Labour-leader-block-vote.html

As a socialist/trade unionist/low paid worker, why isn’t your gasted all of a flabber over HOW MUCH was spent (£170 billion on my quango link) on new government Quango’s full of bureaucrats and administrators on up to 6-figure salaries we didn’t seem to need prior to when Labour came to power – rather than pay more to nurses and other public sector workers?

As a basic Conservative objective, they/I believe that the State should be as big/expensive as it NEEDS to be, and it needs the job roles of those you talk about but NOT those new bureaucratic layers Labour brought in at VAST expense to the taxpayer.

Getting rid of the ‘fat’ in government should/has made it easier to ‘redistribute’ public sector waste; lower taxes for those taxpayers that need it (the new £10,500 start rate of tax, when Labour took away the 10% tax rate during the crash), better State pensions etc - and hopefully, better pay for those in the Public Sector forgotten by Labour when they handed out taxpayers money to their new army of pen pushers.

But they have to realise, figures do show that generally they did better than the Private Sector (the rest of us) taxpayer before the crash, and after.

It ain’t the coalitions fault Labour chose to repay many of their apparatchiks in 'red tape' sinecures than give those lower paid workers a bigger piece of the budget pie before, as they wrote in 2010 “the money has all gone”, that when handing over a £157 billion annual deficit/OVERSPEND, was an understatement.

I think the old Labour are for the working and Tories are for the rich is no longer valid.

Nowadays there's not a lot between Labour & Tories. They're both right of the middle with Labour being ever so slightly to the left of the Tories.

Both will cosy up to big businesses and the rich. Both say they will slash the welfare bill and not endlessly borrow money. The only difference is that the Tories seem to be saying it with a bit more clarity than Labour who are making vague noises and no-one seems to trust Milliband.

In short there's no longer any fundamental differences between Labour & the Tories. Vote for either of them and you will just get more of the same. I guess that's one big reason why UKIP have become so popular.

Isitme, for the avoidance of confusion my public sector union has never sponsored Labour. I'm also not particularly interested in defending the Labour party.

This is more detail than anyone needs to know but I have never been a member of the Labour party. I was once a member of a small and imperfectly formed socialist party. Things went a bit wrong.

You seem to be assuming that everyone on the Left and the entire public sector has some kind of allegiance to the Labour party. Um no. That's a bit weird.

Secondly, there is no way round, in a developed capitalist economy, private sector companies providing goods and services to the public sector. Unless you want to do a Somalia, abolish the public sector altogether and have people barter for basic necessities, weapons and food in the main street, that's yer luck. If you think the companies are not providing value for money, of course, you can take it up with them.

As for whether we "provide value" I dunno, you tell me. What I do in my day job involves a lot of consoling upset people. I also try to improve industrial relations. My mate in HMRC does shifts for seven hours patiently helping taxpayers with tax and finances. My comrade in the DWP spends hours trying to help sometimes drunk and violent customers. Another mate spends time sorting out issues that people with mental health problems have. None of us earn above 20K.

We are obviously giving no value for money at all. If only we would just stop! We're such a drain on society! The private sector is itching to step in and we're standing in their way! Except...maybe not.

Thing is, the private sector does not want to do this stuff at all. The pay is shit and there's no profit generated. You have to talk to a lot of upset and angry people for fuck all pay and none of them want to buy goods off you. If you think the private sector want to do that, I have a bridge to sell you.

Shockinglybadteacher …. I understand what you are trying to say re various Private Sector companies that may only be viable due to State (Public Sector) spending, but while I have no idea of the percentage of ‘growth’ (GDP) they generate, I doubt the percentage of £283 bil we were spending as a nation in 1997, or £570 bil in 2010, significantly came from those you list.

But let me clear something up to both you and Claig, of course the likes of government spending creates economic growth e.g. via consumption, the key is whether the growth is SUSTAINABLE or UNSUSTAINABLE.

The litmus tests FOR TAXPAYERS are firstly whether that spending is NECESSARY and secondly, can it be supported by the wider economy, known as the Private Sector, through any economic conditions bar an economic depression - which is kinda important if you have grown the State payroll by a million, and individual departmental spending i.e. the NHS and education, double to treble what it was in 1997. This was key when deciding was it worth putting future generations in national debt (affecting their rate of taxes and quality of public services), and Labour in 2010 chose not to address the problem.

Shockinglybadteacher …. In the main, when people are talking about the sheer growth and expense of the Public Sector under Labour, they do not need to be reminded by the trade unions etc that there are many low paid workers. The problem was that the SIZE AND COST of the State grew so much, but much of it was not getting to, or giving value to, THOSE PAYING THE BILLS.

Layers of new bureaucrats, many on salaries twice yours and up, were formed’ and called economic ‘growf’.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1214001/The-cost-quango-Britain-hits-170bn--seven-fold-rise-Labour-came-power.html

Council Tax in relatively low inflation, went up over 110% under 13-years of Labour, why, if not to support the Public Sector growth of ‘non jobs’, some highly paid; if you or anyone dismiss the Daily Mail’s costs/figures and/or non jobs mentioned, please challenge them with qualified data of your own.
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1358144/Labours-3m-town-hall-jobs-bonanza-employed-deliver-frontline-services.html

In 2010, when like it or not figures I’ve seen show that the majority of the Public Sector employees had done better under Labour than the rest of us in the Private Sector, but where were Labour plans to CULL the £££hundreds of billion waste on Quangos, bureaucrats and non jobs, if nothing else, TO REFLECT ON THE ABILITY OF THE PRIVATE SECTOR to maintain this typical socialist ‘big state’ job fest?

Maybe if they’d addressed the growth in Public Sector ‘fat cats’, there might have been a bit of ‘wealth distribution’ to those lower paid Public Sector employees we need, rather than employed as a ‘taxpayer money is no object’, luxury.

So tell me, can you justify the years of Public Sector waste, when a government could spend a total of £570 billion a year, but not build NET new social housing to start compensate for the 2.5 million growth in our population, stuff the State pensioners with derisory annual increases, stuff the private pension provision mainly due to Brown’s tax raid in 1997/8, and ALLOW the unemployment in our 16-24 year olds that hit 580,000 in 2004, 711,000 before the financial crash and hand over to the coalition 921,000 unemployed youngsters by 2010????

Labour were borrowing to fund their fat State from 2001/2, over £30 billion a year before the crash, but after the tax receipts of businesses and those generated by public speculation and debt dissolved, it LEFT the bills but not the SUSTAINABLE tax/growth to cover them = the £157 bil annual budget deficit Labour cowardly passed to the coalition in 2010.

It seems to me socialism has changed, it appears the relative ‘few’ in the Public Sector means more to Labour than the ‘masses’; nothing of course due to the fact they now rely on the Public Sector unions to ‘sponsor’ the majority of the Shadow Cabinets offices ,and fund around 90% of their General Election campaigns.

You are right, shockingly.

"please do not listen to Ballsian and Public Sector trade union economic theory that believes when our taxes pay 100% of a State workers salary, we get economic ‘growf’ from the taxes they pay, it is the road to annual deficits/public debt/ruin."

Of course we get 'growf' indirectly because teh public sector is teh oil that keeps teh nation's wheels turning. Without teachers teaching kids then we would have no future growth as our intellectual creativity and capacity would decline. Without hospitals healing our sick, those ill people could not contribute to society's growth. Without the prison service and police service, criminals would destroy and steal the wealth of law-abiding, hardworking decent people and destroy security which is essential for investment to produce growth.

They have sold off some of our great public services like our railways and Royal mail etc and prices will be jacked up and the service will decrease and the great oil that we have built up over decades to aid a smooth running society will be burnt off for profit.

However, the luvvies and useless metropolitan elite of PPEs waste lots of our public money - sponsored discussions, patronising elf and safety advertising campaign, unnecessary wars etc are just some ways in which they waste our money.

'The state doesn't provide food, clothing, vehicle repair'
It probably does for the PPEs.

It is about priorities and not wasting our valuable money and resources by constant failing restructurings and reorganisations and tick box tomfoolery, but the clowns and PPEs who are in charge and don't represent the people don't have priorities that help the people, just the lobbyists, hedge funds and their metropolitan mates.

And because this has been annoying me all morning:

Public sector workers are not immune to recession. They get paid and pay taxes like anyone else. There have been a huge swathe of compulsory redundancies across the sector, with more planned (Francis Maude has been boasting about it). They don't live featherbedded lives of ease.

I'm also fairly well off for a public sector worker on my wage which is 18K. Some people in the DWP get 14.5K. They are on the same benefits they are administering. People in HMRC, working in call centres, earn well below 20K. I started off in the public sector on the minimum wage working for HMRC, which at the time was 11K. My gold plated fantastic pension is in the low hundreds, that's per year. I dunno how I deal with all this sumptuous luxury, it's a tough one.

The pension and wages figures are distorted by the SCS, which is the Senior Civil Service, and by senior council executives. They earn a lot and their pensions are likewise final salary (this is now discontinued for some but some staff with special arrangements have seen this continue). To think that the vast majority of the public sector get anywhere near that is madness.

Also, public sector workers buy things and contribute to the economy. They buy food to eat. They go and get their cars serviced. They buy a nice shirt now and again if they can afford it. The state doesn't provide food, clothing, vehicle repair...to say that the public and private sectors aren't connected is slightly strange.

points at self I've never been Labour in me puff. I belonged to a particular socialist party which I left because I thought it was going too far to the right. I am and remain a revolutionary socialist.

Moving swiftly on:

Isitme you are slightly incorrect. The private sector is paid again and again by the public sector. It just is -I'm not imagining this, it is actually true. I am going to regret this, but here are a handful of the services we buy from the private sector - conferences, event management in general, mediation, food, IT, pens and pencils, cars...

Oh no, I forgot. They give us all of that for free from the kindness of their hearts.

Claig ... I told you your 'welcome back' wouldn't last long. lol

Farage might well STILL be the country's most popular politician, with bells on, but if he keeps making statements like 'MP's aren't paid enough', it won't last for much longer - it might be correct, but it ain't what the peeps want to hear.

Any more of that before the General Election, and he'll have to 'reshuffle' himself! lol

'And I added balance.'

If I recall correctly, you launched a vicious diatribe against the statesman and most popular British politician known as Nigel Farage.

And I added balance. lol

Shockinglybadteacher …… I do not think that Labour are “wild eyed idealists”, arguably they mean well, but if nothing else the last 13-years of Labour proves they are inept running an economy, as they always overspend and have no idea how to promote the Private Sector that pays for it all – so I repeat they will always run the economy down into debt and emergency measures, that will ALWAYS affect every person, but the poor the most.

As Mr Miliband has just announced ‘no return to tax and spend’, he has done that for a ‘credibility’ reason, but frankly it will take more than that.

Firstly, let me clarify what the Private Sector is, basically it is the part of the economy not controlled by the State, ranging from a City hedge fund, a factory, down to a small business owned by one person e.g. a high street shop, all (usually) paying Corporate Tax, and their employees, income tax and national insurance.

The Public Sector is 100% paid for by the Private Sector; please do not listen to Ballsian and Public Sector trade union economic theory that believes when our taxes pay 100% of a State workers salary, we get economic ‘growf’ from the taxes they pay, it is the road to annual deficits/public debt/ruin.

Your view that Conservatives and Labour are as bad as each other in government spending is incorrect, from 1979 that is, and lets put some figures on this using the figures from a Financial Times dated 28/3/2010;

• In 1997 Government Receipts were £272 billion, government expenditure was £ £283 billion and Public Sector Employment was 5.2 million people.

• In 2010 Government Receipts were £468 billion, Government expenditure was 570 billion and Public Sector Employment had reached 6.1 million people.

Can you see that DESPITE the recession the Private Sector was experiencing from late 2007, with employment and company/personal taxes falling dramatically, when Labour in 2010 had no plans to boost the Private Sector companies, and was at least keeping Public Sector expenditure/employment the same, it is no wonder the size of our annual budget deficit (later acknowledged to be £157 billion) was so large.

Furthermore, waiting for the Public Sector (the State) expenditure and employment to PRODUCE the taxes to both pay our annual education, NHS etc bills, reduce the annual budget overspend AND reduce our accumulating National Debt, it was economic incompetence of a grand scale – so under Labour it is GUARANTEED the UK would not has seen a recovery with 1.8 million new Private Sector jobs since 2010, by Labour instead ploughing ever more taxpayers money into a top heavy State and increasing everyones taxes, as they suggested in their tax/spend more, cut less, 2010 general election manifesto.

One other little fact to show wanting more taxpayer value from the State ‘is business, not personal’;did you know that the Public Sector’s (State employees) pensions are mostly UNFUNDED and not in our National Debt figures and come out of annual spending budgets when due?

If you didn’t, the last ONS Public Sector pension figure I saw was a total £1.2 trillion (£1,200.000.000.000) taxpayer liability, ON TOP of the £1.3 trillion (£1,300,000,000,000) National Debt, ALL to be paid for by taxpayers who have no such pension plans.

“Final salary pensions 10 times more common in public sector”
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/10698432/Final-salary-pensions-10-times-more-common-in-public-sector.html
“Just 8.5pc of workers in private sector have the gold-plated pensions enjoyed by vast majority of public sector employees”

IMO few people would begrudge the Public Sector ‘front line’ their pension, but that is a lot of annual interest rate servicing and total national debt paying off to do, so we can’t risk another economic dip from an economically incompetent Labour, only just realising after 4-years that their lack of a 2010 plan, was not just ‘pants’, but big pants, which would have led to bigger and deeper cuts latter on.

"I feel so sorry for the OP..."

"grimbletart Thu 17-Jul-14 19:48:21

Are you expecting an unbiased response on MN? grin
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Missetch Thu 17-Jul-14 20:10:01

Anything really...
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Missetch Thu 17-Jul-14 20:11:08

Oh I see! but yeah as biased as you like!"

I think the Labour supporters saw that as a green light to be as biased and partisan as they liked and they certainly rose the challenge!

I feel so sorry for the OP...

Digdeepforanswers ….. yet more one liner Labour class cliché propaganda that is ill informed at best, hypocrisy at it’s worse.

Please read this short passage about Labour ties with Hedge Funds and other businesses for donations;and let us not forget that while all parties ‘reward’ their cronies with Lordships, Blair was the first P.M. in many a decade to have a police investigation into their ‘cash for Lord’s’ shenanigan’s.

“Who Runs Britain?” by (the BBC’s) Robert Peston
www.socialismtoday.org/122/peston.html

Wasn’t the company owner that was awarded the NHS I.T. project that went £18 billion(?) over budget for a system (the NHS was hardly consulted on), involved in cash for Lords and also the Private Clinic that was awarded the mental health contract of our returning soldiers with those issues?

Why did Labour/Brown make substantial cuts to the Capital Gains Tax, via a taper relief as low as 10% (and then later an 18% rate by 2010) so attractive for City folk like Private Equity companies who’s bosses “paid less tax than my tea lady” – to ‘help the ‘working classes’? Tell me the last Conservative parliament that lowered the tax paid on capital gains, anywhere near that level.

Why did Labour WAIT until the end of 13-years in power, to go against their 1997 and 2005 manifesto pledges ‘not to raise Income Tax’ to put up the top rate from 40% to 50%, to ‘help the working classes’ for 13-years? The fact it was to raise next to nothing in new taxes, was here nor there, it looked good to ‘the faithful’ for the 2010 General Election to help cover their economic and social incompetence.

P.S. The left wing teaching establishment having had 13-years under a left wing government encouraging educational mediocrity, kicking up a fuss about ‘change’ to give the tax payer value for money and prepare our children for work, really, I wonder why.

Re those ‘farmers doing well’, FYI after 13-years of Labour this country was far less domestic ‘food secure’ than we were in 1997, so something went wrong.

Well the trade unions doesnt do as well for Labour as the billionaires do for the Tories. I think there is a serious debate to be had about party funding. It aiant gonna happen soon. It needs to be up front and above board. My Local radio hunted down the brewers about party funding . Thay met a brick wall. (the brewers get their way with successive governments, )
The farmers do pretty well .The teachers said they were struggling under squre Gove. (84 per cent of them anyway)

)

OP, I think it can be summed up as well with "They all do the same things but Labour pretends to be nicer about it".

Isitme I'd agree with parts of what you are saying. PFI was an incredibly stupid idea, for starters. But the issue about public sector spending isn't that Labour governments are incapable, by their very nature, of negotiating contracts. You seem to think Labour are a party of wild-eyed idealists. That might have been true about three seconds after their founding, but it didn't last. It is not true today.

The issue about public sector funding is that it's a fundamentally sound and positive idea but successive governments, both Labour and Tory, have done dreadful things to it. If you want an example where the Tories have fucked up (you don't, but anyway) Universal Credit. Anyone who's ever spent two minutes on the DWP's incredibly clunky internal systems, or even had sat down and thought about how benefits are provided, could have told you that wasn't going to work. And lo and behold, it didn't. The Tories' famed acumen let them down a bit there, no? And how much was spent on that again?

Other things - The Private Sector (so important that it needs All Capital Headings) doesn't subsidise the public sector. We pay you, mate. We provide your contracts. I can think of a hundred businesses easily where the public sector is a major client, in some cases it is the most important client. Hate us so much you want to jack that all in and be FREEEEE? Didn't think so.

I also love the idea that trade unions all support Labour and provide vast magnificent salaries and pensions for all of their members. I bloody wish (aside from the supporting Labour part). My union is non affiliated and I don't even make 20k (I'm actually a fair way away from that). There are things in life however which are slightly more important than earning loads of money, although I appreciate I am saying this to a Tory, so the idea might be confusing to you.

'Labour, Conservative... Can someone summarise them I am confused!'

OP, you have not been back and the above summaries may have confused you. It can be summarised in 4 words that they all use often.

"All in it together"

Oh and in 2010, Labour refused to 'ring fence' the then NHS spending when cuts were due to the £157 bil budget deficit they handed over - the Conservative did and increased spending.

Just as well as in the past decade, the population has risen close to 5 million and those visiting A&E has DOUBLED in the last several years, so in who's hands is the NHS safe, Labour's? lol