A Labour Governments 1997-2010 record in power – lest we forget.

Tory troll.

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Thank god for places like here where we can all have a good old debate

Yep, I love that we can have a civilized direct debate, without it being filtered by the media.

I read an entertaining account of the election from the New York Times tonight, as it's always interesting to see how outsiders view it.

Apparently it's "the red-cheeked toff who went to Eton and belonged to snooty clubs" verses "the gawky, adenoidal, agnostic son of a Marxist Jewish refugee and historian".

Yes the advent of social media has made it harder to control the vote. The press still has a huge amount of power and I long for a politically unbiased media in this country.

Thank god for places like here where we can all have a good old debate.

The Establishment are made up of the same people from the same universities. That is why they are W1A and can't help how out of touch they are. Only if the W1A mindset can be broken, can things really change for the better.

Yes, I think even the Establishment now realise that they are losing the people. They nearly lost Scotland after 300 years of Union. That is how unrepresentative and useless they are.

So I think that the Establishment will tell their parties to start changing their leaderships and allowing more ordinary people in at the top in order to keep the people onside. So things will improve and things will get better as the Establishment accept that they can't have it all their own way anymore and that they will have to grant the people a voice.

We will soon see how much power the Establishment are prepared to give to the people when the voting shows how unrepresentative the FPTP voting system is. If Ed is told to start talking about PR voting then we will know that the Establishment has decided to grant the people some power.

Do you think a way to reclaim the party for the working people would be for more working people to get involved though?

Become a voice from inside that overpowers?

Do we need a new party to do that? I'm not so sure, even if I do agree with a lot of what you said above.

The Labour Party was once a force for working people. But the Establishment hijacked it and put its Oxbridge public schoolboys in at the top and now even its Northern heartlands are abandoning them.

Fettes public schoolboy and Oxford PPE, Blair, and Oxford PPE Mandelson started the decline. Ed is better than them but that is not saying much.

'It needs ordinary people to engage.'

I think ordinary people have to create new parties because the Establishment parties are filled at the top levels with the same Oxbridge graduates with the same PPE degrees. I think that is why they the Establishment give them a red carpet to the top because they know that they are a safe pair of hands and won't rock the boat. UKIP are different - rocking the boat is what they were formed for.

This is Labour MP Simon Danczuk, who is good

“I do think the party has almost been hijacked by what I’ve described previously as a north London liberal elite. It’s just so disconnected. So it’s not even just about whether we have MPs from a working background, it’s the whole party and travel of direction for the party.'

www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/exclusive-labour-mp-says-public-think-ed-miliband-aloof-and-more-toff-cameron

Oh Claig, I suppose it's where you envision change coming from.

Change could be brought about from inside by more people becoming involved, voicing their opinions, campaigning and ultimately voting.

Change doesn't need a war. It needs ordinary people to engage.

In fact, Peter Hitchens, is in some ways similar to the former BBC Radio Today employee, Rod Liddle, whom UKIP and Tory voters like as he rails against political correctness etc but who ended up in the Spectatr recently saying vote Labour.

Is everybody working for the Establishment in our media? Does nobody out there support the People's Army, the only force for change? Are the people on their own in supporting Farage?

'But here's a link to an online article I wrote about why you should not vote Tory'

Yes, that's his article for not voting Tory in 2010, from five years ago.

'Wonder if he's about to have a Peter Obourne moment?'

No he won't leave the Mail. He has never backedthe Tories ever as far as I know and the Mail must know that. He used to be a Trotskyist when he was young, he is still revolutionary in not towing any party line even now.

His readers on his blog seem to be mainly all voting UKIP rather than Tory and one of them has posted what Hitchens put up on his twitter today where as usual he goes against the Tories and explains why.

It is essentially that the Tories are like Labour but won't admit it i.e. they are all the same.

Which of course is true in that they are all Establishment and the aims of the elite are the same.

Claig - The man himself is on twitter. People asked him this morning why they can't see his column. He said "Because it's not there". He was asked why, and said "No comment. But here's a link to an online article I wrote about why you should not vote Tory" Ahem

Wonder if he's about to have a Peter Obourne moment?

BreakWindandFire, have you got a link to that story, please?

'I must admit I'm stunned that Peter Hitchens would write such a column as I've always found him to the right of Ghenghis Khan'

I'm not surprised, he has never backed the Tories. I like him a lot, but it is difficult to know what his real position is as he always goes against the Tories and yet mostly does not back UKIP either and therefore nearly always ends up by default in some way almost endorsing Labour with whom he disagrees on nearly everything.

Interestingly the Mail on Sunday has spiked Peter Hitchens' column for the first time in 15 years. He's been censored for urging a vote for Miliband over Cameron, against the Mail's editorial line.

(Although I must admit I'm stunned that Peter Hitchens would write such a column as I've always found him to the right of Ghenghis Khan)

Yep, they are good policies - Labour ones. Some other parties policies are close to those.

See Claig, I do agree with you. Ed to me seems less interested in getting to number 10 as a goal in itself and more interested in affecting real change that he genuinely believes in. I also agree that if he allowed himself to be more the real Ed and less smooth polished political, more people would see this.

Trouble is the public seems to love a smooth talker.

Work does need to pay in this country. To many people rely on benefits even though they work. Take at look at this:

-Raise minimum wage
-Ban exploitative zero hour contracts
-Cut taxes for lower/middle incomes
-Extend free childcare
-Make it illegal for employers undercut wages by exploiting immigrant workers

Work needs to pay. I fully agree.

Sorry for brief posts, I am writing on my phone whilst trying to entertain a toddler.

I keep meaning to let isitmebut know about this amazing new thing all the cool kidz are into called, I think, 'blogging'.

Apparently you can vent as much as you like on any subject of your choice, on your very own website. 'Mazing, huh?

And the best thing about it is, you no longer have to clutter up MN with long, ranty, tedious posts with tonnes of clicky links that no one ever reads.

Everyone's a winner! Why not give it a try, eh?

Tories and the economy.......just click it once....

This 3D printer housebuilding technology is incredible. Why aren't we at the forefront of this, investing billions in this type of thing which will help people and earn us huge rewards?

"They may look like your average building sites, but these houses were created with nothing more than a 3D printer.

The houses, one of which is five storeys high, were created in an industrial park in China's Jiangsu province using new 3D printing technology.

The incredible engineering, by Shanghai WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co., was pioneered ten months ago when the company printed ten buildings - costing just £3,100 - entirely out of concrete using a giant printer."

...

The display site also featured a single-story house pre-ordered by the Egyptian government, which will soon be shipped to its owner.

Mr Ma said: 'This house was printed within a single day, and is part of a total order of 20,000 units.'

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2917025/The-villas-created-using-3D-printers-100-000-five-storey-homes-using-construction-waste-China.html

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2917025/The-villas-created-using-3D-printers-100-000-five-storey-homes-using-construction-waste-China.html#ixzz3Z4hhzREM
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

No I haven't seen that

But what it really shows is Farage's appeal. Farage is a laugh, the People's Army taking on the Establishment is fun.

People are fed up of the smooth talking Establishment spinners who never laugh, never say what they think, never smoke, never drink or be real - the W1A phoney political class

"the determination of every employee not to take any kind of decision which will leave them exposed; the terror of causing any kind of public offence and then receiving hostile media attention; the obsession with ratings; coffee in all its manifestations; the obsession with ratings; the simultaneous fear of, and contempt for, members of the public outside their own charmed circle; the aversion to any display of the individuality – of opinion or character – which is so antithetical to corporate life.

This smiling, timorous group-think is all around us in quangos, in Whitehall and in business"

I posted that in a lighthearted way.

I utterly disagree with your assessment of ukip but value your posts

thanks

claig have you seen this?

paintwithnigelfarage.com

The coalition has almost doubled the national debt in 5 years to where it is now £1.5 trillion and apart from bailing out the banks, what have we got for it?

New house builds are at a lower level than the last year of Labour's rule.

I think we should invest in new technology and prefab technology so that we can build new houses at a cheaper cost, complete them quicker and create them on an industrial scale. I think we should scrap HS2 and spend teh billions on housebuilding instead.

Countries like Nepal now need a huge amount of help to rebuild homes. If we can spend £100 billion on trident, surely we can invent ways of creating cheap prefab homes that can be exported to help people all over the world as well as people here.