Tell me why you are voting conservative this time

I have never voted Conservative and am still not sure I will do so in this election either. However, I always feel that when the chips are down then change is good - fresh faces and fresh ideas. Any govt seems to become sleazy and corrupt after a certain amount of time in power. I saw this with the Conservatives after their previous time in power and we now have it with New Labour. If there is a Conservative govt after the next election I won't be disappointed as such but I WILL be nervous about what it will mean for low income parents like myself who are reliant on some benefits to prop up a low income. Even worse I am a single parent (not by choice) so a ripe target for the Tory Press.

Now - who to vote for ........hmmm!

Hear, hear, MC.

I'll vote for anyone who ends this bloody idea of entitlement - in my world you would have to work for everything you got unless there was a bloody good reason you couldn't.

If you aren't in education, employment or training then you are put to work to make society better be it litter picking or reading to an old person in a nursing home you don;t just get money chucked at you like evryone earning under 49k at the moment - takes the need to succeed away, if you know you are going to get your earnings topped up why bloody better yourself and get more qualifications or go that extra mile at work - I tell you why because if you do you won't get money chucked at you, you won;t even get a tax allowance - something else these this bloody government sneaked in!

And the goernment did not just giobve the banks mnoney - they have given effectively given them an asset backed loan - the government could stand to make in a huge way when the economy starts looking up.

Blair went to Fettes, which is known as the Eton of the North. It's all hypocrisy, none of Labour's leaders are working class, they use the working class as a stepping stone to power. Old Etonians are also left-wingers e.g. George Orwell, Jonathan Porritt.

Journalists like Jonathan Hari, the champion of the proletariat who leads the rallying cry for class war, wouldn't last 5 minutes in a working man's club, before he was thrown out on his ear.

I was a little less cerebral in my thoughts. A national insurance hike favoured by Labour will cost jobs.

Companies should pay their fair share tax-wise, but they should be taxed on their profits. They should not be taxed by the number of employees they have, because that will influence them to trim their workforces and not take on new recruits.

This is one of the craziest things Labour have ever come up with.

When a company makes profit, they can either 1) pay tax on it, 2) distribute dividends to shareholders, who will then pay tax, or 3) employ more people, who will pay income tax. Win, win, win!

Taxing jobs will not raise revenue because the jobs will disappear.

" he will encourage aspiration and provide greater opportunites for social mobility compared to labour" - curious to know what does that mean in policy terms for the Conservatives?

We didn't do badly under centre left era of Clinton and Blair but let's sit back and give DCameron and Osbourne a go and see what happens. They are decent people even if they are the nice face of the nasty party. But let's see how we emerge after two years. I am confident that they will look after us lot a bit better than Labour. Why wouldn't they, we are they natural constituency.

Every day, of the working week, I try to make a buck for the family not thinking too often about the have nots. Of course I give to charity and do a little social stuff but I am focussed on stocking up for my DCs. But when I vote, I really try to think about wider society. I am sure that many of us do but I think that a lot of people don't.

Labour values keeping the poor in the gutter and throwing them scraps that they have to be grateful for, while feathering their own nests.

Conservatives want to embrace everyone in a productive society.

In Labour's world, if anyone gets too big for their boots, they become Tory and that is a situation to be avoided at all costs.

MmeBlueberry - The economics of Milton Friedman that Osbourne espoused is not about job creation. Unemployment is a necessary evil for then infact. I think the Labour party is closer to Keynes who accounts for the cost of unemployment?

Another thing - this constant harping about Cameron being an old Etonian is obviously total politics of envy. Do those people who bleat on about this actually know any Etonians?

I live fairly close to Eton and am on a dinner party circuit where members of the community dine with 6-8 Eton boys to give them an insight into the world beyond school and their immediate families. They aren't too interested in me (a teacher), but are with my husband (a manager in a major science-based multinational). I can safely say that I am confident to put my future in the hands of any old Etonian. The boys I have met are the most gracious, polite, interested, thoughtful, positive teenagers I have ever met. We could only afford day school for our boys, and they are not bright enough for the competitive scholarships - but that would have been a dream for them to go there.

MillyMollyMoo - but risk and an element of speculation are fundamental to the Capitalism that the Tories, and now Labour embrace.

The politicians are dishonest by not telling us the truth as to how much the UK earns by being one of the key global financial centres, salami slicing fees from global transactions.

Politicians and journalists patronise us and don't explain (maybe don't understand) the whole economic truth.

Lincstash - you really hate that Labour lot don't you?

Nuclear families with jobs will be a start to improving society

Those who are saying they don't know Cameron were happy to put their trust in Blair. Hypocrites.

Don't worry, Cameron will win. I know he will probably help the well off a little more than GB so in some ways, I don't have much to lose. But Let's see how he does on improving society as a whole.

The fact is that you have no idea how Cameron will perform, but you do know how Brown will perform. The odds are that Cameron will be better than Brown, because Cameron wants to stay in power more than one term if he can and isnt tainted by his own history, whereas you KNOW Brown is a lying cheating two faced toad, surrounded by slimy dishonest pocket fillers like Mandelson, Balls, Harman, Milibands and simply useless incompetant idiots like Ainsworth, Jackie Smith and Heather Blears. All you labour voters voted Blair in and you had no idea how he would perform, so whats the difference with voting Cameron in in exactly the same circumstances? How come Blair got the benefit of the doubt and Cameron doesnt ?? And we never got the chance to vote for Brown, and he turned out to be as two faced as Blair!!

So, vote for somone you know for a fact is a dishonest s**t, or someone who on the balance of probability is likely to be far batter?

Furthermore, comments about "hes bankrolled by his rich mates" - its just more class . Those same people switched allegiance to Blair in 1996, and its those people who have been bankrolling the Labour party up until a couple of years ago. So its immaterial there now bankrolling the Tories. On the other hand, you do have to take into account that ONE Union now provides 25% of Labours income and thus has them by the balls (why do you think Brown is keeping his head down about the BA strikes?), and the Union hard liners who run Unite, Unison and the GMB have every intention of throwing out the Blairites and Brownites and returning the Labour party and the Unions to the position in the early 1970's - and we know where that went - the Miners Strike and the Winter of Discontent.

Silly thing to promise an end to boom and bust. Silly man.

It's as old as egyptian pharos with their 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine but surely there must be an answer to this by now.

MillyMollyMoo - alot of thoughtless stuff has been written on boom and bust. How could anyone guarantee no economic crash. There is a paradox about managing the economy in general: the better you become at managing risk and the economy, the more people will make big bets, the longer the period of growth will be and the bigger the shock will be when it happens.

Take the management of interest- no one will argue that it wasn't the right thing to allow central banks to manage IRs per US, UK, Europe etc. That created better decision making a more stable environment which led to long boom and bigger investments and growth, low inflation etc. But in the end, the economic cycle can not be abolished and so the crash will eventually happen and surprise us all.

It will happen again, no question. We will cover off the recent gap and the pressure will build up elsewhere.

I am a Science Teacher and the current GCSE is a joke, tbh. It has broad content on peripheral issues and very little hard science. It is designed to be accessible to all, and this means that it fails the top students who find it unchallenging and boring, yet still get A*.

There has been grade inflation at all levels in the education system. At university level, a Bachelors degree was all you needed to get into a good graduate training programme. Now, you have to have a Masters or even PhD, and even then, employers still have to teach basic skills.

It is not always easy to compare current papers, because content now can be quite broad, without being any harder. There is a lot of material that I did not cover on my O maths, but it is not exactly easy to master when you do have to learn it. Because I didn't learn that material at that age doesn't mean that it is actually any harder.

My son sat for QE, Watford Grammar, Haberdashers and Merchant Taylor + one other grammar school somewhere else here. I can't recall which school that question was from but I didn't notice a large variation in standard between the different schools. Lots of the brighter boys in my son's class chose the Grammar schools. But that is a different story.

It's always the same after three terms, we had enough of the Conservatives in 1997 and it was time for a change and now it's the same for Labour, what will piss me off though is that when the tories get into power they will get the country back on it's feet and we'll all have a good 2 years of misery whilst that happens, all will be ok for 6 years, then something will go wrong again for another 2 years and then Labour will get elected and the whole pantomine starts again.
It really should be no more boom or bust, somebody must be able to keep us on an even keel in this day and age.

I am currently helping my DS with 11+ maths. I have all of the NFER 11+ sample papers and the Bond 11+ sample papers, and that question is more complex than the ones on these sample papers. I think that that is above the level for 11+. I would be interested to know on what paper you saw that question, as I don't think it is representative of the 11+

I will dig up examples and show. I also recently helped son at 11+ exams and compared them to my common entrance exams. Well one of the Maths questions in my son's 11+ was as hard as O'Level Maths question. Here is an example of a question that he had only a few minutes to do: Derive the formula for number of diagonals in n-sided polygon. The question was stated in a different way but that is what they effectively had to do.

You must be young then - 1976 O level maths question on 2001 (or thereabouts) A level paper.

New exam syllabus for one subject ' we have reduced the content and taken out the sections the students find hard'. 6% needed to get a G grade. I have O levels, and they were a damn sight harder than GCSEs.