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How would I know if I've benefit from 15 yrs of Labour & Labour Lite govt? (Serious question!?).
Seriously? Depends on the job you do, in part. Public sector workers are overwhelmingly better off. Private sector workers, mostly not (except at the top end). Low-skilled and unskilled workers worst off of all. Public sector workers are largely protected from rises in the cost of living by their above-average salary rises during the Labour Spending Years. Average public sector salaries also rose above average private sector ones in 2007.
And of course there's the utter destruction of the private sector pension scheme.
Depends on when you bought your house and if you benefitted from the price rises.
Depends where you live. If you live in a Labour or Labour marginal (mostly outside SE England), you're better off. Tory councils were starved of essential funding on infrastructure and it was channelled elsewhere. Been waiting 30 years for a dual carriageway down here. It was due to go ahead in 1998, but in June '97 Brown cancelled it. Now it may get started in 2018.
Just a couple of examples.
Must be a website, somewhere, that says whether which type of person is better or worst off.
I agree. Someone with more time than me ought to write it.
According to this:
UKIP want to double defense spending & cut 2 million people off the public sector payroll (but not in defense, I guess) and give everyone healthcare vouchers rather than be tied to the NHS. So can we add semi-privatisation of health care to their policies?
Only if you think that Finland has a privatised healthcare system.
Plenty of scope for cutting in defence. The MOD is massively overstaffed. But we need to start to look to our own defence across Europe, because the US is going to start pulling its forces out and we'll have nothing. The average defence expenditure across the EU is 1% of GDP.
High speed rail, return to smoking in public places...
HS2 is a boondoggle. It's a crap idea, it's a waste of money and all it'll do is extend London's suburbs 100 miles to the north. If you want to spend money on the rail network, get the cross-country lines open again.
As for smoking in public places, I'm not a fan but I do recognise the essential civil liberty arguments behind it. Hardly anybody argues about the value of liberty any more. Well, nobody in any of the three main parties. But it's an important argument to have, and I don't think that the healthcare arguments necessarily justify a massive state intervention on smoking.