I honestly don't understand why anyone who cares about anyone other than themselves would vote Tory.

[ilovetofu]

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/27/doctor-nhs-vote-labour-austerity-conservatives?CMP=sharebtntw&twitterimpression=true&fbclid=IwAR2JhAMh9bEiRfeALJeTzeP8ogAByuwaitNpshoQ8oEQfYLvlTc7tvJ50

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anyone listening to Diane Abbott on Any Questions this weekend has got to have some doubt about voting labour

I don't tend to watch Any Questions, but wasn't aware they'd pushed her forward as a spokesperson for anything this time

Bit of a risk isn't it ... ?

we’d work out their profits and they would pay a percentage of that in tax

OMG, she's so thick isn't she. If it was that simple, doesn't she think Gordon Brown would have done it during his 13 years?

Politicians and governments all over the world are in discussions about how to tax multi-nationals more fairly - that's been a work in progress a few years now as it's a worldwide problem. It's not going to be resolved by some "back of the fag packet" scribblings.

We had shortages of nurses even before grants were scrapped - the NHS wouldn’t function without immigrants.

^

This

If we want more nurses, doctors and medical specialists then we have to invest in training and make it an attractive proposition. Let's face it nursing is not exactly a glamorous job to young people and the negativity about the pressure and stress in the NHS would put anyone off but it is an extremely rewarding and valuable career. Bring back the bursary or make it a degree apprenticeship otherwise put up with immigration because we currently we do not train enough to fill the positions.

The day after Abbott made that error during an interview, Phillip Hammond - the actual chancellor of the exchequer at that time - got a figure wrong by £20bn during a radio interview.

I thought it was a couple of months after, though that doesn't alter the point. A month after, Johnson was equally at sea when interviewed on radio.

Don't hear much about that either, do we?

Wow, you go out to do a bit of shopping and this thread turns into Swiss cheese! Looks like I missed a racist, bigotry fest.

@HellToupee you might want to brush up on those googling skills...

gandhifoundation.org/2014/01/09/the-gandhi-foundation-international-peace-award-2013/

It was 2013, not 2011

Sorry, for some reason only half the page loaded and I missed the rest of your post.

Peter Tatchell? Ugh.

The Press in this country is run my millionaires who don't want to pay any more tax.

Indeed Paddington. But you’ll never get anyone to admit their views may have been impacted by a biased media. Even when they’re throwing out every Daily Mail cliche, they still believe it’s rheir own opinion based on realty. It would be quite an interesting phenomenon if the stakes weren’t so high, and it didn’t involve scaring the shit out of people so they’ll vote to benefit the rich and influential. Even when you call out their absolute lies, they won’t acknowledge it - they’ll just move on to the next thing the tabloids have told them.

I am scared of this government, they have an ideological insistence on going after disabled people, which includes my children and myself.

Everyone who may fall ill, have a child, needs to work, may lose their job, don’t own a house outright etc has reason to fear this government. I posted a huge list of links early in the thread on the impact of this government’s policies - but even one of those things should be appalling enough to make sure no one votes tory again.

Unfortunately some people never really understand what life is like in this country for the poorest, and even if they did they don’t care because it’s not their problem.

What we really need is complete free movement of people, of course. Opposing immigration is stupid. And stomping about, yelling about your Englishness really is a spectacular cognitive failure because there is no such thing as an indigenous English person. There hasn't been an indigenous English race for more than a thousand years. (Well, OK, there is a slight possibility that some Cornish people may at least have a genetic heritage that could be counted as wholly English.) But 'English' ethnicity is a combination of Danish, German, French, Italian and Celtic.
We would, really, all be better off with a global government, as long as it could be set up in such a way that billionaire fascists could be kept in their place. It would be a complex job, but hopefully it can be done.

What we really need is complete free movement of people, of course. Opposing immigration is stupid.

Good luck with that - even Labour isn’t stupid enough to put that in their manifesto!

We would, really, all be better off with a global government

It would be so responsive, I imagine.

Unfortunately, our system of governance allows the very stupid and the very ill-informed to vote. Stupid people are lead by the nose through the media and vote like sheep. Ill-informed people THINK they are intelligent and 'know what is what', they vote on a few issues without looking at the broader picture, mostly because they cannot understand it. The only people for whom voting Tory makes sense is the very rich. These people have private health insurance and private education to make up for the deficiencies in the state system. They have large private pensions and accountants who help them avoid taxes. Anyone else who votes for the tories fits into one of the two groups previously mentioned.

I suppose you're quite smart, dadshere?

I suppose you're quite smart, dadshere?

Apart from not knowing the difference between led and lead after 2 gins, perhaps.

But there are stupid and ill-informed people who vote other than Tory!

I am a floating voter - either Tory or Labour, once Liberal, have been voting for over 40 years.

So has my intelligence or information gathering power been fluctuating all these years?

I vote for the party who most represents my concerns and whom I believe will be best for the country overall at that time.

I'm solidly average (stupid seems cruel) and I vote Tory.

Deathgrip

My family have been at the absolute bottom.
Not just poor but living in complete poverty.

We clawed ourselves out from the very bottom of the pile into houses that were bought and paid for and a successful business.
All was nearly lost during the 70s because of the Labour government. It didn’t just bring the country to its knees but it took individuals down with it.

We should have up sticks and moved countries but we had elderly relatives who couldn’t face another country and couldn’t live on their own.

Instead we lived through (even though I was quite young) the worse time to be alive.

Unfortunately Jeremy Corbyn’s speeches make me think history is about to repeat itself

All was nearly lost during the 70s because of the Labour government. It didn’t just bring the country to its knees but it took individuals down with it

Funny (tragic) how people.forget that that is what Labour does. They see the pound signs and the shiny promises and forget history.

By that logic you should never vote conservative again after the harm Thatcher did. You’d never vote conservative again because of the harm done by this government. Huge increases in poverty, disproportionately affecting children, pensioners and the disabled. Over 100,000 people dead because of health and social care cuts.

You’re saying that Labour shouldn’t have an opportunity to run the country because of how things played out almost half a century ago, but are turning a blind eye to what’s going on here and now under this government. If you grew up in absolute poverty its even more shocking to me that you would support a party who is choosing to push people into poverty. How can you justify that?

oliversmumsarmy You were in poverty and yet had the wherewithall to start a successful business? The tendency for people to mythologise on here is astounding.
My Mum was a single mother of two small children in the 70's. We had no bedding and slept under coats. She worked all hours and we were latchkey kids. Could she have set up a business at any point? Could she bugger. We were still better off than hundreds of thousands of kids today whose parents are reliant on food banks. Austerity has crushed the poor and the disabled in this country.

The recession I remember best with people losing everything - redundancies, falling house prices, negative equity - was in the early 90s. The government was Tory.