Who would you vote for in a general election tomorrow?

[maybegoingcrazy]

If the next GE was tomorrow, who would you vote for? I've been unimpressed at decisions made by Labour since they came in and just don't have much faith in their long term plans. I've never even considered voting Tory, but also don't really see Labour doing much more to improve things for anyone. Will be interesting to see how things are in a few years time when the next GE comes round. Am I missing some really good stuff Labour are implementing?

Another tax rise is coming as well because Labour won't stop spending money.
They need to lower taxes, rent and cost of living but even basics is just to much for Labour

This government can’t even start spending money. There isn’t any.

They seem to be spending a lot of money though? So if it's not going to be repaid via tax what do you think might happen....

What are they spending money on?

Public sector pensions

Can you please explain?

Labour have made attempts to save money as well to be fair on them i.e. benefits, winter fuel allowance (albeit revoked), I do think that trying to turn the economy around whilst balancing a lot of other responsibilities is going to take a long time. They are spending a fair amount on defence from what I have read and understood.

Public sector pensions are the biggest outlay I think the government has. It dwarfs all the other costs we have. They have increased from £123.7 billion to £140.6 billion this last financial year. The total public sector pension debt is £2.6 trillion. That's 100% of gdp.

So if you whack up wages for already extremely well paid public sector workers like train drivers, you are piling on the liability for their (triple locked) pensions.

Its fine though...we just pile on the debt for our kids. And as they are getting the vote at 16 now if they vote for Labour again it's their own fault...

That's just fiddling about though. We are stuffed. And people want the state to fund more and more. Jam today not jam for our kids tomorrow. It's a weird approach a lot of people have these days. They just don't seem to care about the future.

I agree with you actually - thanks for explaining.

I don’t think all public sector jobs are well paid, but I do think some are such as train drivers (they get paid more than doctors in some cases). Pensions for public sector workers need real changes as they are far too expensive and disproportionate, I’m in agreement.

I work in the private sector, and I don’t get paid that well for what I do, and my pension is nowhere near public sector workers.

Train drivers especially annoy me as they seem to strike a lot and bring the country to a halt. You don’t see us doing that in the private sector 🙄

I really think some policies need to come in regarding strikes, and also changes to public sector pensions - it’s not affordable for the country.

Yeah, I’m glad they allowed voting to come in for 16 y/os to be honest. You’re right, people do want more and more without forward thinking about the future.

In 2022–23, government spending was almost £1,200 billion, around 45% of GDP..

Of that:
£210 billion was spent on the NHS.
£118 billion on welfare (working age and child)
£140 billion on pensions. Some of that is effectively deferred payment from when those pensioners were working and paying tax/NI, but some - those pensioners who weren't net contributors during their working life - is just more welfare
£105 billion on education
£97 billion on narional debt interest
... and the rest on defense, transport subsidies, policing etc

Do you even realise how incredibly lucky we are to have that much money?! Every single one of us - but especially those who contribute little but still get all those tax-funded benefits.

It isn't automatic that a country has such an incredible amount to spent on universal healthcare, universal education, welfare etc. And it doesn't always last forever.

In 1930, Argentina was one of the 10 richest countries in the world. Their GDP per capita was higher than France or Germany. But they fucked it up politically and economically: with excessive borrowing, high government spending, and political instability.

Their GDP is now 1/1000 that of the UK. Their government spending is likewise much lower. They spend 1.8% of their GDP on Welfare, compared to the 10.9% of our GDP we do. So given that our GDP is 1000 times Argentina's., we spend 5000 times more on Welfare than Argentina is able to - a country which was our economic equal 100 years ago.

Let's not fuck up our economy, shall we?

40,000 small boat arrivals in 2025 sounds like a lot because it is a lot. In 1991, total net immigration into the UK was 41 thousand. Total. All of it.

How have we got to the point within a generation that this amount of illegal small boat crossing doesn't seem so bad in comparison to legal migration?!?

It's only from 1998 that it went up to these insane levels. One million net in 2024. 1.5% of our population in a single year. If that continuesd, within 10 years 1 in 7 people in the UK would have come here after today..

And no - we don't need student immigrants. We need to fund our universities ourselves, through taxation and/or student payment.

And we don't need anything like this number of immigrant workers. We need to train our own population, and then do the work ourselves.

That's the only sustainable way to live as a country, and it was perfectly normal in the UK until a couple of short decades ago.

Sure it's lovely to get all that lovely money in today, so that we get all these lovely state benefits without paying tax and without working - but it's a ponzi scheme and mortgaging our future. And it needs to stop.

If we stop welcoming international students, many of our universities will shut down.
Raising tuition fees for home students isn't really realistic and raising taxes even more? Right... good luck with that.

Definitely think we need to reduce the small (illegal) boat crossings. Enough is enough now. It’s completely unsustainable and absolutely ludicrous that we’re allowing it to happen.

I’d vote for whatever was the best option to remove Labour. They are a disgrace.

They haven't got off to the best start, but all of the alternatives (in England at least) are worse IMO.

Tories - they asset-stripped the county, leaving public services in a shocking state, then pissed off. Thanks!

Lib Dems - they stood in the middle of the road and got run over. They don't really know what they stand for. They have some good ideas and they might keep their promises... or they might do the exact opposite.

Greens - amateurish and care more about gender politics than the climate crisis.

Reform - amateurish, prejudiced and some of their policies would dig us into a deeper hole. They want to reform the status quo, but their understanding of how the status quo actually works is very poor.

That would be no bad thing.

Far fewer than 50% of school leavers are suited to 3 more years of academic study... and far fewer than 50% of jobs need an academic university degree.

Tony Blair was misguided: blinded by ideology. He thought that university was a gate-keeper, preventing social mobility - and that getting more young people into university would magically make them all equally able to do academic study and the jobs that actually need that. He was also a snob to think that everyone should aspire to the types of jobs which need an academic degree.

What most young people actually need is appropriate training and skilled (not necessarily academic) jobs. Not tens of thousands of student debt and a degree which doesn't actually help them get a job.

Let the inadequate universities fail - both the fake ones, whoch pretend to teach English and business studies to international students who never turn up for lectures snd mysteriously disappear into the black economy when their visa runs out... and also the ones selling false dreams to non-academic students who would get a better job - without the debt- with vocational training.

Totally agree.

If there were fewer, better quality degrees then they would be worth higher fees - either to the student or to the taxpayer.

By the way, if £9000 fees in 2012 had kept up with inflation, they would be £12,970 now. The real- terms cost of fees has reduced by more than 25% in the last 13 years. No wonder Universities are failing, and have to take ever more international students to keep going. As a country, we can't keep having stuff we're not willing to pay for.

Do you have anything to base your rather rose-tinted view on: that spending yet more money on health and 'skills' would increase the UK's productivity?

Or is have you just fallen for the usual leftie narrative "Spend more! Spend more! Utopia is just round the corner once we're through this rough patch!"

Per person, real-terms funding of the NHS has consistently increased. Weirdly, people still say it's under-funded whenever the rate of increase drops. Ie it's still increasing, but not as quickly as previously . Obviously that's not sustainable, without equally fast productivity growth.

And unfortunately, in real terms and per person, productivity is pretty flat. We're just about back to 2008 levels. Per person, that is.

Our overall GDP growth isn't bad, but our population has grown by 13% in the last 20 years (probably more - no one knows exact numbers of illegal immigrants, but they still use the NHS). And much of that is low-quality immigration: asylum seekers cost the UK £100k - £400k each on average over their lifetime. ( BTW, about 2% of international students go on to claim asylum. Suddenly those few tens of thousands of pounds from each international student aren't such a good deal for the UK.)

Even skilled migrant visas only require a salary of £35k (which is below the level where a person contributes more tax than they cost in state services) and can be as low as £25k for many, many jobs. here's the list of jobs with a lower salary requirement for skilled visas.

So the question isn't really where do you find the money to do it. ("Tax more! Tax more! Utopia is just round the corner when those rich people hand over yet more of their money! Doesn't matter that punitive taxes are already making lots of them leave: tax those who remain yet more!"

The question is "how do we use the enormous amounts of money the UK government already spends on UK citizens each year more effectively?" and "How do we increase the per person productivity of UK residents?"

In case it needs saying, easy ways to increase the per person productivity of UK residents include not allowing in hundreds of thousands of people each year with negative productivity,.

And also getting rid of the ridiculous disincentives to work..

One revolutionary idea would be cracking down on the cash-in-hand black economy, which is estimated to be around £223 billion, or 11% of the UK's GDP. It encourages illegal immigration, hugely reduces our tax take (10% of GDP!!!) and enables benefit fraud. See how many economic birds you could kill with one approach?

But it doesn't fit the leftie, victim narrative that the only reason the UK isn't utopia already is that some middle-class taxpayers earn more than National Minimum Wage. And that's not faaaiir.

Yes because they'll just dismantle whatever is still working in the civil service and replace it with corrupt and ineffective chaos. Just look across to the US and see how they ape MAGA's language. It's not subtle and it's not even transposable to the UK because the two countries are entirely different beasts - but who cares about those details? As long as good ol' Nige threatens anyone forrin' looking with deportation it's all good for the Reform shills.

International student fees allow home students to pay less. Don't you think that your strategy will only serve to entrench the worst kind of elitism? Who will have access to good quality higher education?

Higher efficiency would be great- I agree on that. However, that means putting in place a government of extremely well qualified experts who know the ins and outs of how the civil service works. That clearly rules out Reform (utter lack of experience) and the ideologues in the Tory party. In fact, I'd chuck out all ideologues from all mainstream parties. Bring back moderates both on the left and right, and refocus politics on the centre - or we're screwed.