Tell me why you are voting conservative this time

[Lilovoter]

Some of my reasons are:

• I want a smaller state
• I want a society that encourages aspiration
• Gordon Brown is odious and he and his team lack credibility and real backbone. They are frighteningly good at spin though!!!
• I want Labout out of government and a fresh start for Britain. I do not want a Liberal/Labour coalition.

scarletlilybug, agree with you. Labour hate the middle class and are not friends of the working class, the only class they like is a dependent client class that is guaranteed to vote for them. That's why their policy is to hold the people down. They scrap grammar schools and ruin standards in schools, so that the working class can't escape and vote for the other side.

I'll be voting Conservative because I think they're the best party to stimulate growth of private sector jobs. Something we need in order to be restore health to our economy. Since 2001 our private sector jobs have decreased and public sector jobs increased. In spite of the poltico-economic climate being excellent for private sector job creation, Labour failed to incentivise small business and entrepreneurs.

Greece is currently struggling to service its debts and this is mainly because their private sector tax take is negligible. Most Greek government revenue comes from public sector jobs... so they pay Euros 100 in wages and get back Euros 40 in tax (for example). It's a debt spiral that is going to be v difficult for them to recover from. The UK will end up like Greece if Labour are re-elected.

The stronger the private sector tax take, the more public sector jobs can be afforded. It's so bleedin obvious really.

ClematisMontana, exactly, you can't spend what you don't earn, and it is the private sector that is the creator of wealth.

claig- many of the facts that you are stating are true but many of the conclusions seem quite wrong IMO. For example, equating saving the banking system to saving an unsustainable car manufacturers. I don't think Obama is a fan of Wall Street and wanted to save WS in priority to the helping the Democrat voting manufacturing unions from Detroit etc!!!! But he understood the risk contagion in a collapsed Finance system. I am sure that he is working with ex Goldman people for similar reasons to why he kept Robert Gates on as Secretary of State for Defence. He is doing what he needs to do to avoid disaster.

I wouldn't argue every point but in times of economic boom inequality will increase whichever party is in power. You need to have a govt to ensure that there is some measure of fairness. This leads to a discussion of absolute vs relative poverty. Equality (relative poverty) is an important measure but fairness and absolute poverty are at least as important [clearly, not the same thing].

We should ask our selves whether inequality would have been worse if Labour hadn't come to office in 1997.

Labour has made mistakes and I find DC a very attractive and clever politician BUT on big mistakes like Iraq, the Tories would have done the same/voted in favour. And they were more laissez faire about regulation of Fin Services whatever they say now.

And then on important actions like stopping bank meltdown, they were saying that the govt shouldn't intervene.

And then I don't think that they would have improved health care and primary education as has happened in the last 15 years. personally, I would have paid less taxes and be better off. And given that I send mine to private schools and have private health cover, I probably would have done better under the Tories.

So whilst I think DC is a great guy and I don't mind him becoming PM I am trying to distinguish between substance and personality politics. Isn't DC just a light version of Tony Blair?

Defence (and I always vote Tory because of that).

TDiddy, we'll have to disagree on Obama. I think he rescued the banks and did whatever they suggested because he is hostage to them. They backed his election. Democratic voters come second when real power is involved.

I agree that both parties do exactly the same on the really big issues i.e. war, global warming, globalisation. On these issues they carry out the wishes of big business. They have flexibility on other issues such as tax increases, VAT, health spending etc. Yes DC is like Tony Blair, because they all follow the same agenda on important issues. We have seen that some of them are 'cabs for hire' at £5000 etc. That's not a lot for big business to get their agenda through.

It is on the smaller issues that you need to make a decision about which party will cause less harm for the normal individual. I think that Labour holds people back, dumbs down, is a fan of the lowest common denominator as seen by their championing of comprehensive schools. Labour don't promote business, they restrict it with unnecessary legislation, they don't care if you do well, they don't want you to succeed because you may then become a Tory. The Tories are no angels, but they don't care who you are or where you came from, they won't stop you succeeding. It was the Tories that had the first female prime minister and it will be the Tories who have the first non-white prime minister. John Major left school at 16 and became Prime Minister, unlike Labour's Brown and Blair. The Tories provide a ladder to succeed, they promote private enterprise to give people employment. The Tories are pro freedom, they don't want an overbearing state controlling everything like the Labour control freaks do. They won't be fining ordinary struggling families for wheelie bin crimes. They believe in getting the state off people's backs and setting people free.

Claig - I really don't see why/how you could be cynical about Obama who risked his entire presidency on sticking up for normal people against big business.

Anyway, closer to home, I think that the Tories would be better for me but when I vote will be thinking a bit more altruistically. But don't worry, DC will get his chance to show that he isn't running the country just for nice people who live in nice affluent areas. Let's see how he goes. let's see how he will achieve greater fairness.

Easy to say Labour is dumbing down. But what does that actually mean? Primary education standards have improved. Not true that results improvement is down purely to easier exams. I have had a look at some of the papers myself and I can see that children are more drilled and better prepared hence grade inflation.

TDiddy, politics is theater for the masses. Don't believe everything they say. Sticking up for normal people against big business is part of the act, followed by shafting normal people for big business when they get in power.

"Primary education standards have improved"
Did you watch Channel 4 programme Dispatches "Why Our Kids Don't Count?" about the fact that 1 in 5 primary school children are below the acceptable standard for maths at age 11? New Labour's rising standards figures are like Big Brother's rising pig-iron production figures, bullshit. They are drawn up in the 'Ministry of Truth' known as Millbank. Labour are masters of Orwell's newspeak and double speak, with many of their policies being double Dutch.

I'll be voting conservative because I think they might just transform the political lanscape. We are so bogged down with labour red tape, taxes, stealth taxes - pension dividends are taxed post labour coming into power.

I admit I loathe the current administration -particularly GB and the heir apparrent Ed Balls. The Times headline today sums them up, Labour have been leafletting cancer sufferers telling them that their lives could be at risk under a Conservative government.

I want labour out.

"Labour have been leafletting cancer sufferers telling them that their lives could be at risk under a Conservative government"
sounds like the usual Labour scare tactics, it's always class war or the NHS. They never argue positively about what they will do, they only try to scare the public about what the Tories will do.

'I have had a look at some of the papers myself and I can see that children are more drilled and better prepared hence grade inflation.'

I am a GCSE examiner and the papers HAVE got easier, as the content has reduced.

IMO A'Level Maths, Chem and Physics are about the same standard as when I did my A'Levels

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.

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.

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+

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Agree, this better the devil you know mentality is bonkers.