I can't tell you how much I hope the Conservatives win the election.

[AntoinetteOuradi]

Just had to get that off my chest.

Please come and join me if you feel the same, and then I can stop annoying myself (and others) by hijacking the anti-Tory threads.

"Conservative philosphy is built on the laughable premise that life is fair."

What makes you think that? That is not what I read and hear. Tory philosophy makes the assumption that working hard and doing your best is good for society as a whole, and should be rewarded - but it also is about helping and supporting the most vunerable.

All about helping and supporting the most vulnerable? That'll be all those vulnerable souls having to pay tax on their substantial inheritances I presume?

'Tory philosophy makes the assumption that working hard and doing your best is good for society as a whole, and should be rewarded - but it also is about helping and supporting the most vunerable.'

Yet so many of their supporters automatically, and cluelessly, assume that poor = feckless who don't work and are on benefits.

He doesn't have a CLUE what 'big society' is because if he had he'd know sharpish that 'big society' often means big religion, and he's not got that cultural tradition here.

There are no big, daily, morning and evening soup kitchens or food banks here. No big funds where Christians pool in to pay their medical bills if they haven't go insurance.

No huge scholarships for higher education based on faith.

Clueless. Utterly clueless.

Fair enough, you privatise away.

You've not got the low VAT that others who've done the same, or never had a socialist tradition of provision, had. The low cost of the consumer goods that keep them in work.

Not the countless other anti-discrimination legislation in place to support that.

Putting the cart before the horse is a common mistake.

But not one you'd expect from someone with such a sterling education.

American tradition of charity replaces or is an excuse for a lack of the British welfare state isn't it expat?

Actually - and this is a by the by - the idea that there is such a thing as a Tory philosophy is quite interesting to me.

I'm not sure they did have one - historically - I think of them as a party of the landed gentry and the toffs, deeply pragmatic and proudly without ideology.

Thatcher introduce a 'Tory philosophy' didn't she, which was basically free marketeering - v. much about getting off your backside, fighting your corner, the indvidual is all, the best survive, the less good, well, they drop etc etc

And New Labour's winning formula in 1997 was to take the free market aspect and add a belief in the state for the vulnerable.

Does anyone else think that's true?

"And New Labour's winning formula in 1997 was to take the free market aspect and add a belief in the state for the vulnerable."

Agree and (flame if you want) but that is what I voted for in 1997!

DC is IMO trying to get back to this (I'm not totally convinced he is there yet though btw).

'American tradition of charity replaces or is an excuse for a lack of the British welfare state isn't it expat?'

Yes, in large part, it is.

My father and his brother-in-law, his sister's husband, are a big part of it.

They devote a large part of their time in retirement, and money, to it.

They are Knights of Columbus, a Catholic brotherhood.

Last weekend, they held a BBQ with the Masons in their city.

It was the culmination of 6 months of exhausting work among many, both working and retired, to raise money for the American equivalent of Help for Heroes, to provide things like state-of-the-art prosthetics, counselling, home buying and modifications, funds for those injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Donors looking for tax write-offs and publicity, pitching in, etc.

To the tune of close to $900K.

I don't know that you'd see that here, in a day.

Yes that is a very lucid summary I think, 100x

ahundredtimes, I'd agree with you re. ideology (or lack of it). I think the Conservative party isn't ideological on the whole, which is another reason I like them so much. I don't like ideologies at all. But the general belief now is that Thatcherism was an ideology.

What I want to know is why we are not on Discussions of the Day when the depressed lefties are? Ah, it's the MNHQ pro-left bias again...

Yeah, it was their undoing too, attaching themselves to an ideology, I think. That's why they've been in opposition for so long etc

I think the Tories were kept out of government because people believed that Labour could combine running the country well, with creating a fairer society.

Yes, and I think they gave it a bloody good go tbh - they did lots of things wrong too, of course, as well as much that was right. Like the minimum wage, sure start, repealing clause 28 etc - I do think 'society' is in better shape than it was.

I say, of course, because that seems to be the way of long-term governments

I'm not convinced that DC does want to care for the vulnerable. I might be wrong, of course, but it's difficult to swallow and he hasn't really convinced - either in person or in policy. I haven't really got over the conservative's attitude towards apartheid - I know it was a long time ago, but it did then speak VOLUMES to me

This was in the paper today:

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/poverty-and-injustice-in-david-cameronrsquos-model-borough-19 62318.html

about how the Conservatives in control of the 'flagship borough' Hammersmith and Fulham council have cut council tax... by slashing services for the homeless, disabled, etc etc.

Very depressing, it's just going to be the same old Tory party fucking over the vulnerable again, isn't it.

"The council here told people that if they took away services like this, there would be volunteers; if the state withered away, people would start to provide the services for each other. But nobody opened their home to Jane, or volunteered to feed Debbie, or started a new youth club on their own time and with their own money. The state retreated and the service collapsed."

Big society my arse.

(oh, and they turned took the athletics track out of the local park so they could turn it into a polo pitch. I mean, FFS.)

'I want to live in a MERITOCRACY, where there is an equal opportunity for all children to succeed, and those in power are there because they are best able, not there by birth-right or who they know.' Wasn't that supposed to be what the past 13 years were about?

That is utterly shocking, heathen.

I cannot comprehend the degree of utter callousness required to be a Tory supporter right now. Or is it just ignorance?

Yes it was... but instead social mobility has decreased and the gap between rich and poor has widened. Everyone talks about the Thatcher years as some kind of political low-point but, if you lived in Britain in the mid-late seventies under a Labour government - power cuts, 3-day weeks, wage freezes, constant strikes, appalling services - the eighties were positively the sunlit uplands.

In an ironic 'give them enough rope to hang themselves' kind of way I rather hope we get a re-run of the 'Lib Lab Pact' this time around. Let them have to come totally clean about the austerity measures we need.... let them slash public spending, chop benefits, introduce crippling tax rates and preside over rocketing unemployment.

Does anyone know - I really don't know - how they measure the difference between rich and poor. Is the gap wider because the rich are richer or because the poor are poorer or both?

Well, we've sold our shares and we're looking at Canada, and if it's not a Tory victory tomorrow I think my husband will be wanting us to go.

I remember the seventies too... And the eighties. For the first time in the eighties people like my parents had some money to show for their hard work. Their standard of living shot up. My mother was a nurse and my father was a middle manager: they weren't high-fliers. They could transfer pensions (which you couldn't do pre-Thatcher, meaning limited job mobility).

Talking of 'utter callousness' I am thinking of my father, tacitly deemed last year to be too old, at 79, to benefit from heart surgery on the NHS. He's had his ops now, privately, and is much healthier and happier. Exactly how would be he have been worse off under a Tory government?

I expect it has a lot to do with upper and lower percentiles of average income. Comparing the 10th percentile with the 90th percentile... something like that

That's a good, nice liberal country Canada

Thanks Chil

abride, exactly how do you think he would have been better off under the Tories?

Did you read the article which Heathen linked to?

Yeah what Chil said. Measures of poverty are relative not absolute. It is usually measured as 60% or less of median income.

He was a victim of health-rationing. I don't think that will be worse under a Tory government. They may be more honest about it.

Although I would hate to emigrate I fear alot of hardworking people may well just do that if Conservatives don't get in. If alot of the people who pay taxes to the government bugger off overseas, who is going to fund all the benefits, tax credits, public sector etc?

I have just written on another thread, saying I now don't want the Tories to win. If they do, they will go down in the people's memories as the party who brought a lot of grief. It will be impossible to bring the economy back into equilibrium without causing grief.
Margaret Thatcher and the tories did this previously and yet people seem to think she was some kind of monster. In particular, I get so tired of people blaming her for stopping free school milk. Free school milk was brought in, quite rightly, when many children were undernourished. My son had it for one term, when he started school, before it was stopped. By then there were no undernourished children. Indeed it was the start of the rise of the obesity problem.