So...why do we hate the Conservatives so much?

[Chulita]

And why do we think Labour has anything left to offer after 13 years?

Just wondering...

'Not unless you're stupid and racist, no.'

Oh dear, I voted for them in the local elections and I was thinking of voting for them again.

'Vote Green or Left Unity'
But they won't win and can't change anything and the mood of the public has swung dramatically after the reported chanting by Chief Cheerleader Cameron of the phrase 'cut the green crap'.

I think they are both extremely awful.

Labour were 13 years of absolute disaster. The Tories had an opportunity to learn from Labour's mistakes, fix the economy, encourage an economy based on real industries and provide jobs for people. Instead they have overseen a continuation of Labour's "get rich quick" scheme of pumping debt money into an already hugely overpriced housing market. Now the housing market IS the UK economy and that is apparently all that matters. Sod all the young people with huge amounts of debt around their necks in order to get onto the farcical "property ladder". They have done nothing about tax avoidance, they seem to be of about the same corruption levels as Labour, no house building, no real encouragement to make working pay, no trying to make society more equal, no listening to what the electorate want or need. It is just the same old same old, "we know best".

We just need a revolution. We need to get rid of the political class who are all basically the same, self obsessed, selfish, greedy parasites who have no clue about how normal people live. Nothing is going to change until we get rid of Lib/Lab/Con.

Hurrah Ophelia!

I think that whoever won the 2010 election would have been hated now, whether they addressed the problems of an unbalance economy immediately or waited until it was too late, on the road to Greece.

Let us not forget that in 2010, this country was spending £158 bil a year more than we earned, and whichever party inherited that annual deficit, was going to see the national debt rise to £1.5 trillion by 2015.

For those that like to see it in real money, that is £1,500,000,000,000, that already costing over £50 bil a year in interest charges, and can only rise when interest rates go up from the current over 300-year lows.

So how could any party address those types of figures, without doing something to bring down our debt, via new plans for growth and the cuts, from record amounts of money thrown at an unbalanced economy for over a decade?

The economy in 2010 the Tories inherited looked NOTHING LIKE the economy they handed over in 1997, but historically ‘the people’ like to hate the party trying to solve huge structural UK problems, rather than the party that created them – whether anyone else had a realistic plan or not. IMO.

Sadly, some posters cannot look beyond the end of their partisan noses when dealing with political issues. Pejoratives used by posters about Tories, progressives, liberals, Guardianistas, DM readers et all just give the impression the posters are arrogant, blinkered, humourless knee-jerkers who make dismissive judgements based on the fact someone disagrees with their world view.

et al - bloomin' autocrat

I was brought up in Scotland, am still there, and vote Tory. Had a great education in small country schools, people have huge chips on their shoulders and have to have someone to blame.

I hate the dependent society we have now, thanks to labour, no one does anything for themselves. People used to pick up their own litter, work to improve themselves now it's all to be handed on a plate and if you haven't got a lot then blame the tories.

There are many other reasons I don't like the Conservatives but the neglect of the schools catering towards the children

We have big new schools round here, loads of them, but all part of the public/private partnership scheme of Labour and we will be paying for them for decades (how, I don't know).

It's so depressing. People wanting more and more for free. Free social housing, free health care, free university education - get real guys, unless you pay some tax there will be none of this.

We just need a revolution. We need to get rid of the political class who are all basically the same, self obsessed, selfish, greedy parasites who have no clue about how normal people live. Nothing is going to change until we get rid of Lib/Lab/Con

Exactly Ophelia. Until there is a government which encourages social mobility instead of crushing it there will be massive imbalance in power. There needs to be a roll back of neoliberal (corporatist) policies to those more in favour of people.

We don't and nor do a majory of the country hence about getting kicked into touch

I don't much like double standards that's why I can't tolrate red ed and crew most are champagne socialists now they have no belief in any thing they say

State schools most of labour now didn't go to one and don't send there children to them including the current shadow education minster

ECt

They talk about Tory toffs as if they didn't enjoys similar types of education and up brining it was hardly hand to mouth at Ed balls home

I believe strongly in person responsibility and I don't believe the welfare state helps anyone giving someone simply money dose nothing for them expect inbed depencay.

Also the Tory's are running the country like I run my home living with in its means and unlike the labour govermentwho live like my sister spend weather you have it or not

Dozydroids

Us to lots of new shiny schools and hospitals well done labour now just the small issue of how to pay the bill

Labour are like petulant children so eager to spend all our money with no notion of how we shall pay the bill

I don't hate any political party or it's supporters, I do however have eyes and senses and have made up my own mind as to why this or that happens.

To me the tribal bigotry between the tories and the Labour party has been the most damaging single aspect behind our relative demise.

This was especially apparent at certain times, notably during the miner's strike, however it's effects will be with us for decades even if 650 saints were to be elected in 2015.

It is self apparent that the tories favour big business over all other things. The number of tory MPs who hold directorships in our large firms ( 46 of the top 50 in 2010 ) despite the clear conflicts of interest would make a banana republic squirm. It is indeed part of their sadly misguided ideology, namely that the able ( read Eton, Bullingdon and the like) create wealth for the majority.

So the tory heaven is for you to tend his lawns and doff your cap, he does after all pay you slightly over minimum wage - to show how generous he is.

New Labour of course favour the Unions. This appears to be misunderstood as some form of kindness - all their funding comes through them! Afghanistan and the Armed Forces in general however shows just how callous and calculating new Labour is when it comes to their little protectorate.

The armed forces cannot have a trade union, hence there is nothing in it for Labour except on the fringes. The MoD on the other hand is highly unionised and hence was massively expanded at the expense of the fighting strength. Snatch landrovers are built in lots of lovely marginal and new Labour strongholds hence the Army would use them no matter what ( only the coroner's reports eventually changed this).

I recall returning from Afghanistan where my body armour was held together by gaffer tape to see the police strutting around in shiny new armour to face the difficult challenges of driving a car through Little Codswallop on the Thames.

So new Labour is on the side of highly paid and organised union workers and officials, the social workers rather than the single mums, the police rather than the residents and the prison wardens rather than the victims.

New Labour heaven therefore is an army of snooping council workers rifling through your bins and ensuring that no-one questions the great leader who knows best - while he sips champagne and tries to copy the tory's lifestyle....

On a serious note you can ascribe every twist and turn of our foreign and domestic policy to these competing forces, which lurch one way then the other as majorities in the houses change. As each party has refined and entrenched it's power base they have become sad caricatures of their stated ideals and ruined the UK in the process.

It is interesting to note that the last acts of Gordon Brown were to implant as many cronies into charities as he could cram. This wasn't to ensure high quality leadership for said charities but to rally the fight against the expected tory cuts to their unionised government masses. This tory cut will hurt the children, that tory cut will cause homelessness.

What people haven't figured out yet is that it isn't the children and the homeless that they are trying to protect....

The Tories understand that the Private Sector pays the bills of the Public Sector, and the Private Sector are aware of Labour’s penal taxes when they get in financial trouble i.e. pre 2010 raising Fuel Duty and Nics to come in after the 2010 election.

Back in 1979 the Corporate Tax was 50%, the economy had inflation/earning spiral of around 20% a year, businesses were failing and personal taxes were 32p lower, 83% on income, 90 odd % on income – millions of man hours were lost through strikes each year when the miners took on the government, when our manufacturing had been plummeting throughout the 1970’s and coal could be imported from Poland much cheaper – whilst German and Japanese manufacturers with none of those problems, won ever more market share.

Labour always blames Thatcher for what Old Labour passed her, yet lost 1 million manufacturing jobs in the eight years to 2005, 2-years before the crash – they have no idea how to run a balanced economy, never mind pay of our £1,500,000,000,000 national debt they projected by 2015.

You rather miss the point I'm afraid....

The Thatcherite boom certainly helped the tories coffers, lead to our financial services based economy ( which worked out well! ) and settled some petty scores with the unions. It also laid waste to large swathes of the UK, condemned towns and regions to dependency and put the final nail in the clear fact that only London and the South East matter.

That isn't economic competence, it is and was cultural terrorism on the North and Wales.

As for the private sector paying the bills, well yes but our understanding is significantly different.... To me the private sector is the small and medium sized businesses which employ the vast majority of people. To the tories it is those large businesses which can afford high director's salaries and pay huge donations to keep the tories going...

Then as now if you weren't working for a large company or in a heavily unionised industry then you had no representation in parliament. No-one was interested, no-one on your side.

Hence where UKIP came into the picture, lots of ex-armed forces types, single mothers, farmers, tradesmen and the like who realised that if they didn't do something hen no-one would do it for them.

Thank you for making my point detailed above....

New Labour are not on the side of the unions, they're occupying the same corporate bed as the Tories. Look at what Milibland is planning to do, namely cut the power of the very unions who got him elected party leader. With friends like that who needs enemies.

If I were a union leader I'd stop funding New Labour and switch to either Left Unity or The Peoples' Assembly, and I'm leaning towards the latter.

We have SMEs being allowed to fail, which is fair enough, that's capitalism. The flipside is Too Big To Fail, which is not. We also have the giving away of our national treasures to asset stripping vultures and foreign governments. Globalisation is going to end up eating itself, it already is. Look at the rhetoric flying between China and Japan, the meddling in Syria and Libya, the global corporations are ruling already, we just haven't realised yet.

Hmmm... Planning to do you say.

Well I'll take that one to the bank as a dead certainty then, afterall who has ever heard of a scumbag politician being economical with the truth of their intentions?

Whilst I don't entirely disagree on the global corporations and large businesses there has been a step change in their contribution compared to the influence they can wield.

One upon a time large corporations paid large tax. Nowadays they pay their tax in Switzerland or Ireland and are still able to buy politicians for little up front.

Google pays hardly any tax in the UK yet still manages to get favourable laws passed - reputedly for the cost of a few airline tickets...

I completely agree with everything Laurie says.

Because they are bastards. HTH.

What the Doc said.

So…why do ‘we’ hate the Conservatives so much – when history shows that they have been the most effective political party in the UK, over living memory?

For a start it appears that for some strange reason, unlike the U.S. where the people think anything is individually possible for them through education and effort, the UK is anti success, anti business and that shows up time and time again in people’s posts on here.

Apart from the lack of UK economic knowledge that there is no god given right for employers to risk starting up and/or employing people, and that you FIRST have to HAVE non State job creation to both worry about job rates and pay taxes to cover all the States bills – so many UK workers feel when looking at business, that it is ‘us or them’, so immediately think of large companies as the enemy.

What I will allude to bellow, is if not for the Conservative in 1979 (and now), there would have been a very different economic story after the 1970’s, when manufacturing fell from just under 30% of our economy to around 23% when Thatcher came in, to the same figure when the Conservatives lost office in 1997 – only to be around 11%, when Brown left office.

But as this class and business hatred in ingrained into the British DNA, we first have to go back to the 1970’s, a time of around 20% inflation, above inflation pay rises and strikes of millions of man hours each year – but listen to the socialists, this was sustainable, our industrial output wasn’t falling off a cliff and never mind Japan and Germany, we could have told China to ‘bring it on’ – when clearly we had ingrained unsustainable commercial madness.

Economically, the Labour government that handed power to Thatcher in 1997 had lost all control of the nation and we were laughed at by the world as being ‘the sick man of Europe’, but don’t take my word for it, read the link below.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent

Politically it was also dangerous times as the Trade Unions in the 1970’s onward were either run by the Soviet Union, or thought they could ‘just’ claim money to take on the government.
www.spectator.co.uk/features/3665728/we-came-close-to-losing-our-democracy-in-1979/

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-448602/How-Scargill-begged-Kremlin-fund-miners-fight-Thatcher.html

Only in UK politics is ‘class’ is used by opposition parties whose ideology has proven to fail whilst in government (or in Ukip’s case, failed Tories that have sod all to offer themselves) as an argument to vote for them, to keep out the reformers who took tough decisions to sort out the nation – rather than blaming those who ran Britain’s industry into the ground.

See what the 1970’s UK car worker mentality was taking on the strike free Japanese car industry and strong German Unions that understood a businesses problems and worked with the bosses, for the good of all.
news.bbc.co.uk/local/liverpool/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8401000/8401200.stm

As I’ve said before, in the real world away from failed ideology, politicians get State Funerals for rescuing a nation from disaster, not steering the nation into it.

Many UK workers who were fooled into losing their jobs by Trade Unions demands have to blame someone, the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of a Labour government brought in Thatcher, and as we find today, where the Trade Unions now run the Public Sector, many ideologically want to blame both business and the pro business party that sorts out the mess, not the ideology that fails this nation time and again.

Ahhhh...

So that's why we all hate the tories, due to their success...

Thirty five years is a long time ago, and outside of the South East it isn't a period of time that most people think fondly of...

Spin…as I’ve explained with the FACTS at the time, but your clearly a bit slow, it’s easier to blame the Tories for what history shows as The British Disease, back then, that’s why the likes of Japan invested in the UK auto industry AFTER the Trade Unions switched their focus to enlarging a fat inefficient Public Sector, happy in their thoughts that you can’t bankrupt a State.

Ukip of all should know, that through propaganda and repetition (in the above case over many years of misinformation), you can get millions of people to think a Moonies like political cult, with no policies, is a serious alternative to established parties.

In Germany people thought Hitler was a good idea, how did that work out? ‘The people’ don’t always get it right, and the facts above confirm the Conservatives saved the nation from a worse 1979 onwards fate. Back then as in 2010, ‘more of the same’, was not a sustainable option.

However, reading my links (and more could be provided), are you saying that the pre Thatcher industrial decline, continual 20 odd% wage/price spirals, trade unions trying to dictate government policies, millions of wild cat strike days lost a year interfering with industries supply lines - NONE of which our industrial competitors had - WAS SUSTAINABLE????? Discuss.