Politics
OK, so I don’t often get political on my blogs ‘cos it’s usually a sure fire way of annoying people and starting arguments. But I simply have to vent my ire otherwise I may, in fact, go mad. Here, then, is a rough idea of why I’m voting for my chosen party and why, frankly, I think you should too.
There’s been a lot of talk about the economy lately, and rightly so, and a lot of pure scaremongering coming from the blue corner of this electoral love-triangle in which we find ourselves. Liberal Democrats and Labour both agree with the international institutions such as the IMF when we say that if you start cutting immediately you will almost certainly end up turning the recovery back into recession. The Tories talk of ‘waste’ as if we can somehow get out of debt by buying cheaper paper clips. That’s simply not true and they know it. But it’s good for them to claim that we have identified waste but don’t want to cut it. The waste that has been identified, as well they know, is jobs. If you cut now, with a fragile recovery, you increase unemployment and put the recovery in jeopardy.
But the real problem I have with the Tories is their talk of ‘broken Britain’. It’s true that there are aspects of society which are broken - and it’s true that in 13 years Labour haven’t done anywhere near enough to tackle those issues - but the reason we find ourselves in this mess is simple: the last Tory government. Don’t believe me? This article - by academics, not journalists or politicians - explains:
But the truth is that we are suffering the impact of the massive increases in income inequality under Thatcher, which Blair and Brown have since failed to reverse. In the 1980s the gulf between the top and bottom 20% widened by a full 60% – much the most dramatic widening of income differences on record. Since then there have been only minor fluctuations under Major, Blair and Brown. The result is that the gap between the top and bottom 20% in Britain is twice as big as among our more equal European partners.
Almost all of Gordon Brown’s budgets did at least something to redistribute from rich to poor. But because the benefit was entirely offset by the unconstrained rise in top earnings, he can claim no more than having prevented a greater rise in inequality.
So what plans do the Tories have to combat this problem with income inequality? They have tax cuts for the rich and a plan to reverse the NI rise which hits the rich more than it hits the poor and replace it, although they are being coy on the subject, with a rise in VAT which hits everybody, insidiously.
They even call the NI rise a tax on jobs. This is pure bunkum. They’ve found 1000 or so business leaders who say it’s a bad thing although I’ve yet to find a single business leader who would ever say tax rises were a good thing. Perhaps, though, if you asked the self-same business leaders ‘would you like to see a rise in NI or would you like to see a tax rise which would choke off recovery by reducing consumer spending and thus plunge us straight back into recession?’ the answer might be different. James Caan (of Dragons Den fame) has said it makes absolutely no difference to job creation. The survey I just took said that 51% of small business owners had responded that it makes no difference to job creation. So I go with them, rather than the 1000 mythical business men who were answering a loaded question.
Finally, the Institute for Fiscal Studies published a report this week which was, effectively, ‘a plague on all your houses’. None of the parties came off well but the Liberal Democrats came off marginally less badly. We have fully costed plans for our manifesto, which the IFS agrees is the case, and we have to find a LOT less money for deficit reduction than the other two parties over and above the plans already announced. Furthermore, they said that Lib Dem plans to raise the tax threshold to £10k would aid job creation more than the Tories policy of partially reversing the NI rise.
I could go on and on. Our policies on the environment were streets ahead of the other two parties (according to Friends of the Earth) our policies on Science will actually allow scientists to, you know, do science stuff (according to, well, scientists, I guess!) and our policy on drugs is that never again will drugs be used as a political tool to appease the press but will be decided upon by a truly independent advisory committee. Finally, we have the mess that politics is in. Only the Liberal Democrats have sensible plans to truly fix the rotton core of politics, abolishing the concept of ‘safe seats’ which have led to so much abuse and allow parties with a minority vote to have a majority in power. Only when we let ALL votes count will be be able to say what Britain’s population REALLY thinks.
So it seems to me that the picture is coming clearer and clearer. The Labour Party have, over the past 13 years, spent us so far into debt that our children will still be paying for it and want us to trust them to change their ways. The Tories want to continue taxing the poor, feeding the rich and allowing society to head towards breaking point, like they always have done, and want us to trust that they’ve changed their ways. I can’t conceive of an election in which the choice of which party to vote for has been or will ever be clearer.
You can vote for the same old stuff we’ve been shovelling for the past 65 years or you can vote for the party with the best policies designed to fix society, making it fair for all. A vote for anyone other than the Liberal Democrats is a crime against humanity.
