No, that was those damn ethnics just waving their spears because they hadn't got their giros on time.....

Quick edit in case people think I've gone all BNP......It is intended sarcasm in a Carol Thatcher type of way....

I agree but what is the alternative ?
Society is manipulated into economic slavery by capitalism and going down the communist route is equally as bad, what exactly is the middle ground ?

Technocracy or a meritocratic govern ship is surely the starting ground though.
Not people wet behind the ears fresh out of Eton or militant bully boy unionists who like asking questions without offering a solution.

The problem is this idea of Mrs Thatcher's era being the glory days when Britain was put to rights is a myth. Even if you take out the emotion of the Thatcher-haters, her record was not as good as some of her supporters like to claim:

She claimed that her no.1 priority was to counter inflation, which was just over 10% when she took over in 1979. It was 10.9% when she resigned in 1990. The years in between there was a big spike in inflation followed by a few years when it was down to 4-6% before going back up in the final years of the decade. Certainly a million miles away from the constant low inflation of the past decade.

Unemployment - when she took over the unemployment rate was about 4%. After three years it was nearly 13%. The average unemployment rate during her time in office was 9.1% even accounting for the fact the Conservative govt kept changing the way in which unemployment was defined. Compare that to the fact that even at the worst of the current recession, it has peaked at about 8%.

She saw two recessions and one boom, the average growth during the Thatcher decade was 1.8% which was a lower rate of growth than we'd had in the 60s or 70s, and lower than the 90s and 2000s. It was also lower than all of our competitor economies at the time.

The social security bill rose by 40% in Thatcher's time, which is the largest increase in social security spending since the welfare state was set up. The culture of welfare-reliance that we are saddled with today started in the Thatcher era. Before she was PM there was never the same extent of large sections of some towns/cities living a life-on-benefits. There was a 60% rise in people claiming income support.

In a lot of ways I admire Mrs Thatcher, she was a genuine politician with no bull or spin behind her words and she had a conviction in what she thought was best for Britain, but in the cold light of day her reign needs to be analysed fairly, she was not a successful PM and she left British society more divided and with deeper social problems than it had before.

(stats above are from books on Thatcher by Peter Riddell and Denis Kavanagh which I used at uni)

If the Tories get in, lots of taxes will be added and the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer also all public building will get scraped e.g. stadium around the country.

Quote: RED FLAG RISING "If the Tories get in, lots of taxes will be added and the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer also all public building will get scraped e.g. stadium around the country.'" Gap between rich and poor 'at its widest since the war'. Shocking legacy for a Labour Government. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 003694.ece

Quote: RED FLAG RISING "If the Tories get in, lots of taxes will be added and the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer also all public building will get scraped e.g. stadium around the country.'" Gap between rich and poor 'at its widest since the war'. Shocking legacy for a Labour Government. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 003694.ece

Statistics, schmatistics....

rlDevil's Advocaterl

Programme for 71 and Sally....

just wait till friday when normal service will resume regardless of who wins this comp for being two faced..in fact in 12 months time nothing will have changed..dont know what all the fuss is about

Labour asking me to vote lib dem is almost making me want to vote Tory.

I've just seen the cover of today's Times, with possibly the most nauseating image I have seen for quite a while adorning it.

Are the Cameron's campaigning for the country's top political role, or are they auditioning for a modelling contract with M&S??

The sight of Cameron gazing out of the train window, with his wife lay across him, really is stomach turning..... They make the Blair's look publicity shy with their constant courting of the middle class media.

To think that this chancer is set for the role of PM is a very scary thought.....Especially the strong chance that his wife will become the darling of the Daily Mail reading male population....

Effects of the recession are kicking in now, only going abroad on holiday twice this year instead of the usual three times. Glad its not the eighties, weekend in Rhyl was the most my parents could afford. Being skint under the conservatives was much more severe than being skint now under labour.

Thats because to a large extent we have been shielded from the effects of the recession so far. The government has intervened in the economy to lessen the impacts of the negative things. When the banks collapsed, the government guaranteed savers' deposits. When lending dried up, the Bank of England slashed interest rates to the lowest ever. When retail was collapsing because nobody was spending, the government cut VAT. Whilst unemployment has gone up and there have been some repossessions, these have not been anything like the scale they were during the recessions under the Conservatives, because the Conservatives didn't intervene in the economy, they just let nature take its course. Considering this global recession was the worst since the 1930s, that would have basically seen the economy collapse. So its a bit churlish that the Tories are now crowing about the size of the debt and blaming the government....the government has done what it needed to do to keep us afloat, and in that sense it's worked.

The danger however is the public has been lulled into a sense that "it wasn't as bad as they said it would be". The reality is that we've 'survived' by the government intervening to stabilise the economy, to do this they needed to spend highly, and they weren't getting as much in from taxation because the economy was shrinking, so the shortfall was made up for by borrowing. Hence the size of the debt now. When the economy is growing again that debt will have to be paid back, so whereas many people enjoyed a period of unparalleled prosperity between 1997 and 2007, if we have a decade of growth to come, the proceeds of that growth are going to be diverted to debt repayment, which will ultimately mean hefty tax rises.

At the moment we can still have a few more weeks of living in denial because we have been sold the dummy that 'efficiency savings' will pay back the debt. They won't....paying a high premium in various taxes will.