Cost of Black Wednesday - £3bn.

Cost of Brown's belief that he was the hottest gold trader in town £7bn - the man's a genius, really, what a guy.

labour for me

The cost of 13 years with Labour in power-

Record Youth Unemployment
Doubling of the national debt
Doubling of tax rates for the poor
Increase in The Rich-Poor Divide
Thousands of pensions ruined

To name but a few...

When Labour brought this point up in Parliament in the 80s that the Tories had widened the gap between the rich and the poor, Thatcher ripped them to shreds saying how Labour care more about the divide and not about increasing the wealth of the poor. Her famous quote was "You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer".

Now, with the inroduction of the minimum wage (which the Tories continure to appose, btw), the poorest members of society are better off than ever before and yet the Tories are now dragging out the "Widening of the Rich-poor divide" rhetoric - even the Sun have jumped on that bandwagon.



Want it both ways, much?

well for a start, someones individual vote is phenomenally important, if it isn't why are we currently flattening parts of the middle east?

therefore, when some wannabe mp turns up at my door/sends me a flyer canvassing for my support i expect them to be almost beyond reproach, and if they get the gig i expect nothing to change.

my current mp, lives, sorry, owns a house 200yds from my place, she has claimed over £100k over the past 5/6 years on upkeep of said place, if she'd have been on the ball she could have bought the house next door and still have had £20k(ish) left over to renovate it. i've seen her receipts online, she's an expenses glutton. she's just handed back nearly £6k, a clerical error or something, anything to try and deflect from her having her hand in the till.

i don't want them to make promises they can't keep. i want them to be honest with me.

Would a hung parliment not be best for all parties.

Good luck with that

The problem is that under a Labour government, poor people has suffered whilst Blair tried to appeal to "Cool Britannia" and The City. Labour is supposed to be the working man's party, and yet the poor have suffered, be it through the scrapping of the 10p tax rate, the record number of stealth taxes. The New Labour project has failed.

Socialists believe in a classless society, where all are equal and treated fairly, regardless of background.

If socialists believe in a classless society, why did Gordon's election announcement outside no10 begin "I come from an ordinary middle class family?" Why, during the Crewe & Nantwich by election did Labour activists follow Ed Timpson around dressed in top hats and tails?

I don't disagree with you, but many of those things would have happened under the torries as they were due to the recession and not labour and you would would have several big banks collapsing to add to the list too. The fact that Cameron opposed the bail out makes me have zero faith in him or his ability to guide us safley out of this recesion.

I do think its time for change but the stakes are too high just now. Maybie next time round when your party has a leader people can believe in.

I think you're getting mixed up here. Socialists base their whole philosophy on classes in society. It was John Major who said classless society.

sorry, i should have added a 'pigs might fly' smiley!

Were they making the point that Ed Timpson represents a party that is essentially filled with and looks to benefit people with conotations of top hats and tails and balls to everybody else, perhaps?

Why does Cameron insist on changing his favourite drink to suit the bandwagon? It was Guiness and a game of darts a few weeks ago, now he's a Cider drinker?

I'm pretty certain when DC visited Warrington back in Summer 2008 he had a pint of cider

Young leaders are rarely successful, ironically for all his unpopularity and bungling errors Brown's seniority gives him a gravitas in this campaign which Cameron and Clegg don't have, they look like clone wannabe Blairs, but Blair was never that popular, he just happened to be Labour leader at a time when they were always going to win the next election (no party can credibly hope to win 5 in a row, the argument for 'change' is just too strong). Labour would have waltzed to victory under John Smith in 97 if he had still been alive.

The Tories made this mistake with William Hague, who if they had waited ten years, would now be a formidable leader, he's easily the most articulate and witty speaker in the Commons, and he talks well both to the media and in hustings type situations. When he was leader, he was a prematurely balding 30 odd year old with a terrible combover and surrounded himself with idiot image makers who put him in a baseball cap going down a waterslide, and the media made fun of him. To shore up their traditional vote the Tories need a statesman or woman with seniority and gravitas, Cameron/Osborne have been picked too young. Hague (if he hadn't been leader before), Davis or Clarke would dominate Brown now, as would Portillo had he stayed in the Commons and not left to pursue his media career.

I take that point. The key ideal of socialism was the criticism of private ownership and the workers' rights. Essentially, the party of the working class, true. But that's not to say you have to be working class to be a socialist (I'm not sure you'd put Michael foot into the marxist working class category, for example).

Are you drinking what we're drinking?

you think the bail out worked..?

i don't know the exact quote, but 'we're well placed to lead everyone out of the recession' springs to mind. which is all well and good if leading everyone meant holding the door open so every sodding country could file past leaving us to traipse out after everyone else.

at some point we were always likely to come out of it, trying to claim credit for something that was going to happen anyway doesn't really work for me.

The bailout it worked in the sence that the whole system didn't collapse. Thats the best you can hope for.

We were the last country out of recession because we are such a service base economy. And we have the Tories to that for that one.

Brown said we were best placed in Europe to deal with the recession, instead we had the deepest recession, and were the last country in Europe to come out of it

and now our economy is growing the fastest.

Because the others have levelled off having been in front before us?

The economy is growing thanks to the hard work of business staff and leaders, people who Gordon Brown says do not understand the economy or business. If Brown is re-elected and implements his tax on employment, the green shoots will disappear over night. And of course as Monmouth Wire correctly said, the rest of The EU levelled out months ago

quite. i'd have a read of this if i was you, it's the mail, but the quotes it uses are from fairly 'reliable' sources/publications

[urlhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1232897/Manufacturing-decline-Labour-greater-Margaret-Thatcher.html[/url