June 6, 200916 yr Has their ever been a multimillionaire prime minister before or will Cameron be the first? I doubt he is a millionaire in his own right, he was head of PR for a tv company before he became an MP which I doubt would give him anywhere near millionaire status in his own right but he does have an extremely wealthy wife Denis Thatcher was a multi millionaire several times over as was Cherie Blair so if you include spouses there have been several
June 6, 200916 yr Coalition governments don't work When Major was in charge and had a small majority in parliament he had to keep relying on deals with the Ulster Unionists to get legislation through due to tory rebels and the country lurched from one crisis to the next, Major's term in office was a disaster and that is with a small majority so imagine what a hung parliament lead by Cameron would be, there ould be no stability, Lib Dems would continually stamp their feet and threaten to bring down the government and economic stability would be non existent, worse than under Major It is looking like a tory majority of between 170-200 the way things are going so its academic but hung parliament would make this country unattractive to overseas investors and to business I simply dont believe that... At least one poster in this thread has pointed out several instances when a Coalition has worked in other countries.... The whole idea of a Hung Parliament means no overall control, so bringing Major into it is irrelevant.... You also assume rather erroneously that a Coalition should be "led" by David bloody Cameron, frankly I think that the likes of Vince Cable or Frank Fields have far more credibility than Lord Snooty Cameron posh boy... :rolleyes: Cameron is an elitist who only represents the priveleged classes... I'd rather have Alan Sugar running the country than a prick like Cameron....
June 6, 200916 yr I simply dont believe that... At least one poster in this thread has pointed out several instances when a Coalition has worked in other countries.... The whole idea of a Hung Parliament means no overall control, so bringing Major into it is irrelevant.... You also assume rather erroneously that a Coalition should be "led" by David bloody Cameron, frankly I think that the likes of Vince Cable or Frank Fields have far more credibility than Lord Snooty Cameron posh boy... :rolleyes: Cameron is an elitist who only represents the priveleged classes... I'd rather have Alan Sugar running the country than a prick like Cameron.... I was being realistic, only way that someone like Cable (who I quite admire) will ever be PM in a hung parliament is if Lib Dems get the most seats but if they have their typical 30 or 40 MP's which is most likely then the next PM in a hung parliament after next election would be Cameron or Brown with the likes of Cable and Clegg having departments like education, environment and agriculture, certainly none of the big jobs like chancellor, home office, foreign office or trade in return for propping up Cameron or Brown Edited June 6, 200916 yr by B.A Baracus
June 6, 200916 yr I bought Major into it as effectively he had a "hung parliament" deal with the Ulster Unionists as he had so many tory rebels and Major's reign was chaos, yes there are some examples of where a hung parliament has worked but the likes of Israel and Italy have had more PM's in the last 30 years than Paris Hilton has had sexual partners, both countries have no stability politically
June 6, 200916 yr I bought Major into it as effectively he had a "hung parliament" deal with the Ulster Unionists as he had so many tory rebels and Major's reign was chaos, yes there are some examples of where a hung parliament has worked but the likes of Israel and Italy have had more PM's in the last 30 years than Paris Hilton has had sexual partners, both countries have no stability politically What about Germany? That country almost constantly has a coalition govt, and yet, they are generally stable, and have the biggest economy in Europe...
June 6, 200916 yr Almost every democracy in the world uses some sort of PR system. Most of them therefore end up with coalition governments. They still see plenty of foreign investment coming in. So to suggest that foreign investment would suddenly dry up if we had a hung parliament is total nonsense.
June 6, 200916 yr I bought Major into it as effectively he had a "hung parliament" deal with the Ulster Unionists as he had so many tory rebels and Major's reign was chaos, yes there are some examples of where a hung parliament has worked but the likes of Israel and Italy have had more PM's in the last 30 years than Paris Hilton has had sexual partners, both countries have no stability politically Hasn't Italy had Berlusconi as their leader for a fair amount of time though....? :unsure: I wouldn't exactly say that's worked out too well.... Berlusconi's a crook.... It's all very well to talk about "stability" Craig, but even with our apparent "stable" political system, we're in the biggest sh!thole since Hitler's 'Blitzkreig'..... And, I somehow dont think an empty suit like Cameron, or the equally empty suit Osbourne have the ability to get us out of it.... I posit that 'Political Stability' in this country has been an illusion which only benefits the elites, and the only way to improve things is with radical change.... And radical change can only come from a Coalition Govt which takes on board all sides of the political spectrum (or a Peoples' Revolution, which would be my own preferred option tbh) in my view, the main two parties dont want to change the status quo, which is the whole problem this country has just now.....
June 6, 200916 yr Margaret Thatcher was the best PM we ever had. FULL STOP. If she was Catholic she should have been given a Sainthood. can someone shut the idiot up? I think his meds are wearing off..... or maybe we should threaten him with work or a training scheme.... he'd be out of here and in hiding quicker than a rat up a pipe.
June 6, 200916 yr Scotland works alright with PR. It's not perfect, but it is a one seat minority government between Labour and the SNP. The Scottish equivalent of Kim Jong Il and Hitler basically :lol: Poor Satan doesn't get a say. Her mother f***ed up south of the border and destroyed her chances of ever being somethin other than a token land owners vote. In Aus there's a 'Coalition' thing going on, but the Coalition are the opposition having had the floor wiped with them by K Rudd in 07.
June 6, 200916 yr Margaret Thatcher was the best PM we ever had. FULL STOP. If she was Catholic she should have been given a Sainthood. I'm determined to stop this ridiculous nonsense. The celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power have had a surreal quality. The moist panegyrics from David Cameron and Boris Johnson - followed by an army of cheering commentators, and a distant, shameful echo from Gordon Brown - have been filled with statements that are the opposite of the truth. Yet there they stand, unchallenged, as the road-map for our future. The defences of Margaret Thatcher invariably have three prongs. She made it possible for ordinary British people to "get ahead", and "aspire" once more. She expanded freedom. And her strip-down-the-state economic model saved Britain - and spread prosperity across the world. Each of these is simply asserted, as if these claims can't be measured objectively. Just shut up and rejoice! But your ability to "get ahead" - to rise up the social ladder - isn't simply a matter of hunches; it can be tested scientifically. And every study has found one thing: social mobility collapsed under Margaret Thatcher. As a massive recent London School of Economics study showed once again, in the 1980s and 1990s we became a country where if you were born rich, you stayed rich, and if you were born poor, you stayed poor. This shouldn't have been a surprise. Every country that adopts a low-tax, low-investment model sees the same. The evidence shows only countries that tax the wealthy and use the cash to lift up the rest - like Sweden - consistently achieve the dream of allowing anyone with talent to make it. So thanks to her policies, a whole generation of poor and lower middle class children remained stuck, unable to achieve their potential. Look at the new generation of rising Tory candidates and MPs and you see this failure of social mobility writ large. They are overwhelmingly the children of the wealthy, educated at the most expensive schools. Everybody else is stuck, unable to get up and out. While you are entitled to your own opinions, you are not entitled to your own facts. To claim Thatcher boosted aspiration is false - unless you mean merely the aspiration of the rich to become super-rich. How about Thatcher's support for freedom? This is a leader who called Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" and vandalised all attempts to place sanctions on Apartheid South Africa, while her husband cheerfully referred to black Africans as "coons." This is a leader who called the self-described "fascist" General August Pinochet "a great man", after he toppled an elected leader in a violent coup and rounded up thousands of dissidents to torture to death. This is a leader who upheld a system of Protestant supremacism in Northern Ireland, while the police force there conspired with criminal gangs to murder Catholics. This is a leader who at the height of the AIDS crisis criminalized any mention of homosexuality in our schools. Freedom? What about the idea that her economic model "saved" us? Thatcher wanted to build a "night watchman state", where the government stopped anyone invading the country or your home, but otherwise stood inert and passive. She saw regulation as "red tape", and boasted of building a "bonfire" of it. And what happened? Her apostles took this to its logical conclusion, building a "shadow" banking system free of all government interference. If she had been right, it would now be the self-regulating engine of the global economy, pulling us all to a better world. It didn't quite turn out that way. As John Campbell, her best biographer, has written, the tragedy of Margaret Thatcher is that she sincerely believed rolling back the state would create a generation like her father, a moral, self-reliant grocer. Instead, it created a wave of businessmen like her son, a parasitic amoral crook. Yet David Cameron's election song could be the old Honeybus hit "I Can't Let Maggie Go." He cheered the ugliest of Thatcher's policies while they were happening: he even accepted a free holiday jaunt to Apartheid South Africa paid for by one of the most depraved corporations backing the whites-only regime. Today, he says she will be his inspiration in power, as his claims to moderation burn away under the pressure of recession. But oddly, the party that has found it hardest to get out of Thatcher's shadow is Labour. They drank so deeply of Thatcherism after the collective trauma of 1992 that they have become tarred with its worst failings. As Labour now collapses into a mess of fratricidal sound-bites, it would do well to pause and remember a slap-in-the-face fact. Contrary to the ahistorical waffle pumped out over the past week, Margaret Thatcher never won over a majority of the British people. At every single election where she was leader, 56 percent of the British people voted for parties committed to higher taxes and higher public spending. She won because the centre-left majority was divided and at war with itself - and because of our lousy electoral system. Over the past year, there have been small hints of what a de-Thatcherized Labour Party could look like - and it's a world away from both Toryism and the old, hellish Scargillite closed shops. It is simple Scandinavian-style social democracy that marries thriving markets to an interventionist state. It would tax the rich more, both to reduce inequality and to pay for public services. Despite the out-of-touch press shrieking, some 68 percent of us supported the new 50 percent top rate of tax on the richest 1 percent of Brits. It would argue for a Keynesian stimulus directed at transforming Britain into a low carbon economy - the only sane response to a depression and an unravelling climate. And it would put at the forefront of its agenda moves like Harriet Harman's excellent Equality Bill, which will require local authorities to spend most on the poorest areas, and to put greater equality at the heart of all decisions. The logic of this legislation fits with the egalitarian, European mindset of the silent liberal majority of British people. If we leave it to the market Thatcher-style, it will take eighty years before women are paid the same wages as men for the same work - and we will all be dead. Who wants to defend that? Who wants to say companies shouldn't even have to publish their gender gap, as the Bill demands? A long queue has been forming outside TV studios of Tory MPs saying just that. But a recession is the time when we can least afford to waste talent and promote mediocrities just because they are men. We need the best talents in the best positions now. Yet all this comes far too little, and far too late in the day. Brown's "Green New Deal" is pitifully small, and his ability to sell any policy is limited by his own lousy communication skills and his refusal to decisively cast off the shroud of Thatcher. Even the 50 percent tax rate was introduced with a nervous, quaking commitment to reverse it once the recession ends. Who will point out that during America's largest boom - the 1950s - it had a 92 percent top rate of tax under a Republican President? And so the window to a better, more social democratic Britain seems to be creaking shut. Gordon Brown stands frozen as his Blearsy-eyed colleagues hiss and snap all around him, protesting at even the tiniest nudges to the left. Why won't Labour let the Iron Lady rust?
June 7, 200916 yr or maybe we should threaten him with work or a training scheme.... We wouldn't have to, Cameron and Osbourne would do that if they got into power..... :lol: :lol: ANY working class person who votes Tory is an idiot.... It's like Jews voting for Hitler..... :rolleyes:
June 7, 200916 yr can someone shut the idiot up? Can you stop being so rude? :angry: Am I not entitled to my opinion about a former PM? Some people liked Blair and some detested him. Same with Brown, though not many like him! Just because you and others hate Thatcher doesn't mean everyone else has to. This is not Communist China or North Korea. :rolleyes: Edited June 7, 200916 yr by Crazy Chris
June 7, 200916 yr Can you stop being so rude? :angry: Am I not entitled to my opinion about a former PM? Some people liked Blair and some detested him. Same with Brown, though not many like him! Just because you and others hate Thatcher doesn't mean everyone else has to. This is not Communist China or North Korea. :rolleyes: Chris, you seriously need to ask yourself why it is that people on this Forum are so hostile to you.... Craig has similar "Maggie was Wonderful" views, but practically NO ONE reacts to him like they do you, now, why do you suppose this is mate.....? Could it be because Craig, unlike you, actually has a coherent and logical argument to his posts (whether one agrees with him or not, he posts well...) whereas you just seem to post glib, random, illogical nonsense a lot of the time....?
June 7, 200916 yr Quite frankly, given Attlee, Lloyd-George, Gladstone and Churchill (although he was a better leader than Prime Minister if you get what I'm saying) were all Prime Ministers (in order of greatness...), I don't see how ANYONE can say Thatcher was the best...let alone amongst the particularly good ones, for all the reasons the article I posted stated above :/ So what if she recovered our economy? It came at such a horrendous social cost you have to wonder whether it was all particularly worth it, and let's be honest, you don't have to be a complete country-wrecking bitch to pull off a supply-side policy do you?! :rolleyes:
June 7, 200916 yr LOL at UKIP winning the majority in the euro elections for Hull. Says it all really, Hull, the home of Alan Johnson, the so-called next leader of the Labour party doesn't even seem to have enough support in his home city. Big win for UKIP, but bigger loss for Labour...
June 7, 200916 yr Lib Dems won in Burnley which is also one of the few places where the three main parties have come first, second and third.
June 7, 200916 yr BNP get a seat in Yorkshire/Humber. Labour would have needed approx 10,000 more voted to have prevented that.
June 7, 200916 yr If Yorkshire gave one to BNP then North West must have done. Pleased with Green party's performance so far.
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