Michael Dean : Weblog items tagged with election

IF Brown could have run the UK better then he would have done!

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:47:02 GMT

Amazing how many people are prepared to state what Cameron and the Conservatives are going to do next. Some sort of gift of prophecy?

Yet they forget all that Brown and New Labour have actually done, stuff that is all documented, it is in fact history.

How can anyone expect Brown and the rest of New Labour to do anything different than they have already done.

We have a major financial meltdown in progress. We are going to be taxed to the hilt and beyond just to pay the huge debts we have incurred. The UK economy now is almost on the same level as Greece!

IF Brown and New Labour could have run the UK better than they have managed to do, then I would suggest that they would have done better.
What we have seen in the financial meltdown is the best that Brown and New Labour can manage to do!

Their best is nowhere near good enough. That is why they should be out of power ASAP.

New Labour are making a real big deal about the opposition to increases in the NI

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:59:08 GMT

New Labour are making a real big deal about the opposition to increases in the NI. It should be obvious to them that we need as many jobs in the UK as possible and that increasing taxes on jobs is not the best thing to do!

And the jobs need to be in the private sector. Public sector jobs are paid for by our taxes. Every new public sector job increases the UK debt levels!

But Brown, New Labour and Mandelson seem to be unable to cope with any criticism of their plans. It comes over as a 'matter of principle' that Labour will not accept any criticism even if it is obvious to most that Labour is wrong!

This just reinforces the fact that New Labour, and Brown, have dealt with the UK economy so very well that the UK is in deep trouble. We now have huge debts. We are now facing huge tax increases in almost every aspect of our lives.

We now cannot afford to maintain most public services.

We couldn't afford the salt in the winter and now the roads are falling apart and will cost billions to repair! What crazy logic from this government stopped them from buying enough salt, which really was the cheap option!, even though they knew road surfaces would be seriously damaged by the freezing temperatures. It might save a million or two now, but will cost hundreds of millions over the next few years.

When Brown promises to ring fence an NHS service, then that means the other NHS services will be cut! If they were not at risk of being cut then there would be no need to ring fence certain services!

I want to see a government in power which is prepared to govern for the benefit of the UK and NOT to spend all their efforts trying to maintain their own positions in government!

The fact that Brown refuses to release the financial data for the UK means several things:

He is hiding the size of the financial mess that he has put the UK into.
He is trying to stop the opposition from making their plans for government.

Brown is able to attack the opposition by claiming that they don't have the finances right. We would not know if the opposition is right or wrong, since we do not know the figures either!

On the other hand we don't know if Brown is right or wrong, since he does not reveal the figures that his policies are based on!

The forthcoming election is about debt and failure to govern!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:35:08 GMT

Anyone who is in debt or who has been in debt knows that the sooner the debt repayment starts, the less money is actually needed to clear the debt.

Gordon Brown doesn't want to do this for short term benefit to himself!

To go into the election promising , as Brown has been doing, money all over the place is a very cynical attempt to gain political credence for himself at the expense of the tax payers of the UK.

Brown knows that the longer he leaves it before starting to repay debt , then the longer we will be paying increased taxes and the greater the amount of money that is needed to clear the debts of this Labour government!

Cameron wants to start debt repayment as soon as possible. In the long term this is the best approach.

Brown and New Labour's time in power has been a disaster. How can anyone expect the people who have so completely failed to run the country properly to be the people who are competent enough to get us out of the mess they caused!

Governments MUST be elected

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:09:18 GMT

I heard Brown yesterday say that he would stay as PM if he was re-elected. He seems to have forgotten that he was never elected as PM in the first place.

Brown is a very good example of the dangers and folly of allowing anyone positions of authority over a country without being elected by the people. If people get a chance to elect someone who turns out to be useless, then they have no one to blame but themselves. That is the way the system works.

But Brown was not elected.

That is the main reason, in my view, why people are so against New Labour now that Brown has taken the UK from an economy in a really good position (remember the Golden Inheritance of the last Conservative government?) and almost bankrupted the UK and leaving us with debts that will take twenty years of austerity to pay off!

Brown has messed up this country big-time! And he was not elected by the people, he was foisted on us by this Labour government. Both will take the blame for the mess that the economy and the country is in.

Brown and Afghanistan exit strategies

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:54:56 GMT

It would seem obvious from the latest comments from Brown that he has finally understood that this war in the Middle East is wrong, was wrong from day one, that we cannot win and more and more of our soldiers will be killed or injured.

I was taken in by Blair (at first) when he claimed that we had to attack Iraq or they would attack us.

It wasn't the quality of his argument, it was that it simply did not occur to me that the prime minister of this country would lie to us about the potential threat by another country!

Fortunately I realised quite quickly that everything blair was saying was rubbish and I have not believed a word he has said since!

But Brown has kept us in this war, even subsequently attacking Afghanistan. He has failed to justify the war, giving differing reasons why we need to be in Afghanistan.

Now Brown appears to have changed his mind and is working on exit strategies (which can be seen as meaning that the reasons we are at war were not that important after all!).

So what has changed to mean that Brown is now not firmly sticking to his stated position that this war is important to the UK?

I would suggest that nothing has changed. Except that we have an election coming up soon and Brown knows that he is not popular!

All that money wasted in these wars, let alone the lives lost and the lives blighted by injuries. We have an election coming up and Gordon Brown is changing his priorities!

MP's expenses - investigator reports results and recommendations

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:22:05 GMT

I like the way that Gordon Brown could not even organise an investigation that would keep him in the clear!

Why would he give the investigator the right to change the expenses rules retrospectively with the result that MPs who had followed the rules and been in the clear were now branded as cheats and thieves?

Most enquiries of this sort recommend changes of the rules that need to be introduced! And then everybody follows the recommendations!

This is a serious political mistake by Brown. He has inflamed the voters of this country against all politicians and MPs. What is he up to?

Cameron would have handled the situation very much better!!

Norwich by-election - bad result for Gordon Brown

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:34:17 GMT

I heard a labour minister talking on tv about the Norwich result. He said that it was disappointing but that it was a bad result for cameron!

Really! Apparantly the swing to the Conservatives was nowhere near high enough to win an election. He said that he was happy that New Labour could keep quite a lot of seats at the general election if this was a representative result!

So what planet was he on? There are two options here.

One was that he did not understand that a similar swing in a general election would give the Conservatives a majority of 190 seats!

The second was that he was happy to spout misleading and wrong information on tv in order to hide that fact that New Labour have very little support even in their own seats!

the economy - the main battle ground

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 04:01:43 GMT

The UK economy was already in a bad way when the recession started. It was caused by a worldwide recession caused by failures of many governments to regulate the financial industries properly.

Brown was in charge as chancellor and then prime minister and was responsible for ensuring that the financial regulation was done properly in the UK. He doesn't seem to like accepting responsibility for his actions if it might cause him to look bad, but he was in charge. It was his responsibility and he failed!

Gordon Brown and New Labour have been in control of the UK for a long time. They cannot blame anyone else for the parlous state of the UK economy.

It is a bit rich for Brown to accuse Cameron of planning to cut services when so much of the money spent on them was borrowed in the first place!

The next government has to pay back these debts. The cupboard is bare. We don't have the money to repay the debts let alone find the money for new services, schools and hospitals etc.

Whoever wins the next election will have to reign back on spending and increase taxes to pay back the debts that New Labour have accumulated during their time in power.

Brown has borrowed billions to get us out of the recession (that he is arguably responsible for!) . We now have to pay that money back from our taxes (don't forget that we have to pay back the interest as well!)

It is obvious that something has to change in the way that the economy is being run. The UK cannot keep borrowing money!

We are going to have to have increased taxes just to repay the existing debt. That is unavoidable and it will take many years of high taxes to clear these debts.

So where will the money come from to maintain the cost of the public services (including the NHS) ? No government, including New Labour, can carry on spending money that they don't have.

When I hear Brown attacking Cameron with accusations that the Conservatives will cut spending on public services, then I do wonder how desperate he is to cling onto power!

Can Brown really keep people from realising that the UK is saddled with so much debt that that it is too poor to keep spending money?
Can Brown really make enough people in the UK be more scared of what Cameron might do, than New Labour and Brown have already done to the UK economy?

How happy are people going to be with New Labour if they have to pay extra taxes and suffer reduced services for many years just to clear the debts incurred by Gordon Brown and New Labour?

And it is not inconceivable that Labour will again end up having to seek help from the International Monetary Fund as it did in 1976.

Gordon Brown and New Labour

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:59:28 GMT

The New Labour vote has collapsed. Perhaps it is because Gordon Brown’s handling of the UK economy is so poor. The UK economy is in a terrible state, the consequences are going to have to be massive tax rises to pay for the incompetence of those running the country.

The recent elections have hit Labour hard. They blame the expenses row. But the Conservatives have done well in both the local elections and the European election. So have the Libdems. So it cannot just be the expenses mess.
Perhaps people understand that New Labour and Gordon Brown are responsible for the expenses problems!

All the Labour people on TV and the radio seem to think that there is no competent person in the party who could do a better job than Brown who has actually got everything wrong.

Perhaps they are right!

‘I am the right man to lead these challenges’

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:53:05 GMT

I heard Gordon Brown defending himself following the utter devestation of the Labour vote today.

Apparantly Brown believes that ‘he is the right man to lead these challenges’. Of course it is not his fault. He can reel off a long list of things that his government are doing, although I am not sure that many of them have actually been done!
Brown is convinced that he can sort this out himself. (He may be the only person on the planet who does!)

I have to admit that his stewardship of the Labour party is a good thing. I don’t know of anyone else who could bring the Labour party to near extinction and single handedly turn most of the UK against them!

I am still trying to find out how many people holding government posts are not elected MPs!

Tony Blair needs to step in soon. He will be getting the blame for handing over to Brown without an election.