David Cameron Is Now Prime Minister

[sam fisher]

What do people think of the election outcome and the probable LibDem-Conservative coalition?

 

[quote]

I'm surprised that Clegg is going to be deputy PM, I guess that was the Conservative's side of the bargain. Also, there're going to be (5?) Lib Dems in the cabinet.
I'm against the Lib Dem idea of a reffurendum to change to Proportional Representation. Partly because it would give those BNP bastards a good shot at getting bigger.

But yeah, we'll see how long this lasts.

 

[Nintendo]

Damn, I miss Mr. Blair.

 

[iprice]

Hey, I got thrashed in the election. Can I be second in command of the country now, please?

 

[craigix]

I'm surprised that Clegg is going to be deputy PM, I guess that was the Conservative's side of the bargain. Also, there're going to be (5?) Lib Dems in the cabinet.
I'm against the Lib Dem idea of a reffurendum to change to Proportional Representation. Partly because it would give those BNP bastards a good shot at getting bigger.

But yeah, we'll see how long this lasts.

I'm not that keen on PR either, but have you ever considered that the BNP are all talk and it's Labour who have actually been killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims over the last 10 or so years?

Forget the BNP - Vote Labour if you hate them foreigns.

My personal opinion would have been for a raw Tory government, Thatcher style.

 

[Esn]

You guys aren't getting a referendum on PR, but on something called "Alternative Voting" - if nobody gets over 50% of first choice votes, second choice votes are taken into account. The Lib-Dems get more seats under that system, but not nearly as many as under PR.

 

[goonaman]

Look at Birmingham city council for a Lib Dem-Tory coalition doing a generally good job. I'm just hoping that we'll not go to the extremes that both conservative and labour have put the country through and maybe we'll get good common sense government with unknown things like compromise. Let's face it the two main parties usually get in because the previous government has gone power crazy, corrupt and screwed around the country so we vote for the other side until they mess it up. Maybe we're trying something a bit different

 

[silver]

My personal opinion would have been for a raw Tory government, Thatcher style.

Really? My memory of the Thatcher years includes hardcore strikes, riots, unemployment going from 1 to 3 million, reduced spending on social services, education and housing, a massive recession and privatisation... I get reminded of this every year my train fares get hiked by a huge %, for a service that is typically rubbish and late, and the people running and owning the private companies contracted to run the trains pay themselves 5-6 figure salaries for a job well done. (Not that New Labour at any better - they signed up to this as well, with PPP.)

 

[Trevsweb]

I love the stick that thatcher gets. sure she went nuts at the end a bit like Gordie but shes got huge balls for facing a working class country that dispised her.
all this labour winging that thatcher ruined everything is a load of crap. if she ruined things reverse/fix them then labour... oh wait you didnt in 13 years you stuck with the plan and used conservatives as your scapegoat.

we celibrated with champagne and i have a hangover yey! go cameron!

tbh the lib con coalition might be a set back for the tories but better than nothing. as long as the hippies don't act like they won the election

 

[silver]

I love the stick that thatcher gets. sure she went nuts at the end a bit like Gordie but shes got huge balls for facing a working class country that dispised her.
all this labour winging that thatcher ruined everything is a load of crap. if she ruined things reverse/fix them then labour... oh wait you didnt in 13 years you stuck with the plan and used conservatives as your scapegoat.

we celibrated with champagne and i have a hangover yey! go cameron!

tbh the lib con coalition might be a set back for the tories but better than nothing. as long as the hippies don't act like they won the election

Don't assume because I have bad memories of Thatchers time I like Labour, or that I'm a left wing. (I'm actually not a great fan of democracy in general, but that's another story.)

These days there is very little difference in policy between the parties - they bluster about how different they are, but they are all pretty much middle-ground.

The main reason lots of things are a bit of a mess is because no party looks beyond the next election, so all policies are designed to have an impact quickly. Real change takes decades - look at some of the World Class public services provided by some of the Scandinavian countries - that's what 50 odd years of sustained policy gets you.


Having said all that, if you were around for the dark days of thatcher's recession and the related carnage, the only way you could look back in fondness is if you were minted so it did not touch you, or simply love watching the working class suffer.

 

[Monk]

I'm hoping that, with no SINGLE party in full control, the politicians will be too busy screwing each other over to do the country significant harm.

 

[finty]

I still can't believe people think they are going to be better off under the tories. Say hello to a failing economy and rising unemployment again, you just elected Thatcher with more make-up.

Ah well Tory governments usually drive more moderate nationalists to get behind a united Ireland so something good might come from this.

 

[Dead1nside]

Nick Clegg has lost the opportunity of a generation to gain PR for the country. I think there is sufficient demand for a change in electoral system, why not be more open minded. AV is no real change. It's not even what the independent commission recommended under labour which was AV+.

People love to bring up the weakness of coalition governments in a PR system, that they're inevitably always a coalition. Shady political horse trading in smoke filled rooms. What do you think politics has been, and always will be? What do we have now? A coalition.

I voted Lib Dem and I'm disappointed that Chris Huhne can come out and say that their stance on the economy, to wait until cutting the surplus, was misrepresented and that they've agreed with the Conservatives.

No faith restored in politicians, no hope for holding the government accountable with a proper electoral system, which weights some people's votes more than others.

 

[Ravnos]

I'm hoping that, with no SINGLE party in full control, the politicians will be too busy screwing each other over to do the country significant harm.

It's worked out like that in Canada. The minority Conservative government hasn't been allowed to really get out of hand the way the previous Liberal and Conservative governments have. They've done stuff I've disagreed with (governments usually do), but the prospect of being forced out of government seems to have kept them from going too crazy. On the downside, the idea that they might have earned enough trust to form a majority in the next election scares the shit out of me.

Regarding changing the election system, people here are opposed to it because the proposed changes would usually mean more minority governments. I say bring it on. The government needs to have a healthy fear of both the electorate and the other parties. It keeps them honest.

 

[Monk]

The minority Conservative government hasn't been allowed to really get out of hand the way the previous Liberal and Conservative governments have. They've done stuff I've disagreed with (governments usually do), but the prospect of being forced out of government seems to have kept them from going too crazy.

That sounds most excellent. Let's hope the downside doesn't materialise. Over here the Lib Dems seem to have forced "fixed term of office" onto the Conservatives as a way of ensuring the Torys can't call an election as soon as they've hoodwinked the customer base into trusting them. I'm torn between thinking that the LibDems have too much power (they didn't just lose the election, they lost it spectacularly by coming a very distant third place) and thinking tha tmaybe they have it about right - on the basis that although the Lib dems got "around" 1/4 of the vote, the Conservatives only got "around" a third themselve. Not very accurate math, but it was a pretty close-call election. Which everyone has said is a clear call by the elecortae for {insert their favourite policy here}.

Regarding changing the election system, people here are opposed to it because the proposed changes would usually mean more minority governments. I say bring it on. The government needs to have a healthy fear of both the electorate and the other parties. It keeps them honest.

Over here they seem to be afraid of it on the basis that it may give rise to more bigots in politics. I struggle to wrap my head around that concept at times, but only because I have sarcastic tendencies. The BNP apparently got a nasty shock when, liek the Lib Dems, their predicting gains turned out to be losses in the real world. It's like the credit crunch all over again, but with political power instead of money. "We're gonna be RICH! Whoops, where'd it go?". Personally, if we're that racist a country we probably deserve to have it reflected in our politics. My suspicion is that it would go the other way - that people are generally more decent than we imagine, once you've cherry-picked the politicians out of the crowd.

I tend to view politicians like this, in a seriously over-generalised kind of way - politics attracts people who lust after power on a scales that extends to an entire country (or sometimes even more!). Politics is basically full of failed Bond villains - they failed the science test so, with no ultra-nasty weapon to force their will upon us, they have to be more cunning.

 

[craigix]

Ah well Tory governments usually drive more moderate nationalists to get behind a united Ireland so something good might come from this.

Like adopting the Euro and becoming closer to the EU? Because that worked out well for Southern Ireland... oh...

 

[grahamr]

Ah well Tory governments usually drive more moderate nationalists to get behind a united Ireland so something good might come from this.

Like adopting the Euro and becoming closer to the EU? Because that worked out well for Southern Ireland... oh...

Actually the euro has done a lot of good in ireland for many years. I remember punts, and the crappy state the country was in. Now it has a pretty decent infrastructure. Sure it might be causing them pain now in terms of not being able to de-value, but punts never had the weight sterling did anyway, so there is much less room to move.

ROI problems stem from the fact so much of the economy was driven by construction and property. As such the crunch hit harder than most other places. Being in the euro means the other european countries have a vested interest in stopping it completely going down the tubes.

This is all 'different' in the uk, so it doesn't mean the euro is a good (or bad) thing for UK, but lib dems never claimed to be pro-euro, only pro-referendum-if-it-suited-uk-interests-in-the-current-economic-climate. I doubt it will even be mentioned with the current setup.

Its hard to tell if thatcher was a good thing or a bad thing. You can throw a lot of probably valid criticism, but the preceding labour government was so absolutely awful, it made her government seem like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

My own opinion is that being just pro-united Ireland is really daft. So is being anti-united Ireland. What matters is the quality of life and freedoms of real people, not labels.

 

[andys]

Nick Clegg has lost the opportunity of a generation to gain PR for the country. I think there is sufficient demand for a change in electoral system, why not be more open minded. AV is no real change. It's not even what the independent commission recommended under labour which was AV+.

People love to bring up the weakness of coalition governments in a PR system, that they're inevitably always a coalition. Shady political horse trading in smoke filled rooms. What do you think politics has been, and always will be? What do we have now? A coalition.

I voted Lib Dem and I'm disappointed that Chris Huhne can come out and say that their stance on the economy, to wait until cutting the surplus, was misrepresented and that they've agreed with the Conservatives.

To be fair, there was a big difference between the debates pre-Greece (and Spain, and Portugal) and afterwards.

Of course, the problem is that political parties find it very difficult to say what they feel without being evasive.

The problem with cuts is that it is a hugely critical word - what does it mean? "Efficiency savings" usually implies job losses, and they aren't great, but we need to get our finances on an even keel, make sure we get value for money (that doesn't necessarily mean lower taxes, but it means that every extra job makes sense and provides value... is that the case now?)

£6bn is a drop in the ocean, and odds are there will be tax increases to pay for it as well. The benefit of the lib dems is that they will hopefully adjust the natural Tory inclinations to dump the tax load in a certain way and rebias it to be fairer. Of that we can only hope.

I think coalitions are a pretty reasonable outcome anyway - the alternative is to have an elected executive and then an unwhipped parliament, but look at the mess that does in, say, America. Or to have hugely unstable governments. Those complaining about manifesto commitments - well, what do you expect? You've got the representatives of two groups of people who have tried hard to come up with something that is a reasonable compromise. That is because there wasn't a majority to do anything else.

The suggestion seems to be an elected upper house (hopefully by STV, but knowing the parties it will be PR lists which are awful), and AV for the commons, which again, is better than what we have now.

I'm cautiously optimistic, but it very much depends on the Tory party to be reasonable - I have a horrible suspicion that future policy (which will adjust by the circumstances) will be hugely more Tory biased.

 

[Nova]

May god have mercy on us all.

 

[sam fisher]

May god have mercy on us all.

What? The Den! May God have mercy on us all!