UK Politics IX

[williamjm]

Labour gained back 4 of the 25 council seats in Sunderland (most of which are already theirs) from the Tories, and there are rumours that Labour is making gains from the LibDems in several northern cities: Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, Hull. It's looking like the Conservatives and LibDems are both being punished in the North. But I am curious to see if Scotland is throwing out Labour as well.

First Scottish result is in now, it's a Labour hold but there's a 7% swing towards the SNP from Labour. Labour's vote share still rose slightly but the SNP's vote rose massively (seemingly a large part of that due to the Liberal Democrats falling to a quarter of their previous votes).

[Sophelia]

But I am curious to see if Scotland is throwing out Labour as well.

Rutherglen (safe Labour seat), retained Labour without any loss of votes, but a huge swing from LibDem to SNP to put SNP in second place. They are predicting that the SNP will make huge gains elsewhere where Labour is weaker. Need more data, but it looks like disillusioned Lib Dem voters are voting SNP over Labour, hence the SNP projected gains.

(Do correct me if I'm making errors - getting late!)

ETA: Cross-posted with williamjm. OK, I thought the Rutherglen table said Labour had gone up 2%, not fallen. But perhaps it fell in absolute terms. Oh, I see what you mean, yeah. I think my brain is falling apart, time for bed :P

ETA2: Going to go to bed and dream that the Lib/Con results are so bad that there is a vote of no confidence in the coalition and we get a chance to stop them before they do any more damage :-/

[williamjm]

Rutherglen (safe Labour seat), retained Labour without any loss of votes, but a huge swing from LibDem to SNP to put SNP in second place. They are predicting that the SNP will make huge gains elsewhere where Labour is weaker. Need more data, but it looks like disillusioned Lib Dem voters are voting SNP over Labour, hence the SNP projected gains.

There have now been three Scottish seats declared, all supposedly safe Labour seats and the SNP have won two of them with a 18% rise in the most recent result. It looks like the poll predicting a terrible result for Labour and a crushing victory for the SNP was accurate.

[Forderz!]

I hope your referendum turns out a yes vote.

The things I would do to get political reform seriously on the table in Canada...

[Hereward]

ETA2: Going to go to bed and dream that the Lib/Con results are so bad that there is a vote of no confidence in the coalition and we get a chance to stop them before they do any more damage :-/

What damage do you think will be avoided by bringing back the party that drove us to the edge of bankruptcy in the first place? Will they discover a secret horde of gold that Gordon forgot to sell?

[Vestrit]

I hope your referendum turns out a yes vote.

The things I would do to get political reform seriously on the table in Canada...

Yes, we could do with some reform here but I'm not sure AV is the answer.

Personally, I voted against AV for the simple reason that if we're going to change the system here, let's change it to something really good rather than something that's a bit meh as a solution and change just for the sake of change.

That said, I really don't know what I think the ideal solution would be. Maybe something like NZ's Mixed Member Proportional system, although that has its faults. And what opinions I do have on this are heavily influenced by whatever The Economist has to say about it... (hey, at least I admit it :P )

[Werthead]

What damage do you think will be avoided by bringing back the party that drove us to the edge of bankruptcy in the first place? Will they discover a secret horde of gold that Gordon forgot to sell?

You hit the nail on the head there. Labour either caused the problem or allowed it to happen, and the Coalition has made it considerably worse. So all three parties have really shut themselves out of the running, hence the low turn-out and why virtually no-one I knew voted.

[Usotsuki]

It will be interesting to see the final turnout figures, one assumes that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will outperform England and London will have to hang its head in shame.

[Vestrit]

You hit the nail on the head there. Labour either caused the problem or allowed it to happen, and the Coalition has made it considerably worse.

How? We're only about 10 minutes into the austerity programme. Bit early to be making comments like that isn't it? Latest GDP figures suggest growth. Sluggish growth and things could still go either way, but growth nonetheless and it's very early days, so it's a bit early to be making judgements about policies based on longer term recovery.

For the record, I'm in no way a Tory supporter (sorry Hereward :P ), so don't think I'm saying this from any party-political point of view

So all three parties have really shut themselves out of the running, hence the low turn-out and why virtually no-one I knew voted.

Way to exercise their franchise :rolleyes:

Sorry, but this really pisses me off. I know I don't get serious about many things on here, but I do get really fucked off with people who can't be bothered to vote. All around the world and throughout history people have fought and died for the right to vote, and yet we have people who just can't be arsed with exercising that right. Yet they'll spend the next four years whining

[Hereward]

How? We're only about 10 minutes into the austerity programme. Bit early to be making comments like that isn't it? Latest GDP figures suggest growth. Sluggish growth and things could still go either way, but growth nonetheless and it's very early days, so it's a bit early to be making judgements about policies based on longer term recovery.

I agree, and I'm not sure there's much option. In a perfect world austerity either wouldn't be necessary or could happen much slower, but when Gordon placed our dangly parts in the tender hands of the bond market, such luxuries were denied to us.

For the record, I'm in no way a Tory supporter (sorry Hereward :P ), so don't think I'm saying this from any party-political point of view

That's OK, some of my best friends aren't Tories, The List is getting unmanageably long already.

[Werthead]

How? We're only about 10 minutes into the austerity programme. Bit early to be making comments like that isn't it?

The austerity programme calls for major improvements by 2014, so we're already a quarter of the way there. In order to hit that target we would have needed to have seen rapid improvements by now with the groundwork being laid for an outright boom, which was not very realistic in the first place (I believe it was discussed here at length at the time). It's how the cuts were sold: a brief period of misery followed by growth and recovery, and there are no real signs of that happening 25% into the timeframe alloted for it.

Maybe a year from now things will have turned around and everything will be smelling of roses, but there is zero indication right now - when the votes are being cast - that this will be the case.

Way to exercise their franchise :rolleyes:

Sorry, but this really pisses me off. I know I don't get serious about many things on here, but I do get really fucked off with people who can't be bothered to vote. All around the world and throughout history people have fought and died for the right to vote, and yet we have people who just can't be arsed with exercising that right. Yet they'll spend the next four years whining

I 100% agree that if people are unengaged and can't be bothered to get up from the sofa to go vote, they should not be able to moan about it for the next four years.

However, there is also a very strong distinction to be drawn between people who can't be arsed and people who are politically engaged but who exercise their democratic choice to refuse to vote because they do not favour any of the candidates on offer. And in this election, faced with a choice between the Tories slashing everything in sight, the LibDems having flat-out lied to the electorate to get a chance at power and Labour still tainted by their failures, the choice not to vote appears to be an absolutely valid one.

[Lummel]

er...aren't low turnouts usual for local elections anyway?

[Hereward]

The austerity programme calls for major improvements by 2014, so we're already a quarter of the way there. In order to hit that target we would have needed to have seen rapid improvements by now with the groundwork being laid for an outright boom, which was not very realistic in the first place (I believe it was discussed here at length at the time). It's how the cuts were sold: a brief period of misery followed by growth and recovery, and there are no real signs of that happening 25% into the timeframe alloted for it.

Maybe a year from now things will have turned around and everything will be smelling of roses, but there is zero indication right now - when the votes are being cast - that this will be the case.

Again, what was the alternative, because no-one was going to keep lending us money with no credible plan in place to radically cut the deficit. You can see the effects on the cost of servicing the debt in places where that plan wasn't in place.

Secondly, you were never going to see major improvements in the deficit this year. With the redundancy terms in place in the public sector, it was always going to cost more to get rid of people in the first year than it was going to save. The financial benefits will be seen in the following years.

Will growth be weak? Yes, unfortunately. It's going to take years to rebalance the conomy, and particularly the government finances, away from an almost complete reliance on property (and property taxes) and the financial sector, so a boom is impossible whoever takes over.

[ljkeane]

You can see the effects on the cost of servicing the debt in places where that plan wasn't in place.

To be fair the circumstances for Eurozone countries are significantly different than for the UK so they aren't really comparable.

There needed to be a plan for addressing the deficit but it's far from clear it needed to be as severe as the Tory plan. Growth isn't just weak either, it's abysmal even compared to the very pessimistic forcasts we had.

[Hereward]

To be fair the circumstances for Eurozone countries are significantly different than for the UK so they aren't really comparable.

There needed to be a plan for addressing the deficit but it's far from clear it needed to be as severe as the Tory plan. Growth isn't just weak either, it's abysmal even compared to the very pessimistic forcasts we had.

Fair enough, I may have stretched the point too far in my comparison. :) The fact remains that no plan, or insufficiently rigorous plans, for deficit reduction will lead, at a minimum, to vastly increased debt servicing costs and in the worst case scenario the impossibility of borrowing the necessary money at almost any price. In that case the pain to be imposed on the public services and the low growth figures we are seeing would look like a walk in the park.

[ljkeane]

The fact remains that no plan, or insufficiently rigorous plans, for deficit reduction will lead, at a minimum, to vastly increased debt servicing costs and in the worst case scenario the impossibility of borrowing the necessary money at almost any price.

We aren't really anywhere near the point of being unable to borrow money though despite the poor fiscal situation, in fact the circumstances in the Eurozone probably make UK debt a relatively more attractive proposition. That's not to say that there didn't need to be a plan that was considered credible by bond markets but any growth makes the UK's situation far better and the Tories have gone straight to an extreme that was pretty clearly going to totally sacrifice growth in favour of shorter term deficit reduction.

[Maltaran]

My local councillor is called Albert Bore. I suppose if you're called A Bore then politics is the obvious career choice. It seems a lot of people think like me here, as the Greens overtook the Lib Dems to come third.

[Lummel]

It's nice that politicians are talking about rebalancing the economy away from financial services, but it's unlikely that this will happen and certainly not without some kind of major intervention.

Financial services has long been a strong part of the UK economy overall, our key competitive advantage that allowed us to outfight bigger countries was our ability to raise money afterall or if you prefer travel around the stockbroker belt and you can see who profited big time out of the industrial revolution. Then we have the creation of the Eurodollar market in what the 50s / 60s, deregulation of the city in 80s. There's a trend to growth in the financial services sector and at this particular time our financial institutions can still suck in money from round the world even if the rest of the world economy is too subdued to buy significant amounts of our whisky or divorces in our law courts.

The front loaded austerity cuts that we are seeing could work well politically - if we suffer all the pain now there's a chance that we'll be concentrating on other things (like an SNP referendum on independence maybe) come the next general election. Economically I think it's very unclear - if public services aren't being redesigned to operate with less manpower then potentially we'll end up buying those services back in from companies like Capita & Serco and that's not necessarily going to be anyless of a burden on the public purse than our current pay roll. Certainly it's going to take a while longer yet for the full impact of not spending on programmes like building schools for the future (and for sure it didn't seem to be a programme that had been designed to be cost effective) to work their way like an enema through the economy.

It's interesting reading the business pages of the papers seeing companies trying to renegotiate their rent bills with their landlords and then to contrast this with the growth of poundshops on the actual high street.

At present I'm not sure if any other political arrangement could do much better. I'm only aware of the SNP and the Greens as having programmes to promote growth in new areas of the economy.

[VarysTheSpider]

We aren't really anywhere near the point of being unable to borrow money though despite the poor fiscal situation, in fact the circumstances in the Eurozone probably make UK debt a relatively more attractive proposition. That's not to say that there didn't need to be a plan that was considered credible by bond markets but any growth makes the UK's situation far better and the Tories have gone straight to an extreme that was pretty clearly going to totally sacrifice growth in favour of shorter term deficit reduction.

The difference is exaggerated by both sides. Labour wants to reduce the deifict to £94bn by 2014 and the coalition want to reduce it to £70bn. The difference is not enough to make growth significantly stronger or weaker (and if it was much stronger, in conjunction with higher inflation it would only make it more likely the MPC would have raised interest rates by now).

[ljkeane]

The difference is exaggerated by both sides. Labour wants to reduce the deifict to £94bn by 2014 and the coalition want to reduce it to £70bn. The difference is not enough to make growth significantly stronger or weaker (and if it was much stronger, in conjunction with higher inflation it would only make it more likely the MPC would have raised interest rates by now).

Well that's debateable but either way it's a difference. In my opinion employing the absolute minimum of austerity meausures acceptable to bond markets in an attempt to improve growth rates should have been the plan rather than concentrating on deficit reduction as the coalition did.