Who Will The Geeks Vote For In The General Election

[SpuffMonkey]

Which is why the power is with, and always has been with the whips. Most of them just turn up and vote as directed by the chief whip, no thought goes into the decision.

 

I've seen some of the debates going on, it's pitiful when only four or five MPs turn up. This is what their paid for, you'd like to think that when serious decisions are taken all MPs at least know the background!

 

At a local level things are better, I'm tweeting with my local councilor, who gets things done. It's rare to have a PM from a Tory saying "cheers dude"!

 

Agree about whips - wouldn't it be a good idea if MPs had a secret ballot arrangement for voting too - just like they made the unions have - that would ginger things up a bit.

[SpuffMonkey]

When the politicians talk about 'cost cutting' in the public sector, emulating what the private sector is doing, be aware that for many this means cutting jobs.

 

For those old enough to remember, in the Thatcher era this meant millions of unemployed workers being paid benefits funded by oil revenues....... which we no longer have

 

Making public sector workers (like most of us) redundant means:

 

We claim benefits

 

We don't pay tax

 

We don't pay NI contributions

 

We don't make pension contributions

 

We buy less, which means we don't pay as much VAT, excise duty on the goods & services

 

Those left in employment have to shoulder a bigger proportion of the tax burden overall.

 

Think about who is promising the biggest cuts when you go to vote.......

 

Its always seemed a bit pointless that public se ctor staff pay direct taxes - the govt gives us money and then excessively bureaucratically takes it away again - given the large %age of public sector employees in the workforce - surely it would be a saving to just reduce our wages by about 30-odd % and sack a load of tax collecting staff?

[duncane]

Agree about whips - wouldn't it be a good idea if MPs had a secret ballot arrangement for voting too - just like they made the unions have - that would ginger things up a bit.

 

No - how would we, the voters, be able to hold them to account if we don't know how they vote on issues?

[localzuk]

Its always seemed a bit pointless that public se ctor staff pay direct taxes - the govt gives us money and then excessively bureaucratically takes it away again - given the large %age of public sector employees in the workforce - surely it would be a saving to just reduce our wages by about 30-odd % and sack a load of tax collecting staff?

 

Now you're getting into an area which seems quite reasonable on the surface. Why do we have such a complex tax system? We have several direct taxes (NI, Income tax at different levels), and a huge number of indirect taxes - VAT, fuel duty, beer duty, stamp duty, etc...

 

Surely, if all of these were streamlined down to a much simpler single direct tax, then we would have a smaller civil service? Add in the split between council tax and national taxes too and huge amounts of money are used simply to collect tax.

 

But then, you hit the snag - 'saving money', meaning 'sacking people'. What would those people do instead?

[torledo]

Its always seemed a bit pointless that public se ctor staff pay direct taxes - the govt gives us money and then excessively bureaucratically takes it away again - given the large %age of public sector employees in the workforce - surely it would be a saving to just reduce our wages by about 30-odd % and sack a load of tax collecting staff?

 

taxes can be quite effective if used correctly and well targetted.

 

But that's the point about taxes, they in part are used to impact how and how much we spend......i think people need to look beyond taxes as mere revenue generators. that way you see the benefit of using a variety of different taxes.

[srochford]

But then, you hit the snag - 'saving money', meaning 'sacking people'. What would those people do instead?

 

This is a real problem which no-one seems able to address. Cameron can trot out all the big business people who support his stance on NI and says how wonderful they are at creating jobs and yet all of them are actually trying to get fewer people doing more work (eg every supermarket near me now has rows of self service checkouts so you get 1 member of staff supervising 12 checkouts instead of 12 checkout staff)

 

It's easy to talk about people doing "non-jobs" but sometimes that's because there aren't any "real" jobs to do - we seem to have closed down all the manufacturing industry that used to employ people (and does anyone remember coal mines - they used to employ tens of thousands of people)

[nicholab]

The 3 main parties

Conservative off shore party and outsources politicians

New Labour More Brown

Liberal democrats might make a difference.

[localzuk]

We are approaching a point where there will simply never be enough jobs in the UK for the people that live here. Low down jobs are being replaced constantly (look at the Royal Mail dispute - that is over exactly this), manufacturing jobs are outsourced, IT jobs are being reduced and outsourced, more people buy things online instead of in shops, meaning less staff needed in shops.

 

What do the parties plan to do about this? How can the UK produce more long term jobs? One area which is mentioned in passing occasionally is the high-tech industry. We have massive amounts of skills and knowledge in engineering, electronics, computing etc... over here but our high-tech industry is tiny.

 

What about the big jobs that never get done? We spend decades talking about building new railway services, building new roads, or implementing a country-wide electric car charging grid but by the time it actually gets agreed, most of it is outsourced to other countries to build, or it is scaled back.

[witch]

When this thread started I meant not to join in but ... I am old enough to remember Thatcher and I live in an area devastated by her policies, even before she was PM.

 

When reading all this political rhetoric a song continues in my head ... "We are the self-preservation society". Think hard about all the analogies, both song words and film.

 

Me too - and I also remember the huge sigh of relief when the Conservative Party were thrown out and Labour got in.

Same old same old...

[SteveBentley]

I have a horrible feeling one of the constituencies near here is going to end up with a BNP MP - the sitting Labour MP (with an 8,000 majority) is frequently demonstrating himself to be embarrassingly out of touch and something of a liability, and I think many people who would generally have supported him will not vote, as they can't bring themselves to put a X next to the Tory's name, leaving the door open for a smaller party.

[Quackers]

I think it will be Lib Dem from me this time, always voted labour before, but there last term has been bad, and i think they are losing the plot now. No way on earth am i voting Tory, i do have some standards, they are twice as bad when it comes to taxes, remember their 80's run VAT went from 3% to 8%, then 8% to 15%, then John Major in the 90's put it up to 17.5%. I just hope many others vote Lib Dem too, as you get a bit sick of it always being between Labour and Tory.

[teejay]

I think it will be Lib Dem from me this time, always voted labour before, but there last term has been bad, and i think they are losing the plot now. No way on earth am i voting Tory, i do have some standards, they are twice as bad when it comes to taxes, remember their 80's run VAT went from 3% to 8%, then 8% to 15%, then John Major in the 90's put it up to 17.5%. I just hope many others vote Lib Dem too, as you get a bit sick of it always being between Labour and Tory.

 

These VAT rises were mainly down to EU legislation which specifies a minimum rate of 15%.

[Dos_Box]

I think it will be Lib Dem from me this time, always voted labour before, but there last term has been bad, and i think they are losing the plot now. No way on earth am i voting Tory, i do have some standards, they are twice as bad when it comes to taxes, remember their 80's run VAT went from 3% to 8%, then 8% to 15%, then John Major in the 90's put it up to 17.5%. I just hope many others vote Lib Dem too, as you get a bit sick of it always being between Labour and Tory.

 

Not Quite true. I've done a little looking up on this and:

 

Iin '79 when Maggie came to power VAT was already at 12.5% and then it was raised to 15% to offset the Income Tax cuts. It wasn't until '91 when it was raised to 17.5%, supposedly to offset Community Charge Relief (i.e. reduce 'poll tax' bills, but increase tax for everyone across the board).

 

Although VAT was originally brought in as a tax on luxury items, there was also a goods and services tax of 8% in '79, 5% was the EEC minimum VAT rate, but the UK had a zero rate exemption for certain items (books, domestic fuel, etc).

[Theblacksheep]

How can you tell them apart from the colour of the ties?

 

 

The opposition acts like the opposition until they get voted in. Political metronome.

[broc]

If the the political 'mood' represented by edugeek voters is anything to go by, My slightly cloudy crystal ball reveals a hung parliament, with Conservatives having more seats than Labour..... perhaps with an all-time lowest percentage share of votes of any party forming a Government......

 

The chances of a LibDem led coalition Govt is still a long way off.... the number of seats they would need to gain to achieve this is too great.

[localzuk]

Well, the '£12bn savings' by the Tories were exactly as expected - slash IT projects, freezing recruitment, and 'renegotiating contracts'.

 

Now, if people don't realise that that means 'job losses' across the IT industry, public sector and support sectors, then they are blind. The IT industry in the UK has already had a very rough couple of years - with 10k workers being laid off a week last year at one point. Do the Tories plan to sit back and wipe out yet another industry?

 

They talk of their being 400k people who leave and join the public sector in the UK each year, and say that by not hiring new people to replace them they can save money. Well, yes, not filling posts will save money but it will also damage services. Most of those people moving around jobs will fall within the 'lower paid' ranks of jobs. School TAs, administrative assistants, etc... What will these people do instead? Go on the dole?

 

The Tory plan is poorly thought out and will, if they get in, be poorly executed.

[teejay]

At least the Tories are being farely honest by political standards about this, Labour are claiming they'll protect services yet Alistair Darling has said there will be cuts bigger than in the 80's under Thatcher. The reality is that we cannot afford a public sector anywhere near as big as it is at the moment and we never have been able to, Labour have just kept borrowing more and more money even through the good years to pay for something we cannot afford.

[localzuk]

At least the Tories are being farely honest by political standards about this, Labour are claiming they'll protect services yet Alistair Darling has said there will be cuts bigger than in the 80's under Thatcher. The reality is that we cannot afford a public sector anywhere near as big as it is at the moment and we never have been able to, Labour have just kept borrowing more and more money even through the good years to pay for something we cannot afford.

 

The problem is, we can't afford *not* to have a large public sector. There isn't a private sector for them to move to!

[broc]

The public sector provides a significant number of jobs for a large number of relatively low-paid workers, they all still pay taxes, NI, pension contributions, VAT, excise duty. They also consume goods & services provided by the private sector as part of their work...... power, water, accomodation, furniture, PCs, telephones etc etc.

 

If you get rid of these jobs & they all start claiming benefits where does that leave us? At least while they are working they are paying their way..... If the public sector cuts spending the private sector will suffer even more than it already has .... that is why the current economic crisis has not been quite as bad as it was forecast to be. The libDems have wised up to this.......

[srochford]

Labour have just kept borrowing more and more money even through the good years to pay for something we cannot afford.

 

This isn't quite true - National Statistics Online

 

Through the late 90s and into the early part of the 2000s Labour paid back debt - it fell from about 42% of GDP to just less than 30%

 

In part, that's because GDP went up but it's also because Gordon Brown as chancellor did pay back money which had been borrowed earlier.

 

Over the past few years, borrowing has gone up (and dramatically recently) but it doesn't mean we can't afford it. If our economy doesn't recover then perhaps we can't but I'd like to think that it will recover and start growing again (the phrase "green shoots" isn't popular but we did see a tiny amount of growth at the start of this year and many of the other indicators are pointing the right way)

 

A government can increase income from tax either by putting up the rate or by having more people working and paying tax - sharing out the load nicely. If GDP goes up (and it almost certainly will) then the debt problem is reduced.

 

To me, it's a bit like taking out a mortgage. When you first take it out, it eats up a huge chunk of your income but then time goes by, your income goes up and after 5-10 years the mortgage payments don't seem so bad at all.

[localzuk]

Yet another reason for me not to vote Tory - my local Tory MP, Ian Liddell-Grainger, both didn't bother to reply to my last letter to him outlining my complaints about the Digital Economy Bill, but also didn't even bother to turn up to vote on it.

[FN-GM]

Well, the '£12bn savings' by the Tories were exactly as expected - slash IT projects, freezing recruitment, and 'renegotiating contracts'.

 

Now, if people don't realise that that means 'job losses' across the IT industry, public sector and support sectors, then they are blind. The IT industry in the UK has already had a very rough couple of years - with 10k workers being laid off a week last year at one point. Do the Tories plan to sit back and wipe out yet another industry?

 

They talk of their being 400k people who leave and join the public sector in the UK each year, and say that by not hiring new people to replace them they can save money. Well, yes, not filling posts will save money but it will also damage services. Most of those people moving around jobs will fall within the 'lower paid' ranks of jobs. School TAs, administrative assistants, etc... What will these people do instead? Go on the dole?

 

The Tory plan is poorly thought out and will, if they get in, be poorly executed.

 

Hopefully some of us might see the managed ICT disappear

[localzuk]

Hopefully some of us might see the managed ICT disappear

 

Unlikely - that will be where 'renegotiating contracts' comes in. ie. getting more stuff outsourced, for less.

[broc]

Unlikely - that will be where 'renegotiating contracts' comes in. ie. getting more stuff outsourced, for less.

 

Could get very interesting..... You might find renegotiating actually means more PFI, as this does not appear as 'borrowing' on UK PLCs books.

 

It's a classic accountancy trick of shifting costs from 'capital' to 'revenue'..... a bit like one of us buying a car on HP rather than using a bank loan.....

Edited April 9, 2010 by broc
I wish I could type properly & spell at the same time

[teejay]

This isn't quite true - National Statistics Online

 

Through the late 90s and into the early part of the 2000s Labour paid back debt - it fell from about 42% of GDP to just less than 30%

 

In part, that's because GDP went up but it's also because Gordon Brown as chancellor did pay back money which had been borrowed earlier.

 

Over the past few years, borrowing has gone up (and dramatically recently) but it doesn't mean we can't afford it. If our economy doesn't recover then perhaps we can't but I'd like to think that it will recover and start growing again (the phrase "green shoots" isn't popular but we did see a tiny amount of growth at the start of this year and many of the other indicators are pointing the right way)

 

A government can increase income from tax either by putting up the rate or by having more people working and paying tax - sharing out the load nicely. If GDP goes up (and it almost certainly will) then the debt problem is reduced.

 

To me, it's a bit like taking out a mortgage. When you first take it out, it eats up a huge chunk of your income but then time goes by, your income goes up and after 5-10 years the mortgage payments don't seem so bad at all.

 

Thats because that figure doesn't include off book debt such as PFI and other such accounting fiddles, when you include these, debt has risen considerably through the years when those figures show a decrease.