General Election Predictions

Thinking labour or ukip to vote for this year but can't help thinking ukip is a Tory party in disguise.

Thing about the bookies odds is that they are predicated on the bets they receive.

The pollsters say that the Tories may win the most seats by a handful but Labour would still be in a position to form a minority government, punters read these reports and bet accordingly so the odds change to reflect this.

Now, with modern-day techniques, an average of the polls are probably correct so sites which take an average of all the polls such as Electoral Calculus are most likely correct. That said, they haven't used any reasoning for their overall prediction as they are now saying that the stats indicate a Conservative/Nationalist Parties coalition is most likely!

Hmmm. If I was to be cynical, I wonder if the Tories are going to drop any pretense of caring about the Union and plan to offer the SNP another referendum in return for their support in forming a coalition? If they did that and the SNP were will to throw the rest of us under the bus enough to accept in return for protection of the Scottish budget for the next parliament and another referendum, we'd probably see a break up of the Union and the chance for the Tories to try to fix themselves as the dominant party in England. I wouldn't trust those fornicators not to try this. It comes to something when a Conservative PM makes even Thatcher look principled and reasonable!

UKIP and Labour are at opposite ends of the political scale. UKIP are mostly made up of disgruntled Tories who want to be further to the right. Labour are a centre-left party. If you wouldn't vote for the Tories due to their policies, the only possible reason for voting for UKIP is if you wanted the UK out of Europe.

Pretty much everyone agrees an exit from the EU would be an incredibly risky proposition with no guarantees we'd be able to keep access to the market. Norway is often used as an example of what we could do, but UKIP seem to disregard the fact that if we left we'd still have to pay billions to the EU for this market access (and follow EU employment law, as do the Norwegians) without having any say in the running of it!

It's the ukip immigration policy that made me stand up and think about them , I like the ideas of an Australian style points system that they propose to deal with immigration.

The Tories are all about the rich so I wouldn't vote for them.

Swinging more towards Labour but that is with a bit of hesitancy.

Problem is that as EU members, we can't limit immigration like the Aussies. We're signed up to various treaties which agree that we will follow EU laws which we helped to write!

The only way to be able to implement this sort of immigration cap would be an EU exit with all the risks that entails.

One interesting point which often gets overlooked is what would happen to the 2.3 million or so UK expats living in Europe in the event of an EU exit?

I'd imagine plenty of pensioners on the Costas would be screwed. If lots of them are forced back, that's an extra burden on the NHS which is already in trouble though we would at least get their pension expenditure back into our economy.

Quoted from jonnyboy82

It's the ukip immigration policy that made me stand up and think about them , I like the ideas of an Australian style points system that they propose to deal with immigration.

The Tories are all about the rich so I wouldn't vote for them.

Swinging more towards Labour but that is with a bit of hesitancy.

The Australian system works for them because they have historical skill shortages. (A friend of mine was thinking of emigrating there. He works in computers and even when he decided not to go the firm who were interested in him offered him work to do remotely because we are so far ahead of them in computer know how).
Our problem is that although we have some key area skills shortages our main "need" is for people to do the jobs that for whatever reason our people don't want to do such as land work. UKIP may say that they only want certain skilled people here but they haven't said how they will deal with the shortfall in manual labouring jobs. Before anyone says get the unemployed to fill those jobs-if you were an employer what would you prefer-people from abroad who do the jobs willingly or some of our virtually unemployable misfits of society who wouldn't turn up etc. etc. We are talking a lot of jobs and the slack of unemployed people who genuinely do want to work would soon be taken up. The inconvenient truth is that even in times of prosperity there is a percentage of the workforce who are nothing less than unemployable.

Quoted from Maringer

Thing about the bookies odds is that they are predicated on the bets they receive.

The pollsters say that the Tories may win the most seats by a handful but Labour would still be in a position to form a minority government, punters read these reports and bet accordingly so the odds change to reflect this.

Now, with modern-day techniques, an average of the polls are probably correct so sites which take an average of all the polls such as Electoral Calculus are most likely correct. That said, they haven't used any reasoning for their overall prediction as they are now saying that the stats indicate a Conservative/Nationalist Parties coalition is most likely!

Hmmm. If I was to be cynical, I wonder if the Tories are going to drop any pretense of caring about the Union and plan to offer the SNP another referendum in return for their support in forming a coalition? If they did that and the SNP were will to throw the rest of us under the bus enough to accept in return for protection of the Scottish budget for the next parliament and another referendum, we'd probably see a break up of the Union and the chance for the Tories to try to fix themselves as the dominant party in England. I wouldn't trust those fornicators not to try this. It comes to something when a Conservative PM makes even Thatcher look principled and reasonable!

Nightmare scenario that mate! However if the polls are to be believed Labour face a virtual wipe out in Scotland and yet it doesn't look like the Tories CAN get enough English seats to get a majority. It is by no means certain that the separation of Scotland from the rest of the UK would signal the unchallenged power of the Tories.

Yeah, I realise that an English-only parliament wouldn't guarantee the Tories power in perpetuity (as some commentators seem to think), but they would probably manage to get another 5 years after the next parliament up to the point that the excrement really hit the fan and we have nothing left to sell off. I shudder to think what sort of neoliberal bullshit they could come up with given 10 years to do so.

Labour is, indeed, toast in Scotland. In part due to the fact that they stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tories in support of the 'No' campaign in the independence referendum (mostly because of the aftermath), but also incompetence and arrogance. Scottish Labour leader Murphy is apparently despised by many Scots and is known for being involved in one of the expenses controversies. They've really copulated it up and some commentators think they will never be able to regain any real level of influence in the country.

As for this election, I'm sort of torn here. If the Tories win more seats than any other party as seems quite possible, I suppose that morally they should have the first dibs at forming a government. On the other hand, the current bunch running the party are devious, mendacious illegitimates who wouldn't care one jot about the truth if it kicked them up the bottom.

It's odd that I really didn't think this bunch of Tories were too bad in the early years of the parliament. Sure, they were incompetent and their economic policy was nonsensical, but at least I thought they believed what they were doing. As time went on, their assumptions were proven incorrect (hence the never-admitted implementation of an economic 'Plan B') but despite this, they continue on the same path and have proven that they will say or do anything to get back into power. In particular, they've continued to misrepresent pretty much everything that led to the last recession in an attempt to blame all ills (including those they created themselves) on the previous Labour government.

I've always been pretty moderate politically but the way in which the majority of the media has acted over the past few year in general and the past few months in particular makes me sort of understand how and why some people become more radical. The personal attacks on Miliband haven't worked so now all the right-wing newspapers have reduced themselves to reissuing spurious Tory propaganda on a daily basis. Most of this is easy to disprove if you search out publicly-available facts and figures. The problem is that most of the electorate have no idea that their newspapers of choice (most of which are owned by wealthy foreign nationals or non-doms) are deliberately trying to pull the wool over their eyes in favour of the owners clear political preference.

Therefore, I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that, even if the Tories win the largest number of seats, they really don't have a legitimate claim to being the party of government as it is nothing like a fair playing field so I'd be happy to see a Labour/Nationalist party coalition tell them to go and intercourse themselves.

I can only imagine the hysteria in the right-wing press if (and hopefully when) this occurs. Will lead to the end of the Union in due course I'd imagine, as the attacks on the Scots will be something to behold.

there seems a lot of worry about the defecit which george osbourne wouldn`t exist by 2015

Let's get the economy back into a proper recovery before worrying about the deficit and reducing the national debt.

We aren't going to run out of money, Sterling is a fiat currency so we can always print more if we need it (QE to help the banks, for example).  We are in no way comparable to Greece (or Italy or any other Eurozone country) as we have our own central bank and set our own monetary policy. The economies of Greece (and Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland) have been particularly shafted by the fact that the ECB is enacting policy which benefits Germany and France, the two strongest Eurozone countries rather than the weakest ones who are really struggling.

The current coalition government inherited an economy in the early stages of recovery and cut it off completely with their austerity and we barely avoided going back into recession. Cumulatively, some estimates reckon that this has cost us over 4% growth over the last parliament. Thousands of pounds per person lost from the economy to stop the debt going up by a few percentage points and this at a time when borrowing costs are incredibly low. When Osborne claims success for getting a couple of percent growth this year, people shouldn't forget what has been lost in previous years.

As a rule of thumb, if you ever see or hear a politician (of any party) or a journalist talk about the "nation's credit card", they are talking utter balderdash because this economically nonsensical.

Edit: Oops. A bit late. A couple of drinks too many so I'd better get off to bed!