Brown asks Voters to give Labour a second look

[Acrylic-bob]

Ok, here is a very partial list of Labour achievements over the past thirteen years...

Ballot Boxes are interfered with
Voting registers go missing
The Police can kill innocent people and get away with it
The state can kill people and get away with it
You can be put in prison indefinitely on the word of a politician
The State can torture people
Your children are monitored at School by Political Officers
Their behaviour is logged on a State database for their entire lives
Your innocent fingerprints, iris scans and biometrics are held by the State
You do not have the right to remain silent
You are watched on 4 million CCTV cameras
You may not photograph the Police
You do not have the right to protest peacefully
Curfews exist for entire communities
Your travel movements are logged and monitored
Who you vote for is logged and monitored
Your shopping habits are studied and logged by the State
Your emails and telephone conversations are recorded by the State
Your passport can be withdrawn at the whim of the State
Government agencies can use lie detector tests on you.

- £22,500 of debt for every child born in Britain
- 111 tax rises from a government that promised no tax rises at all
- The longest national tax code in the world
- 100,000 million pounds drained from British pension funds
- Gun crime up 57%
- Violent crime up 70%
- The highest proportion of children living in workless households anywhere in Europe
- The number of pensioners living in poverty up by 100,000
- The lowest level of social mobility in the developed world
- The only G7 country with no growth this year
- One in six young people neither earning nor learning
- 5 million people on out-of-work benefits
- Missing the target of halving child poverty...
- Child poverty rising in each of the last three years instead
- Cancer survival rates among the worst in Europe
- Hospital-acquired infections killing nearly three times as many people as are killed on the roads
- Falling from 4th to 13th in the world competitiveness league
- Falling from 8th to 24th in the world education rankings in maths
- Falling from 7th to 17th in the rankings in literacy
- The police spending more time on paperwork than on the beat
- Fatal stabbings at an all-time high
- Prisoners released without serving their sentences
- Foreign prisoners released and never deported
- 7 million people without an NHS dentist
- Small business taxes going up
- Business taxes raised from among the lowest to among the highest in Europe
- Tax rises for working people set for after the election
- The 10p tax rate abolished
- The ludicrous promise to have ended boom and bust
- Our gold reserves sold for a quarter of their worth
- Our armed forces overstretched and under-supplied
- Profitable post offices closed against their will
- One of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe
- The ‘Golden Rule’ on borrowing abandoned because it didn’t fit
- Police inspectors in 10 Downing Street
- Dossiers that were dodgy
- Mandelson resigning the first time
- Mandelson resigning the second time
- Mandelson coming back for a third time
- Bad news buried
- Personal details lost
- An election bottled
- A referendum denied.


Pretty impressive. The question that occurs to me is, if Graham is an honorable man, and I see no reason to believe that he is not, how can he justify asking us to vote for five more years of the same and worse? And for the other candidates, whenever they are chosen, what are you and the party you represent going to do about any of the items on the above list?

[Margaret Pilkington]

Your children can be stolen from you on the most flimsy grounds(and you cannot appeal or complain/make the case public)......adopted by people you do not approve of or align yourself to.

The current government have been more interested in social engineering, for their own ends, than protecting the rights of the populace.

[Acrylic-bob]

Oh there is tons more that could be added to the list and the opposition and the Lib Dems have been complicit in most of it.

[Margaret Pilkington]

and that is why it makes it very difficult to choose someone who you think will best represent the needs of the area.......I think I will be voting with a pin.

[Less]

Originally Posted by Margaret Pilkington

I think I will be voting with a pin.

Voodoo?

[Acrylic-bob]

Their hides are so thick I doubt that a pin-prick will even register.

[jaysay]

Originally Posted by Acrylic-bob

Their hides are so thick I doubt that a pin-prick will even register.

It would if fired by a cannon

[g jones]

In reply to Acrylic Bob.

It's not a perfect world. However much of the list is quite a degree away from reality. Was 1984 a police state or an attempt to keep the rule of law?

I think most people will attempt to make a balanced judgement somewhere between the more favourable and less favourable attributes, then compare the opposition by comparison.

There's a book 300+ Labour gains (by USDAW). If you have read it, you'd think Labour have been the best Government... ever. It all depends on which window you choose to look through as to what you see.

[Acrylic-bob]

Correct me if I am wrong Graham, but wasn't '1984' a work of fiction? And I thought that Orwell said that he wrote it to point out the dangers of Communism and Totalitarianism. How odd that you should choose this work in support of your argument.

I am sure voters are more than capable of judging the activities of New Labour over the past thirteen years, but the point is that Labour have been in government and the opposition is ...well...the opposition, who are by definition not in government. So I fail to see how any sort of meaningful comparison can be made between the two, since one would not be comparing like with like.

My question did not ask how you expected voters to understand recent history but how you justified recent history and hoped to persuade voters to accept another five years of the same administration.

[Acrylic-bob]

"It all depends on which window you choose to look through as to what you see."

I do hope you are not intending to use that argument when you are out canvassing or I can see you qualifying for a frequent user pass at the A&E department of our local PFI funded Hospital, which, by the way, we will be paying through the nose for, for the next quarter of a century.

[Wynonie Harris]

Originally Posted by Acrylic-bob

Correct me if I am wrong Graham, but wasn't '1984' a work of fiction? And I thought that Orwell said that he wrote it to point out the dangers of Communism and Totalitarianism. How odd that you should choose this work in support of your argument.

Graham's talking about the miners' strike and the Thatcher government's reaction to it, A-B.

[Stumped]

Highlighted by the current debacle over MP's expenses, none of the current bunch appear capable of managing the affairs of our lost nation. Nothing short of a revolution will alter the course that has been chosen for us by politicians whose ambitions extend no further than their personal bank accounts. I fear that the good ship Brittania is heading for the same fate as the Titanic, thanks, in particular, to a hopelessly inadequate captain and crew.

[Acrylic-bob]

Oh Pur-lease, have we not moved on from this yet? I suppose that Graham intends arguing that Selling off the gold reserves at the bottom of the market was somehow the fault of Margaret Thatcher, not to mention her underhanded involvement in the Great British Pensions raid. You know it wouldn't surprise me to discover that she also had a hand in the Boer War too.

[Tealeaf]

You need to be very careful what you write on here, A-B - because if you're not, you may get a 'big clunking fist' knocking on your front door. A few years ago - when Tony handed over to Gordon - relatively few people understood exactly what the former was referring to in respect to the beheaviour of the latter. Most simply interpreted it as a man not to be trifled with by the political opposition.

As of today, the public now know different about the Queen's First Minister; while some of his sycophants may well seek to deny the charges laid out in the press, it now appears that this evening an anti-bullying group has revealed that no less than three permanent Downing Street staff have sought counselling as a result of Brown's beheaviour towards them. This really is frightening stuff, because as well as having an idiot in charge of government for the last few years, we also have a psychopathic megalomaniac.

[Ken Moss]

Originally Posted by Acrylic-bob

The question that occurs to me is, if Graham is an honorable man, and I see no reason to believe that he is not, how can he justify asking us to vote for five more years of the same and worse? And for the other candidates, whenever they are chosen, what are you and the party you represent going to do about any of the items on the above list?

It's an interesting list and there is some vein of truth in it but, as Graham has pointed out, it is all a matter of how things are looked at.

As I have said before, look to the man rather than the badge. On the voting list who is the best person for the job? Would you vote for someone who you don't really believe in as a matter of principle? On a local level who controls your town or borough and are they giving you what you want?

In Hyndburn, even Tory supporters have named Graham as the best candidate.