Struggling to vote

[papasmurf]

This may help you decide. (if the link works.)



http://cdn.jwplayer.com/players/J3z2HBHq-4Sd9EWyh.html">//http://cdn.jwplayer.com/players/J3z2HBHq-4Sd9EWyh.html

[johnofgwent]

As I said I took part in the referendum in 75 I knew what the Government told us , if it had contained anything about our Parliaments Sovereignty been interfered with by what is now called the EU, I would not have voted in favour of the Common Market, but the back then our economy was in tatters and jobs were being lost right across the UK.



Fishing in our waters was just an example of our loss of control of the UK  or waters and borders, EU regulations now effect virtually all business in the UK even a small business that does not export to the EU, more red tape and another cost added to their overheads.



Our Courts System is good in fact many other nations over the years have based theirs on our system of Justice, however people having taken their cases dealt with by our highest Courts have taken appeals to the European Court of Appeal which over ruled our Courts decision.



We are hopefully leaving at long last I have waited decades for this, yes it will not easy but we will make it work, it all depends how childish and obstructive the EU is they fear others will follow our lead.

I did not have a vote then. I was 17 years nine months old. I too am certain the propaganda put out at the time was that this was a trading matter.



But my research since then, specifically detailed study of white papers and speeches made to interested groups that hardly count as the vox pop ... suggest quite the opposite.



Right now the microfiche copies of the speeches are stored in a dropbox account and dropbox recently restricted even further their analretentive sharing policy.



I find Heaths green paper as stored now contain heavy hints of what was to come, as did the preface to the treaty of Rome. But while the green paper was widely sold, the treaty of Rome was not as available then as it is now.



What I certainly was not told was the text of heaths speech to a pro Europe lobby group in which he frankly admits his negotiations started right where the failed labour ones that de Gaulle vetoed left off. WITHOUT CHANGE.



And the abour white paper promised uk integration into a 'union' dedicated to the socialist dream of the money in the sensible bits of the EEC being poured endlessly like a golden river into the basket cases in hope they can be 'advanced'.



De Gaulle, Heath admitted, vetoed the UK entry because he felt the UKs people were unready, insincere or simply unaware through not having been told the truth.



I have for many years believed the EEC was all about a trade agreement. Sadly a few years ago I came to understand this was not the case, though what was told to the general public in public may not have been the whole truth...

[BeElBeeBub]

As I said I took part in the referendum in 75 I knew what the Government told us , if it had contained anything about our Parliaments Sovereignty been interfered with by what is now called the EU, I would not have voted in favour of the Common Market, but the back then our economy was in tatters and jobs were being lost right across the UK.



Fishing in our waters was just an example of our loss of control of the UK  or waters and borders,

except it's not as simple as that. This is a classic example of Brexiters arguing by only focussing on one part of the situation.



UK fishermen get to fish in other member state's territorial waters.  The entire EU waters is open to all EU fishing vessels. As fish are a limited resource quotas are put in place managed at a continental level. The UK has the 2nd largest catch of any member state and most of that catch is exported to the EU.

EU regulations now effect virtually all business in the UK even a small business that does not export to the EU, more red tape and another cost added to their overheads.

Can you provide an example of "red tape" from the EU that affects a non exporting UK business *that wouldn't be there if the UK wasn't in the EU*?



Bear in mind in almost every single area some sort of regulation would be needed. The only question is wheter the regulations are UK only (and thus the costs of administering those regulations falls to the UK alone) or EU wide (where the admin costs are spread.



If brexit will reduce red tape then why is the civil service being ramped up?



Finally almost no UK business, no matter how small, will operate with zero inputs. Those inputs may well be from the EU.  Does it make life easier for a UK business if it can easily source parts/materials/services from across the EU or if it is restricted to only what is available from the UK? Would Morgan motor cars be better if they were restricted to only UK parts?



If brexit were so good for for business why is almost all business from big to small against it? With the exception of a few (almost always big) names everyone is pro.remain.  my friends father runs an agricultural.machinery business. The classic SME run out of some barns employing a few dozen people. He's worried about the cost and availability of the hydraulics, valves, bearings he depends on.  He certainly isn't looking forward to (or even seeing any) "red tape".

Our Courts System is good in fact many other nations over the years have based theirs on our system of Justice, however people having taken their cases dealt with by our highest Courts have taken appeals to the European Court of Appeal which over ruled our Courts decision.

one of the reasons that the UK is popular around the world is that UK Cort judgements are automatically enforceable in the EU. If you sue someone in a UK court, you can enforce that judgement even if they aren't based in the UK. You don't need to go to a court in (say Germany) and say "I have this UK judgement please enforce it in Germany".  Leaving the EU will shrink the ability of UK courts to enforce their judgements outside the UK.



As for the "European court of appeals" there is no such court.



If you mean the CJEU/ECJ - that can only rule on matters of EU law.  It's jurisdiction is tightly defined. The UK has benefited from it's judgements considerably (see BSE beef ban in France - the UK was able to get that lifted whilst it took over 20 years to get it lifted by Japan)

We are hopefully leaving at long last I have waited decades for this, yes it will not easy but we will make it work, it all depends how childish and obstructive the EU is they fear others will follow our lead.

We can leave any time we wish. We have been the ones asking for extensions.



What we can't do is dictate that the EU give us every single thing we demand.  That was *always* going to be subject to negotiation and to think we deserves better treatment as a non-member than members get is childish.



The irony is, *if* the EU gave the UK everything the Leavers promised they would it would lead to the end of the EU.



A bad deal could destroy the single market and EU.



So for the EU "no deal" really was better than a "bad deal".

[Churchill]

As I said I took part in the referendum in 75 I knew what the Government told us , if it had contained anything about our Parliaments Sovereignty been interfered with by what is now called the EU, I would not have voted in favour of the Common Market, but the back then our economy was in tatters and jobs were being lost right across the UK.



Fishing in our waters was just an example of our loss of control of the UK  or waters and borders, EU regulations now effect virtually all business in the UK even a small business that does not export to the EU, more red tape and another cost added to their overheads.



Our Courts System is good in fact many other nations over the years have based theirs on our system of Justice, however people having taken their cases dealt with by our highest Courts have taken appeals to the European Court of Appeal which over ruled our Courts decision.



We are hopefully leaving at long last I have waited decades for this, yes it will not easy but we will make it work, it all depends how childish and obstructive the EU is they fear others will follow our lead.

[BeElBeeBub]

As I said I voted in that referendum back in 1975 it was a all about a better easier trade deal with 12 countries across Europe which would create more jobs which we were desperate for back then, reduce the cost of food, that is how it was sold to us by the Government who IMO was very economical with the truth.

Wasn't "all about" trade. Sure trade was important but from the very pamphlet you linked to



The aims of the Common Market are:



- To bring together the peoples of Europe.



- To raise living standards and improve working conditions.



- To promote growth and boost world trade.



- To help the poorest regions of Europe and the rest of the world.



- To help maintain peace and freedom.



As you can see trade is only one of 5 points and isn't even the first point.

It was called the Common Market , it morphed over the years into the EU which many millions of people do not like and many are now voicing the fact they want to leave becuase they feel their way of life their culture is being slowly eroded  

the title of the pamphlet referee to "the European Community (Common Market)".

The "common market" was an alternative shorthand for 'the European community" in common use at the time.

There was nothing about Brussels making laws that we had to adopt, fishing in our territorial waters, unrestricted immigration that today our infrastructure cannot cater for,our Courts over ruled  etc drafted by poloticians from different countries we have little or no control over that we cannot elect or remove.

Ah fishing! Why is the fishing sector more important than (say) the automotive, aerospace or banking sectors?



Immigration isn't uncontrolled.  It's just a lot less bureaucratic with the EU.



Our courts aren't overuled by foreign courts. We share a highest court in some areas with the other EU members. This helps keep consistency which is vital for the single market to operate. The UK appoints judges and has significant input into the CJEU.  This is no different than the UK supreme court being the final court for England, Scotland, NI and Wales. Tell how a single market could operate without a common final court to.arvitrate decisions.



The UK has a significant input into setting the laws for the EU. The single market was basically a UK project, undertaken because it would immensely benefit the UK. As one of the big players we set the agenda. Sure sometimes we butted heads with France or Germany, but we were able, more often than not, to influence EU policy to the benefit of the UK.

This is what every household in the UK was sent to make their decision on, some years later John Major took us in lock stock and barrel when he signed the Maastricht Treaty we were not asked



 http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm">http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm

[johnofgwent]

The one thing I should have added to the post is that I, like some 70-80% of the population according to a report from Keele University some years back, am cursed with living in one of the constituencies where the majority enjoyed by the sitting mp is so huge 35% of the constituency get what they want and 65% waste their vote.



That fact alone, that the vote I and the vast majority of the electorate have is wasted no matter where it is cast

because it will be cast in a constituency against a party with a majority that is weighed not counted, accounts for more despair and disillusionment than any other.



My sole hope is that enough labour voters are so sickened by their former choice that they go elsewhere or do not bother , and that every one of the labour leave voters finds enough of the acceptable face of the left in the leaflet the brexit party candidate put out.



I think labour are going to get a kicking in a seat to the north where they were sensationally kicked out in the early years of this century but that owes as much to labour failure to give a toss to the valleys it governs from cardiff as it does to hatred of tory policy. We will have to wait and see.



If I recall correctly you have stated a firm belief in FPTP for the majority in government it is supposed to deliver, or certainly did in the past.



I wonder, looking back over the past decade, if that stance is now still valid, and whether itbis worth giving some 65% of the voting public the perception that voting is pointless. Because in the current atmosphere, where voting is pointless , killing, or if not killing, then certainly violence, seems the only way to get what you want..



It is a shame the remainers did not throw a massive party in cardiff the day they shafted boris. For I feel a rivulet or six of blood in the gutters and pavements of st mary street might have reminded a bunch of scum in the senedd at cardiff just how far from the expressed will.of the people their current stance truly is ...

[Major Sinic]

Indeed we will.



However



I think you need to remember maggie Thatcher personally (I read the cabinet notes years ago) shut down the medical research council funding that sustained my research funds and thus threw eight years of my life, work and dreams down the toilet. Admittedly I was able to use it to find better ways to kill people that wished you and your son dead for doing their jobs, but that was not on her radar I feel.



By the same token, her purge of heavy industry and her conversion of this country into a nation of other peoples shop workers, call centre operatives and sellers of ponzi schemes they called sub prime mortgages and derivative investments turned the entire area where I live and for thirty to forty miles in almost each direction from a land where a young man could look forward to a job, a weekly pay packet, a roof over his head be it his or the councils, paid for not by handouts but by the contents of that pay packet into a desolate wasteland of urban decay and dereliction.



And she and those who came after her did absolutely f**k all to help those she threw on the scrap heap.



Arguably - and those arguments might get aired with weapons before long if another tory asshole stands on a torfaen street demanding we vote boris to stop corbyn -  the act if destruction of our heavy industries was "necessary" - although at the time the countries that counted us friend and foe alike considered maintaining them in their own lands a matter of national security - arguably then the destruction of those industries was necessary, but the destruction of the lifestyle those rather highly taxed wages brought, and the throwing of tens of thousands onto the dole as an act of political spite and hatred inevitably caused a certain harvest to be reaped, and the seeds that harvest provided feed the people here to this day



It is for that reason that most of south wales will sooner behead, spitroast and eat a tory mp than vote for one.



And while it is entirely true that blair did f**k all for the people maggie shafted and their children too, that's because he was never a labour party politician was he.



As I have said, several times on the old forum and elsewhere, when we buried my grandmother, who was herself a bit of a rebel, who demanded from the chairman of the meat pie and pasties company her family founded, her grandfather, her share of the firm's capital as a dowry which she used to put down as a large part of the £300 the three bed brand new home she moved into at the age of 23 with her former pit pony handler turned drayman turned lorry driver she married against the family wishes .... when we took her from that house in a coffin, back in the late 80s, we found among her stuff an OXO tin with lots of faded photographs and a pay packet. A pay packet for what we believe was an uncle or great uncle, his last pay packet ever, for the week he was killed in a coal mine explosion, a pay packet for which the mine owner stopped half a days pay for him and everyone else, because they failed to clock out, by reason of being dead.....



It is that sort of treatment of the people that our industry depended on which drove the people to support the labour party and its nationalisation of the mines and without that detail the arguments do tend to lose something if their essence.



And if you think those sentiments extinct, come see what our HR dept did to someone who HSE are taking the case of while they were off sick following their industrial accident.....



So there are very real reasons of political ideology and spite and hatred on the tory side which mean that at least 20 of Wales's 40 seats are lost to the tory party and will be until the next millennium.



And then there is the problem of my constituency



The area was always a labour stronghold. It last returned a tory in the overwhelming victory that party had in the 1930s. From its creation and apart from that one brief dalliance with the tory party, its dockers and steel workers and coal fired power plant workers and workers in two to three dozen light and heavy industrial and technological companies exploiting all sorts from metal, plastic and rubber, from chemicals and pharmaceuticals , the sheer mass of reasonably well paid even if heavily (by tidays standards) taxed workforce voted overwhelmingly for a labour mp over a tory one.



The Tory party here was recently taken over by a Pakistani chap who by rights should have died in the RPG attack on Benazir Bhuttos motorcade. Just what the f**k he was doing in it no one has been able to work out, but he walked away from the carnage ... and shortly after abandoned his labour councillor post (after a tasteless attempt to get his wife a party job when the labour councillor doing it died of a heart attack in the chamber and he canvassed his fellow councillors suggesting they pay his wife to do the work the dead guy did for free before the body arrived at the mortuary)....



He abandoned his labour party post before they lynched him for terminal bad taste and joined the welsh nationalist cottage burners... where he stood for the regional party list, and successfully conned the people of south wales into.voting for him...



Once elected on that party ticket, he demanded the party employ his wife and daughter, and when they would not  he gleefully accepted a Tory bribe of a job offer for them if he turned tory .... which he did.



For the 2015 and 2017 elections, the daughter to whom the tories gave a publicly funded welsh assembly job as part of the bribe to get his bum under their whip became our tory party candidate, probably because his wife somehow got the job of running the constituency party selection committee.....



And this despite her standing in 2010 as the PLAID party nominee in abertillery against the lad for whom I was an election agent while I was the candidate in the adjoining islwyn ward.... the area that when called something else sent Neil kinnock to fall in the sea....



So, I shall with no little pleasure be putting my 'x' against our brexit party candidate.



First and foremost because I wanted, and always knew I wanted, the hardest of hard Brexit  ever since Cameron said it was the only one that made sense



Secondly because if you actually look at the sort of things they are promising, round here it very much reads like a centrist manifesto that in past years of my far wealthier youth would have been aimed by labour and Ted heaths one nation tories alike at the high skilled blue collar and white collar working people that live here and among whose numbers I count myself and always didxeven when I ran my own business....



And thirdly and lastly because there is no way on this earth I'm voting for that marxist pIRA loving shitebag and Albert steptoe clone, but neither am I voting for the scrubbed pink skinned wax jacket wearing two collie walking landowner theyve dug up to be the tory candidate here this time, because he's only got the nomination because as he admits in his election leaflet,  he's a really close friend of that Pakistani crook.

Well as I believe I have made clear in many a past post I have a great deal of time for your views and the story telling manner in which you deliver them. You obviously realise that you will waste your vote, and if enough voters do the same, that we might end up with with Wurzel as the figure head PM being manipulated by the extreme left wing Momentum. However I can not argue against a principled position.



Personally it is not the views of the local Tory candidate which I find so bitterly disappointing; she, like me is a One Nation Conservative, but rather her jolly hockey sticks, gushing girl guide approach to every issue and an inability to stand up for her principles. I am therefore voting for the Tory ideology rather than a candidate.



Unlike you, although a committed leaver, I have always wanted a deal which leaves us free to trade as we wish and can negotiate and removes us from the probable outcome of being part of new super power governed, in reality, by Germany and France as at present. This is why the Labour policy is such an absolute betrayal of the 2016 Peoples Vote; it is Remain without Representation or Remain. I hope and pray that Labour Leavers see it for the scam that it really is; subject to a customs union, the rules and restrictions of the single market, the ECJ, obliged to continue to pay billions to be treated as a vassal state but without any voice whatsoever - frankly the end of the UK as a global influence.

[johnofgwent]

Without a majority Conservative government, we will have a choice between Remain and Virtually Remain. However distasteful you may find delving around in that barrel if you want to influence your future and the future of your children then vote and vote Conservative.



The real oxymoron is that a vote for the Brexit Party is in reality as effective as a vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats and is in reality a vote for Remain. The Brexit Party will win no seats but may contribute to the country having a harlequin hung parliament dedicated to ignoring the 2016 referendum, with a harlequin clown as Prime Minister!

Indeed we will.



However



I think you need to remember maggie Thatcher personally (I read the cabinet notes years ago) shut down the medical research council funding that sustained my research funds and thus threw eight years of my life, work and dreams down the toilet. Admittedly I was able to use it to find better ways to kill people that wished you and your son dead for doing their jobs, but that was not on her radar I feel.



By the same token, her purge of heavy industry and her conversion of this country into a nation of other peoples shop workers, call centre operatives and sellers of ponzi schemes they called sub prime mortgages and derivative investments turned the entire area where I live and for thirty to forty miles in almost each direction from a land where a young man could look forward to a job, a weekly pay packet, a roof over his head be it his or the councils, paid for not by handouts but by the contents of that pay packet into a desolate wasteland of urban decay and dereliction.



And she and those who came after her did absolutely F@@@ all to help those she threw on the scrap heap.



Arguably - and those arguments might get aired with weapons before long if another tory asshole stands on a torfaen street demanding we vote boris to stop corbyn -  the act if destruction of our heavy industries was "necessary" - although at the time the countries that counted us friend and foe alike considered maintaining them in their own lands a matter of national security - arguably then the destruction of those industries was necessary, but the destruction of the lifestyle those rather highly taxed wages brought, and the throwing of tens of thousands onto the dole as an act of political spite and hatred inevitably caused a certain harvest to be reaped, and the seeds that harvest provided feed the people here to this day



It is for that reason that most of south wales will sooner behead, spitroast and eat a tory mp than vote for one.



And while it is entirely true that blair did F@@@ all for the people maggie shafted and their children too, that's because he was never a labour party politician was he.



As I have said, several times on the old forum and elsewhere, when we buried my grandmother, who was herself a bit of a rebel, who demanded from the chairman of the meat pie and pasties company her family founded, her grandfather, her share of the firm's capital as a dowry which she used to put down as a large part of the £300 the three bed brand new home she moved into at the age of 23 with her former pit pony handler turned drayman turned lorry driver she married against the family wishes .... when we took her from that house in a coffin, back in the late 80s, we found among her stuff an OXO tin with lots of faded photographs and a pay packet. A pay packet for what we believe was an uncle or great uncle, his last pay packet ever, for the week he was killed in a coal mine explosion, a pay packet for which the mine owner stopped half a days pay for him and everyone else, because they failed to clock out, by reason of being dead.....



It is that sort of treatment of the people that our industry depended on which drove the people to support the labour party and its nationalisation of the mines and without that detail the arguments do tend to lose something if their essence.



And if you think those sentiments extinct, come see what our HR dept did to someone who HSE are taking the case of while they were off sick following their industrial accident.....



So there are very real reasons of political ideology and spite and hatred on the tory side which mean that at least 20 of Wales's 40 seats are lost to the tory party and will be until the next millennium.



And then there is the problem of my constituency



The area was always a labour stronghold. It last returned a tory in the overwhelming victory that party had in the 1930s. From its creation and apart from that one brief dalliance with the tory party, its dockers and steel workers and coal fired power plant workers and workers in two to three dozen light and heavy industrial and technological companies exploiting all sorts from metal, plastic and rubber, from chemicals and pharmaceuticals , the sheer mass of reasonably well paid even if heavily (by tidays standards) taxed workforce voted overwhelmingly for a labour mp over a tory one.



The Tory party here was recently taken over by a Pakistani chap who by rights should have died in the RPG attack on Benazir Bhuttos motorcade. Just what the F@@@ he was doing in it no one has been able to work out, but he walked away from the carnage ... and shortly after abandoned his labour councillor post (after a tasteless attempt to get his wife a party job when the labour councillor doing it died of a heart attack in the chamber and he canvassed his fellow councillors suggesting they pay his wife to do the work the dead guy did for free before the body arrived at the mortuary)....



He abandoned his labour party post before they lynched him for terminal bad taste and joined the welsh nationalist cottage burners... where he stood for the regional party list, and successfully conned the people of south wales into.voting for him...



Once elected on that party ticket, he demanded the party employ his wife and daughter, and when they would not  he gleefully accepted a Tory bribe of a job offer for them if he turned tory .... which he did.



For the 2015 and 2017 elections, the daughter to whom the tories gave a publicly funded welsh assembly job as part of the bribe to get his bum under their whip became our tory party candidate, probably because his wife somehow got the job of running the constituency party selection committee.....



And this despite her standing in 2010 as the PLAID party nominee in abertillery against the lad for whom I was an election agent while I was the candidate in the adjoining islwyn ward.... the area that when called something else sent Neil kinnock to fall in the sea....



So, I shall with no little pleasure be putting my 'x' against our brexit party candidate.



First and foremost because I wanted, and always knew I wanted, the hardest of hard Brexit  ever since Cameron said it was the only one that made sense



Secondly because if you actually look at the sort of things they are promising, round here it very much reads like a centrist manifesto that in past years of my far wealthier youth would have been aimed by labour and Ted heaths one nation tories alike at the high skilled blue collar and white collar working people that live here and among whose numbers I count myself and always didxeven when I ran my own business....



And thirdly and lastly because there is no way on this earth I'm voting for that marxist pIRA loving shitebag and Albert steptoe clone, but neither am I voting for the scrubbed pink skinned wax jacket wearing two collie walking landowner theyve dug up to be the tory candidate here this time, because he's only got the nomination because as he admits in his election leaflet,  he's a really close friend of that Pakistani crook.

[Churchill]

As I said I voted in that referendum back in 1975 it was a all about a better easier trade deal with 12 countries across Europe which would create more jobs which we were desperate for back then, reduce the cost of food, that is how it was sold to us by the Government who IMO was very economical with the truth.



It was called the Common Market , it morphed over the years into the EU which many millions of people do not like and many are now voicing the fact they want to leave becuase they feel their way of life their culture is being slowly eroded  



There was nothing about Brussels making laws that we had to adopt, fishing in our territorial waters, unrestricted immigration that today our infrastructure cannot cater for,our Courts over ruled  etc drafted by poloticians from different countries we have little or no control over that we cannot elect or remove.



This is what every household in the UK was sent to make their decision on, some years later John Major took us in lock stock and barrel when he signed the Maastricht Treaty we were not asked



 http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm">http://www.harvard-digital.co.uk/euro/pamphlet.htm

[BeElBeeBub]

Really for me its regaining our Independence for a corrupt undemocratic organisation we were taken into without being asked, the vote I took part back in 75 was about jobs and easier trading nothing else.

but the country was asked twice.



Once before joining in the 1970 GE, where the conservative manifesto had this section.

A Stronger Britain in The World

If we can negotiate the right terms, we believe that it would be in the long-term interest of the British people for Britain to join the European Economic Community, and that it would make a major contribution to both the prosperity and the security of our country. The opportunities are immense. Economic growth and a higher standard of living would result from having a larger market.



But we must also recognise the obstacles. There would be short-term disadvantages in Britain going into the European Economic Community which must be weighed against the long-term benefits. Obviously there is a price we would not be prepared to pay. Only when we negotiate will it be possible to determine whether the balance is a fair one, and in the interests of Britain.



Our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more, no less. As the negotiations proceed we will report regularly through Parliament to the country.



A Conservative Government would not be prepared to recommend to Parliament, nor would Members of Parliament approve, a settlement which was unequal or unfair. In making this judgement, Ministers and Members will listen to the views of their constituents and have in mind, as is natural and legitimate, primarily the effect of entry upon the standard of living of the individual citizens whom they represent.

The Conservatives won an outright majority and so enacted that commitment and used their perogative powers to sign the treaty which was then ratified by the UK Parliament in late 72.



Then in 1975, the country was asked again, this time "Leave Vs Remain" and during that campaign there was plenty of high profile debate around sovereignty.  I'm the TV debate I linked elsewhere sovereignty was the first item discussed and there were multiple exchanges. In that referendum nearly 17.4 million votes remain, more than twice the number who voted leave.



So the idea that the UK was taken in against it's will, without being consulted or that it was only about jobs and easier trading is revisionist in the extreme.

[Churchill]

Pulling the ladder up is pretty much brexit in a nutshell.

Really for me its regaining our Independence for a corrupt undemocratic organisation we were taken into without being asked, the vote I took part back in 75 was about jobs and easier trading nothing else.

[Baron von Lotsov]

No not childish in the slightest. Principled I would suggest is a more accurate description. Spoiled papers are counted and announced. Sitting on your disinterested arse at home is not!

Says who though? Many people are principled arse sitters when there is no point in hiking over to the polling station to deface the ticket. This is a democracy - right, hence if the answer is none of the above then different people will have different ways to express that. I personally see it like the act of putting a complaint into the government about something or other. You know some official will file it away somewhere and absolutely nothing will be done, and that's how it is with spoilt ballots. Another example would be a complaint to the BBC. The only thing the BBC would ever take a hint about is lack of licence fee payers, and I believe it is the same with the government. Lets say one day way into the future Labour were elected on 10% of the vote. It would be nothing but a farce and it would look like Mugabe telling the world how they really do believe in democracy. No one would buy it. Whether the ballots were spoilt or not would not be the issue. I recall in the book 1984 there is a bit that said that opposition to the party by the proles was expressed with not more than the occasional nod or wink. That's like the spoilt ballot right. It's the officially sanctioned allowable protest. They would think themselves lucky if that was all there was.

[BeElBeeBub]

Nice selfish attitude you have I'm all right Jack pull the ladder up :roll:

Pulling the ladder up is pretty much brexit in a nutshell.

[patman post]

It could be argued that anyone currently over the age of 70 should abstain because they currently don't have a real physical incentive in making a good future for those of 50 and under.

However, that's not to say they couldn't/shouldn't participate in focus groups dealing with pensions and welfare for the aged, or even gerontology in the NHS.



Also, MPs living locally (rather than being a party appointee allocated a constituency to represent) could become more a thing of the past if the electoral system is changed to PR where national lists are made up from the party faithful...

[Churchill]

Pubs all over have gone to the wall even in London have gone to the wall over the last 30 years or so, my local has gone , our high street is full of charity shops, or crap fast food outlets, can't park anywhere so people drive to the Business Parks where parking is free



Business rates and overheads are too high, when it comes to pubs why pay over the odds for a pint when you can get a case of beer far cheaper from the Supermarket, a couple of bottles of wine for £12, the nearest pub to me charges £5.60 for a pint of Guinness



When I go back up North for a visit I find the cost of living much cheaper, but shops in the high street are struggling