This discussion is now closed.

Check out other Related discussions

What motivates people to vote Labour?

Scroll to see replies

I didn't say they don't exist- I asked why do engineers not need the support from them?

My point is that unions only really represent the underskilled by relying on the "safety in numbers" game. They have to rely on their numbers because the skills, per individual member, are not deemed high enough for a large salary (hence they keep moaning saying they want higher wages).

My point? Unions are a club for the unskilled masses to join, to rely on their numbers, rather than their skills, to get pay rises.... when they don't deserve them. The market pays what the market deems is the correct price. If you are getting paid too little- leave. If too many of the workers left, the company would have to pay more, right? Well, not if they can hire new people for the same salary the union members were on- which suggests the salary was fair to begin with. Supply and demand.

But no-one participating in the market is looking for the 'correct' price, but for the price most beneficial to them.

Reply 781

Iron Lady

Original post by Swanbow

I find it ironic that someone called the Iron Lady is in agreement with a person who has Ronald Reagan as their display picture, 1980s special relationship all over again? :wink:

haha

Yup.

Reply 782

Iron Lady

Original post by Midlander

The Royals cost £200 million a year-think we could've got them to chip in a few quid.

Or teenage mothers should learn to be more careful and fund their offspring the honest way.

Reply 783

Barksy

Labour rely on scum to exist. It is of no surprise they breed scum too.

Reply 784

billydisco

Original post by River85

That is how I originally read your post, which is why I asked you what makes you that they don't need them?

Thank you for the reply.

As for the part in bold, not necessarily. It's not easy for a main household earner, who is supporting a family, to leave a job and sign on the dole. There may be more people who would then take this job, but this can say more about the relative lack of job opportunites (and versatility of employers) in the region, that it does about the fairness of the salary.

Moreover, unions can play an important role in advising employees of their rights, preventing unfair (and illegal) work practices, and provide support to those unfairly dismissed.

Trade unions are a vital part of a strong civil society in my opinion.

I'll perhaps comment more tomorrow .

I fully support unions in the sense of giving advice to employees who may be disciplined etc- but when a union starts getting its members to stop working, all for pay conditions then it's a case of un-deserved greed.

Reply 785

billydisco

Original post by anarchism101

But no-one participating in the market is looking for the 'correct' price, but for the price most beneficial to them.

and if they offer too low a price they will not get any workers.....

The correct price is the price at which supply meets demand....

Reply 786

Rakas21

Original post by Fas

i am in agreement with a lot of your posts in this thread - notice how Tory supporters have red gems and labour supporters have green ? says a lot about this forum :tongue:

Green here and there are plenty of others.

Original post by MagicNMedicine

You would see outrage from the bankers and very quickly there would be an exodus from the City. However I think we should call their bluff and allow this to happen. The UK has become too heavily dominated by financial services, and it is not a case of if financial services leaves, there will be nothing to take its place. The resources that were previously being devoted to these 'services', which in some cases are socially useful but in many cases are just rent-seeking activities to take a larger share of existing wealth into their hands without adding anything extra themselves, would be released to other activities. The UK could have a stronger engineering and manufacturing base if all the Imperial and Cambridge engineering grads were working in high level engineering rather than in financial engineering.

The problem is when people call for this, there is a very strong right wing lobby against them that says its an outdated leftist ideology, the UK's comparative advantage is in financial services now and if it leaves, then it will just leave London and be welcomed with open arms in Switzerland/Hong Kong (and perhaps expose their governments to huge bail out costs in the end too....)

Perhaps but not all will leave because my plan does not restrict their investments, it simply means they have to hold more cash and therefore lend less. Since most of London's banking profit comes from the investment side this would be largely unnafected. I'd also throw them a bone and abolish the banking levy.

Original post by MagicNMedicine

Well here is George Osborne in 2007:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6975536.stm

So in 2007 George Osborne thought that Labour's projected spending levels were appropriate and was pledging to match their spending proposals for the next three years.

Strangely we have heard since the election that Labour were on a 'debt binge' leading up to the financial crisis - incredible that Osborne had not realised this by 2007!

Spend spend spend thats what Osborne wanted to do. £615bn spending wasn't enough so £674bn was more in line.

You have to wonder, if the financial crisis hadn't hit in 2008, and Osborne had come in with this open chequebook policy, what state would we have been in if the financial crisis had hit in 2015...?

You need to read between the lines on this one. Notice that he only commits for the first 2 years to £29bn extra spending with that finishing in 2011 and a review in 2009. Now i think it's fairly obvious that the 2009 review would have found 'issues' needing to be dealt with and in 2011 we would get the Gove, Lansley and Smith reforms which all make savings to at least some degree.

I maintain that with no recession we'd have seen a balanced budget in this parliament just without such harsh cuts under the Tory government.

Reply 787

Midlander

Original post by Joe909

The people who moan about the royals don't even pay tax.

GTFO

I paid tax all last year whilst I was on placement.

GTFO

Reply 788

River85

Original post by billydisco

and if they offer too low a price they will not get any workers.....

Not if the workers have limited choice. You don't seem to realise the lack of employer versatility in some regions.

Or what about employees who can only manage menial, low paid work (not necessarily through lack of skills, but perhaps illness and disability)?

As for trade unions, so you do admit that they are more than just tools to bully and professionals can benefit from them?

Reply 789

Midlander

Original post by Iron Lady

Or teenage mothers should learn to be more careful and fund their offspring the honest way.

£200 million on the Royals or the NHS?

Reply 790

Iron Lady

Original post by Midlander

£200 million on the Royals or the NHS?

What's that got to do with my point?

Reply 791

Midlander

Original post by Iron Lady

What's that got to do with my point?

You think the Royals are more deserving of money for no reason than commoners are-so answer the question, £200m on the Windsors or the NHS?

Reply 792

That Bearded Man

Original post by Iron Lady

On the reverse, a government that stays out of people's lives benefits the working class for when they want to better themselves.

How does this logic apply when unemployment is so high?

Reply 793

That Bearded Man

Original post by FrogInABog

I hate the "out of touch" argument; there are plenty of very wealthy people in the Labour Party, and it doesn't make sense to criticise anyone for being well off. Would you recommend that all the board members of Oxfam and Save the Children should be sacked, on the basis that the majority of them weren't born in abject poverty? It doesn't make any difference whether or not someone dealing with a problem has personal experience of it. I had glandular fever last year; my doctor had never had it, but it doesn't make him any less qualified to treat me.

The Atlee government gets all the credit for the NHS, but the reality is that Churchill's government had already endorsed the white paper drawn up by Sir Henry Willink (Conservative Health Minister) with most of the core principles included. Bevan inherited all this, and after making some of his own adjustments, put in place the recommendations.

How? Why should I want important decisions about the running of my country made by some man in Belgium who doesn't even speak the same language as me? The EU and all the associated European bodies are just giant piles of bureaucracy, constantly trying to impose their will on member states.

The Right to Buy was originally a Labour proposition, and while they initially opposed the Conservative policy, they changed this stance when they realised how popular it was amongst traditional Labour supporters. Since its inception, 2 million homes have been sold under the scheme, which means many people who could otherwise never dream of home ownership have been able to get on the property ladder. The lack of building was a problem, but Labour did little to deal with the problem in the boom years, so are not really in a position to criticise.

The "out of touch" argument exists as an alternative to the "cold-hearted" argument, look at the bedroom tax. Are they naive or cruel?

The installation of an NHS surely goes against the views of the Tory party, thus I can't imagine a Conservative system functioning as well as the Labour choice.

I like the idea of close ties to other countries in Europe, imagine if all of Europe had one language, one currency, low taxed imports so we could import a multitude of goods for less.

You can argue about how it's implemented but isolationism is not the best policy forward.

Reply 794

That Bearded Man

Original post by billydisco

Some of us don't base our political beliefs on what sells- but rather what is best for the country :wink:

I applaud your dedication but if I watched some groups being targeted for cuts and some not and I found that I was unfairly in the group for cuts there is not a chance I'd vote for them.

Reply 795

That Bearded Man

Original post by vivavangveing

I despise the Tory's as much as anyone, but we all knew what they were like. Labour however, have been just as much, if not more underhand - Privatizing the Nhs? Labour started all that in 2000 you can read all about here:Labour Used Virgin 'Restricted' Report to Open NHS to Healthcare Companies
Along with pfi, they sealed it's fate along time ago, of course we didn't hear about it though (they restricted it) and surprise surprise the press are too busy bashing the NHS and wont pick it up.
The Tory's played right into their hands; this is exactly how Labour wanted it, i wouldn't be surprised if this was their master plan - giving the Tory's the rope to hang themselves and all the bad publicity along with it.

They don't care about poor people anymore than the Tory's do; bloating welfare gave them a captive audience. What about the tax credits fiasco; it would have been far more effective to implement a living wage.

Labour pretend to be something they're not. The Tory's said they wouldn't dismantle the NHS and now all this stuff about Stafford NHS is coming out with impeccable timing. It's always been in the public's interest to know about that, but we're only finding out now because it's in the governments interest to tell us. Why? so when we find out there is no more NHS, they can say it was corrupt/unfit for purpose look at Stafford blah blah. And the Lib dem's we all know what happened there. They're all as bad as each other.

David Cameron has truly screwed disabled people though, especially given he claimed dla for his child, what they've done to that is shocking and nothing to do with fraud because the fraud rate is very low. It is purely based on cost saving, hence they have an estimation of 300 000 people who will loose it before they've even been assessed or pip has been introduced.

Good post here

Reply 796

River85

Original post by That Bearded Man

The installation of an NHS surely goes against the views of the Tory party, thus I can't imagine a Conservative system functioning as well as the Labour choice.

The New Right to a degree, yes, though not the Tory party as a whole.

The Conservative party is not monolithic. One Nationism was central to Disraeli's conservatism which, although it fell out of favour as we entered the 20th century, enjoyed a revival during the inter-war years and was influential leading up to, and during, the post-war consensus (the establishment of the welfare state and NHS).

Even though One Nationism (again) fell out of favour with the rise of the New Right and Thatcherism, conservatism has still grudgingly accepted the basic principles of the welfare state and NHS.

Reply 797

That Bearded Man

Original post by Fas

Actually on that first point , the current Tory Government have borrowed less money than the last Labour Government . I have the statistics to back it up . And the " cut cut cut " policy despite it's annoyance , is more preferable than Labours "spend,spend,spend " policy.

Public sector spending is rising, not falling.

Also cut, cut, cut = no growth.

Reply 798

Superunknown17

Insanity. No I'm joking, used to be the voice of the working class who were often taken advantage of by the upper classes. Nowadays I just see it as a change from the Conservatives, there doesn't seem to be much real difference between the two major parties anymore and they're just two sides of the same coin. I'd urge people not to vote Labour or Conservative but people are too scared to 'waste' their vote and vote for another party who promote real and meaningful change.

Reply 799

MagicNMedicine

Original post by Rakas21

I maintain that with no recession we'd have seen a balanced budget in this parliament just without such harsh cuts under the Tory government.

With no recession we would have seen a balanced budget in this parliament under Labour too. The deficit as a proportion of GDP in 2007 before the financial crisis hit was lower than it had been in 1996 under the last year of John Major's government: with a growing economy that had been turned into a surplus in 1999 and 2000.

It was also in the context of that relatively small deficit that Osborne made his spending commitments. At the time the Conservatives were not talking about small state ideology and spending cuts at all, it was much more 'vote blue go green', the Tories were pushing themselves as a socially conscious environmental party. As Alastair Darling noted in his memoirs, when the financial crisis hit and tax receipts slumped in the following recession, the Tory strategists saw where the political line of attack lay and so changed the narrative to one of a) Labour spent too much in the previous decade and b) Labour didn't regulate the banks enough and left us exposed to the financial crisis. This would have had credibility if the Tories had spent any of the previous decade fighting on those points, but they didn't - they fought the 2001 and 2005 elections on anti-European, anti-immigraton and pro increase in policing, prisons etc.

Another weakness in the Tory argument is the whole "Labour was responsible for the recession" line: it was a global financial crisis that hit every developed country and as we have seen in Europe several countries came off worse than we did. The problem with saying Labour was responsible for the recession as it was on their watch is you can't then turn round and explain the pretty much non existent growth since 2010, swinging from shallow growth to shallow contraction and having a double dip recession (probably a triple dip when next quarters GDP figures are announced), as being due to "global factors". It is either the fault of the government in charge at the time or it isn't. I've also heard a similar line used when the deficits that John Major's government ran during the 1990s (bigger than Labours in the lead up to the financial crisis) get brought up: "we had big deficits because we had a recession in the early 90s". Whose fault was that recession? No doubt 'global factors' as it wasn't one where Labour were in charge!