Design your own David Cameron poster

[Dunenewt]

Which German party would you associate them with?  People over here always equate them with the FDP but I don't think they have an awful lot in common, well, until Nick Clegg, as you pointed out in your post.

[Kiyouta]

Ha! If only...

[Anathema]

And what exactly was wrong with that?

Being able to join or start a union should be a worker's right, not a prerequisite to get a job.

Closed shops are the best safeguard against union-busting employers. They ensure high wages and may even reduce capitalist exploitation to a tolerable level.

There have been only one or two instances of closed shop in the Neth's, and I'm not aware of any significant union busting happening lately. Likewise for the Scandinavian countries, wich all banned closed shop about 2 decades ago.

Besides, banning any kind of agreement between employers and unions is a use of state power to restrict freedom of contract. And I thought you liberals supported freedom of contract as a matter of principle. Or is it ok for the state to intervene in the economy as long as it's on the side of the capitalists?

I'm not one to claim that restrictions and regulations are always bad - any economy (and any society) exists because some restrictions and regulations exist. I'm also against corporate cartels (liberal ≠ pro business) or people selling themselves into indentured servitude, for that matter.

And part of the mandatory "fee" that you pay to your boss - the value he extracts from you in order to make a profit - is often funneled to the Tory party.

I don't agree with that sort of logic, but I'll humour you. The Labour party has historically had close financial ties with British unions, while I doubt that a significant percentage of employers (that means everything ranging from small groceries to international firms) is on the Tory's donor list.

[Dante]

I saw this in the paper yesterday and laughed aloud.

So I have an odd sense of humour, sue me.

[athanasios]

Freaky!

[Dunenewt]

http://www.downingstreetfighter.com/

[Dunenewt]

[Dante]

Pssh. Lets see you do without our oil and say that.

[Dunenewt]

Whose oil?  Scots wouldn't have been able to fund the oil exploration in the first place, plus it isn't as much as you think now.  Besides, main Scottish economy is banking and umm...well, less said about Scottish banks the better (unfortunately, as I was relying on them!).

[Dante]

Eh, all the banks are screwed. RBS was just bigger. Banking itself isn't really considered north of Edinburgh. It's all tourism, industry, farming and energy.

Yeah, North Sea oil. It's not as much as it used to be, but there's a very good argument that the money it brought was piped right down past the border. Indeed, there are those who would say that not only does Scotland deserve the money it gets, but that it's owed a great deal more.

[Dunenewt]

Well we do have to subsidise you in England and Wales so its only fair we get the oil money!  I'm totally against Scottish independence - we love you guys really, don't leave!  I'd rather a federal United Kingdom.

[Dante]

The oil money, so goes the argument, was worth a lot more than what we get.

I care neither one way nor the other regarding independence, but devolution has thusfar been a good thing. Besides which, the SNP are generally sensible and have administrated well. Their fixation on independence is a bit annoying at times, but not enough to harm my disposition towards them.

Although I'm curious, what business is it of yours whether Scotland gains full autonomy?

[Edric O]

The election may be over, but this is hilarious:

[Wolf]

Yeah, because that's effective. Hilarious, yes. Would make me vote for Labour? Never. The kind of people who'd go out of their way to write that kind of graffiti are the kind of people that make me want to vote for whoever they oppose. (The true irony is that my district in London--Holborn & St Pancras--has voted for Labour and always will. No matter which country I move to, my vote will never matter.)

[Dante]

I don't think it's meant to be pro-Labour, just anti-Conservative. Making a point regardless of how self-damaging it may be. I wonder where that picture was taken. I haven't seen any similar defacement up here, but that seems to be largely because it's taken as a given that the tories are subject to deep-seated, visceral loathing. There's no need to act out when you can be pretty sure that your neighbours agree with you.

[Wolf]

Well, I just made an assumption about the perpetrators being pro-Labour: but there's something about anti sentiment specifically that rankles me, especially when--as it seems to me--the target of said sentiment is actually fairly moderate. If a party promotes views that you believe in, you ought to support them. If the natural structure of politics places them in competition with a party whose views are really only slightly different in the grand scheme of things (both Labour and Conservatism are pretty close to the center, and both are certainly Western Liberal Democrats), then I really can't see much justification for "hatin'." On the other hand, if the party is BNP, who actually says and intends to do truly reprehensible things... well, then I think you're good.

[Dunenewt]

The picture is from Cheltenham, near where I live.  The town has a Liberal Democrat MP, FYI.  In Cheltenham there's quite a divide between rich and poor (lots of poor estates, and lots of private schools right next to them), which was made a lot worse by Blair/Brown, but obviously Thatcher's the easy one to blame (although to be fair, in the South West everyone seems to think they are the next Banksy - who was from Bristol - hence just about everything gets vandalised/graffiti).  Labour are pretty much irrelevant in Cheltenham, and in the South West in general, and in many areas only got marginally more than UKIP.

[Dante]

Compared to more extreme examples (the Greens, the Republican Party), it's true that the tories and Labour have more similarities than they do differences, especially under "New Labour" and Cameron, both of which moved their parties firmly into the political centre. However, that was not always the case. I am quite certain that the vehement hatred of the tories stems not from Cameron, nor any of the three party leaders who preceeded him, or anything that's happened in the last decade, during which the party has become much more moderate (if possessed of a deep unwillingness to root out those elements that have not made the transition).

No, the hatred stems entirely from the legacy of the 1980's. It was one of Cameron's great PR objectives to prove that the party had changed since "the bad old days." Some were convinced. Most, such as whoever wrote over that sign, were not. That's why the Conservatives still do badly in Wales and worse in Scotland. To borrow once more from another's words:

...the Scots and Welsh were in throughout the whole of the 80s, where an English government hardly anyone in either country voted for went hell for leather destroying their communities and using them as guinea pigs for some of the most vile and unpopular legislation of the last 100 years (Scotland enjoyed the pleasure of being the test case for the poll tax several years before it was introduced into England).

It's not (entirely) the modern tory party that people hate, it's the legacy of the old party and the pride that the old guard hold in it. The reverence and misty-eyed fondness for some sort of glory day which in effect crippled progressive movement right up to today. The harm that Thatcher and her ilk inflicted upon the UK has not healed by any means, much as people would like to pretend that we've moved on. So while it's true that the Conservatives are better than the BNP (who incidentally were smashed in this election), to a lot of people that's like saying that tuberculosis is better than the plague.

[nemafakei]

And to be fair, Cameron isn't suggesting actually bringing back tuberculosis. And even if he does, we can rely on the Lib Dems to make a speech in opposition and at least abstain on principle.