Troll:
Take revenge for sorting out the country’s economy and ensuring more people than ever are in work? Or perhaps ensuring that young people will have the freedom to decide who in the U.K. governs rather than a bunch of unelected bureaucrats who don’t have our interests at heart
Your choice, but the alternative is a Labour/SNP axis which will wreck the economy and drive the UK back to the bad old days of the politics of envy and class war. Is that really what you want?
Reply:
Wow, so many stereotypes in one comment, it’s difficult to know where to begin 
😉
Sorting out the economy? Seriously? They have borrowed more money than every single Labour government in history combined – they have missed every single one – every one (not even exaggerating) – of their own economic targets. Surplus by 2015, then 2017, now 2021 (conveniently after election dates, so watch this space, it’ll be 2023 next). Not only is our national debt continuing to soar, but they are also selling off everything they can – often to foreign governments. Only the other day the national grid (61% of it anyway) was sold off to a consortium including Qatar and China. Is that ensuring we have say over our own future? Selling all of our infrastructure to foreign nations? Because it seems that the only nation that isn’t allow to own our infrastructure according to Tory doctrine, is our own…
It’s blatantly ideological too – they tried to sell off Channel 4, despite the fact it’s profit making. Why else would you do that? And we haven’t even mentioned the systematic rape of the NHS, or the creeping privatisation of the education system.
What we need is investment. Look at Attlee in 1945, or FDR in the 30s with his New Deal – massive investment that resulted in massive surpluses – building up the nation in terms of balance and infrastructure. The current government is systematically tearing it apart. We need to tackle the actual problems we have – wage deflation, the housing situation – investment. The Tories are stripping our economy, and at this rate it’s going to take a generation to recover from it.
More people in work? Yes, the unemployment figures are down, but the low wage earning and the zero hour contracts are massively up. We have also seen the slowest economic recovery after a crash in modern history, and wages are still worth less than they were 10 years ago. That is not sorting out the economy. Especially since at the same time CEO pay is still increasing, along with the pay gap.
So, we get to the old favourite ‘unelected bureaucrats’ at the EU. Presumably you’re talking about the Commissioners. The Commission is the Executive of the EU, it suggests laws, but cannot pass them. The legislature (the people who can actually pass laws) is the Council and the Parliament – the council is made up of members of each state’s parliaments (elected) and the parliament is directly election, via a modern PR system, by the people (again, elected). So how many unelected lawmakers are there in the EU? It’s a staggering zero.
Let’s compare that to the UK – how many unelected lawmakers are there in the UK? 837. In the House of Lords. About 57% of our legislature is unelected. And the 43% who are, are voted in by the archaic First Past the Post system. On the whole, the UK is massively less democratic than the EU.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m not a strong europhile, I was very much on the fence during the referendum – I think it has problems, and there are many legitimate reasons for wanting out, but the argument that our country is run by a bunch of ‘unelected bureaucrats’ is one of the greatest straw man arguments in history.
Which is also kind of moot, since both Tory and Labour are backing Brexit anyway. And I’m really bored with debating Brexit – it’s happened, let’s get on with it.
The politics of envy is not what we are after, and that is not what this is about. It’s nothing to do with class. It’s to do with prosperity, and the equality of opportunity (not the equality of outcome – many people seem to get those two things confused). This current government is one of the worst in history, and sadly it looks like they are going to get at least an extra 2 years to continue their decimation of the country that could take potentially generations to recover from.
Martin Probert-Davies
