“Reading various blogs, websites and newspapers over the past months (including Labourhome) one cannot help but be struck by the number of so called left-leaning commentators who have been at pains to point out that the likes of David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson aren’t too bad and that if we do end up with a Tory government in a couple of years time it wouldn’t be such a disaster after all. Too many of the Left's 'intelligentsia' appear to place punishing Brown, Blair and Labour for their collective ‘failings’ above the reality of the very real improvements to the lives and life chances of whole communities that were abandoned by the Tories in the 1980s and 1990s.”

The reason why those communities were abandoned was because these areas, dominated by Union workers that spent more of their time striking than working, had to be simply ignored for a while to save the entire economy.

A lot of British Industry within the 1960’s and 1970’s were losing out badly to the former colonies [and indeed colonies] where things could be done better and cheaper and there were more natural resources.

Around 1 million jobs didn’t exist in any reality and as such, when Scargill struck when the coal reserves were high, and without ballot, he was simply crushed underfoot.

The subsequent underclass, to be perfectly honest, only had themselves to blame for the upheaval they created from the Winter of Discontent.

I know that’s caused a number of Labour members to spit feathers and accuse me for being an “evil Tory“, but to be honest I lived in one of those areas where our mines were already in decline before they became rapidly shut in the late 70’s and 80’s.

We voted Thatcher both times as we wound up being the last “outpost” close enough to Birmingham to get some of the redevelopment and arrival of the Free Market into the area. People seem not to realise these things take time, and that with a snap of our fingers we can have either a Socialistic Utopia, or Free Market Heaven, rather than the gradual, and indeed very painful process this takes.

“For many middle class bloggers and journalists voting Tory or even Lib Dem is a luxury that they can easily indulge. Why? Because they are the very people who can afford to not have a Labour government in office - but the poor cannot.”

Which is odd, as it seems to me, as a working class Tory, that a lot of “poor voters” have decided to switch allegiances, indeed the Tory Party is the most successful political party in the country and in history and has regularly cottoned onto these voters and their concerns.

Once again I find myself reading a Labour blog post which lays “claim” to a bloc of voters, which is absolute nonsense considering they only lend them to you for four year periods. It’s a bit like that LGA member who basically wrote a blog post centred on claiming the Bangladeshi vote in a London Borough “naturally” belonged to the Labour Party simply because they were from an Ethnic Minority.

 “Labour has a good record in terms of fighting poverty over the past decade: 600,000 children have been lifted out of poverty since 1997, the poorest fifth of families will be £4000 a year better off by 2009 and the winter fuel allowance, pensioner credit and increases to the state pension have taken over 2 million pensioners out of poverty.”

The problem I always have with these things is they’re random figures. People don’t believe random figures anymore, they no longer believe “92% of statistics at face value”. There’s also the small matter of those children being lifted out of the government defined line of poverty, and this is only with state help.

All we’ve done is redefine what poverty is, I’ve made this point with Jkitleft time and again, we’ve not done enough and it’s not been done right, we need to provide the skills and the opportunities for these people to be able to yank themselves up by the boot straps, something which has been failed by Labour. We’ve created more welfare dependants while causing the gap between rich and poor to go upwards.

You level the playing field by giving them a good foundation and the ability to easily move into job markets and gain the necessary experience to get a decent job for their families and then for the children themselves [which is why I fully support the Diploma]

 “The recent 10p tax fiasco was not a deliberate attempt by Labour to penalise the low paid, neither was it a calculated, cavalier act designed to appease middle England. It was, quite simply, a mistake – nothing more and nothing less.”

A blatant “Brownie” that is a partial rewrite of history to make things look better than they really are.

It was a royal screw-up on the part of the economic genius of Brown in an attempt to net in the big bloc of people who consider themselves “lower middle class” as opposed to working class to ensure a fourth Labour term. Everybody ran for the tax cutting headline media and public, completely ignoring what was amounting to the effective doubling of taxation on those least able to pay for it. If Brown had raised taxes on the ultra-rich I don’t think anybody would have said a thing. Much like most of the Labour PPC at the time, in fact, any wonder that it resulted in a major rebellion?

“The ‘talk left but act right’ tendency that is so prevalent in much of Britain’s media appears to have decided that Labour does not deserve another term.”

Yet not a peep from any Labour member when the press buttered up to you…

As it stands, reading and viewing preferences are decided long before the position of the newspaper, indeed it spends most of it’s time preaching to it’s converted. Left wingers or that dread word “liberals” favour the Guardian and Tories favour the Telegraph, it’s that simple. It really doesn’t matter what the media says there are plenty of other places to get information from as well as newspapers and the TV, and many people do so these days. It seems a number of people have already made up their minds. Just because the “media is against us” doesn’t mean that all is lost. But Labour’s obsessive pandering to the Media, thinking they have the power for the last decade shows how far the party has fallen in credibility, gunning for the headlines rather than engaging people on what they want and need.

 “They are apparently untroubled by the fact that so many of the changes made since 1997 could end up being rolled back by a Cameron led, right wing Tory government that could easily dismantle most, if not all, of the things that have been achieved.”

Even though, aside from things that people would like gone, like the massive waste on Quangos where a lot of money is unnecessarily sank, things like the Regional Development Agencies which hamstring various businesses in their respective regions from continued growth according to a couple of reports, one independent and one from CCHQ [can’t find the ruddy links right now, sorry!]

“If Labour does fail in winning a fourth term and is therefore unable to introduce further reform of public services then the Tories will find it almost impossible to resist the ideological temptation to demolish the very ethos on which they are built - with more charging, less investment, good services for the well-off middle classes and second-class services for the poor.”

A lot of what I’ve been reading, policy documents that Labour Claim don’t exist from the Opposition and from their speeches, a lot of the Tory aim seems to be on cutting back the massive waste “behind shop” which I know exists in a number of Public services [Family of Civil Serpents, ya see] and instead freeing up resources for the front and allowing those at the bottom do what they do best, their jobs, rather than hamstring them with targets, forms and totals.

This is especially prevalent in the Police Force and Job Centres. Regardless of money hurled at these areas it seems that the paperwork and targets have just mounted up and up and up and it effects the point of use for the members of the public and that angers them and turns them away from voting one way or another.

“Labour used to be the party that gave comfort to the afflicted whilst afflicting the collective conscience of the comfortable. It needs to regain its sense of identity and purpose and above all it needs to remind people that under the Tories it is unlikely that things would get better but they could get a whole lot worse.”

As the cold, calculating creature I am. I will note that under Labour is when things have gotten to their worst. Under the Callaghan Government we wound up having to get a bail out from the IMF because we were bankrupt and lets not forget the Winter of Discontent.
We had no money left and the alarming indicators are that it’s been done again.
All very well quoting 1992’s Black Wednesday but the entire country didn’t stop for prolonged periods of time. Indeed the country had recovered within a couple of years thanks to some well timed tax cuts because the public finances were in better shape than the last time we’d hit a bump in the road.

It’s all very good that you feel you stand for the “collective conscience” but:

Does that mean record levels of spending for fairly meagre improvements? The state apparatus wasn’t reformed properly with a “clearing out” it simply had departments and sections bolted on under the guise of reform, but the overall system wasn’t renewed on the level it perhaps needed to cope with all the additional money that began to be sloshed about.

Does it mean raiding people’s pensions so their ability to look after themselves, and not be dependant on the state pension and thus increase the burden on the state, and stand on their own feet in retirement?

For their first term Labour didn’t do that much because Blair didn’t have that clear an idea on what needed to be done in order to improve the state [and it did need improving, I will admit to that]. It wasn’t until his second term that he knew what to do, and then a lot of these were blocked, or tied up in Red Tape by the Chancellor.