Jesting aside though Monts, I simply don't get the support for Labour. Well I do but it leads to pretty ugly implications.
For instance this morning I read how the state share of UK GDP has risen from 38% in 2000 to 52% now. We have to bare in mind that the state doesn't create any wealth, it merely redistributes it from the private sector. In many northern towns and cities the states share of GDP is higher than that found in communist Russia!
This sticking our heads in the sand can't go on. We don't have an empire any more. The likes of Brazil, China, Mexico, Russia, India are snapping at our heals economically. The only major industry that we rule the world in is finance (which accounted for 12% of the countries entire tax take last year by the way), and the country hates bankers. If we lose that then we really do have very little left with which to compete globally. Manufacturing is Chinese. IT is American (and increasingly Indian). Biotech is American. Electronics is SE Asian. Automobiles are increasingly Japanese. Telecoms is Scandinavian.
So much of this thread seems hung up on the caricatures of politics. Labour is friend of the working man, Conservatives are all toffs, Lib Dems are sandal wearing hippies. It's a nonsense. Labours spending splurge of the last decade was funded by the City and the property market (which boomed due to the number of people coming into the country and cheap credit supplied by the City). It's built on sand, yet so many get stuck on the superficial issues.
With so much of northern economies driven by the state it perhaps isn't surprising that northerners tend to vote for the party that traditionally wants a large state sector, but as history has shown that such scenarios are eventually ruinous to a country it's hard to look past such a strategy as being at best incredibly short-termist and at worst incredibly selfish as it hampers the ability of those that wish to stand free from the government crutch.
