Elections On Thursday

One of our local big town Councils, Harlow, has gone Conservative for the first time in Donkeys' years. Their MP has been Conservative for a long time but the Town Council has been almost exclusively Labour for most of it's 70 years

Hartlepool has also gone Conservative for the first time since the sixties. They got double the votes of Labour and even the Monster Raving Loony Party beat two other candidates - Freedom Alliance and Social Democrats!

 

There is a lot of bitterness in Wales and Scotland as they were less decisive about Brexit than England was. Scottish folks in particular hate the Tories with a passion, and given that a lot of that hatred is borne out of the devastation to the mining villages by Maggie, I suspect that Wales is the same. If Labour were stronger and I mean properly strong like they used to be the SNP wouldn't get a look in, but Labour have gone down a path of hatred, division, race-bating and mud-slinging whilst at the same time chasing votes from champagne socialists and completely abandoning the working class person in the street.
They've spent the past five or so years calling Leave voters thick/stupid, Nazi, xenophobic, racist, bigoted and pretty much every other 'ist' or 'phobic' you can think of - - and yet again are sat wondering why they got handed their backside at the polls.

You are also correct about Westminster, and the voting in England - that is the one and only time I will agree with Corbyn as he said yesterday that the low turnout in England shows that people were not being offered what they wanted (or words to that effect); I didn't vote, because there was nobody worth voting for and/or none of them bothered to tell us who they were and what they were about.

For far too many years, we've all been giving the choice of who is the least worst - - folks trying to win purely on the basis that 'vote for me because he is worse' and not 'vote for me because I am the best and will do x, y or z'

Imagine if someone started a new party, today, and built their strategy up toward the next elections with policies like:

- Building decent homes, mostly for rent but that folks can also be assisted to buy and not just a claim to try and push developers into building them but an all out program on a scale similar to post WWII.

- Refurbishing or building schools to have class numbers at manageable levels and have those schools teach actual life skills again (cooking, hygiene, budgeting, gardening, road safety) in addition to the other subjects

- Reform the NHS to take it back to providing care more locally (more GP's, smaller community hospitals that can deal with vaccinations, minor injuries etc and make a lot of those services nurse-led; stop paying for non-essential operations and charge for treatment for anyone not a UK resident.

- Program of improving all roads/streets, including pavements suitable for infirm/disabled people, vastly improved street lighting, quality road surfaces, cycle lanes where possible

- Vastly improve public transport services; accept that they are never going to be a profit making business at the same time as providing the service levels needed to encourage people to use them

- Reform pensions and benefits to bring them to a level where they are suitable for folks to live on and not an insult. Offset the costs of doing so by drastically improving healthcare (and in particular social care)


Now, would you vote for that against the current crop?

 

Part of the lethargy comes from decades of being let down - not at parish level, but at district, county and country level.

 

Yes, the elections in Scotland and Wales are more important as they are voting for their nation assemblies. Hartlepool is the only place in England where an MP is being elected.