UK General Election thread

[I AM MOBIUS]

Cameron running away from the televised debate like a baby...

[C0ckney]

apparently the big election story at the moment is over ed miliband having two kitchens (gasp!).

[C0ckney]

so did anyone else watch the leaders debate? i sat through it this evening (my life is just all sex and drugs and rock and roll i tell you). the format lends itself well to soundbites rather than real debate or argument and mostly became an exercise in banging a few 'key' points into voter's heads. anyway, here's what i thought of each of their performances.

david cameron - he's not a great orator but gave a solid enough performance here. he made his points and kept his cool.
nick clegg - the best natural orator of the 3 main leaders but gave a wooden display here. despite occasional flashes of ability he fell too often into just repeating talking points; in contrast to 2010 he was largely ignored by the other two.
ed miliband - did well. he was probably the best of the 3 main leaders, although he found it hard to cope with the smaller party leaders.
nigel farage - left out the hard right stuff except on immigration and set out a genuinely populist programme. continued a transition (which i talked about earlier in the thread) to front national style politics.
leanne wood - decent if unspectacular. she gave miliband a hard time but was mostly ignored by the rest.
nicola sturgeon - very effective and sharp. she skewered each of the 3 main party leaders and made her points well.
caroline bennett - the only one offering something like an alternative vision, but was only able to show glimpses of that here. she doesn't do well in this kind of format, but did alright.

[Dauphin]

Poor Natalie, if you can't remember her name, what hope has she?

I'm not sure who "won", but my view:

Cameron - didn't screw up and played a straight bat. Playing to not lose votes rather than win any.
Miliband - Death Ray Panda stares at the camera was disconcerting. Answers to small party queries was to say "well we are better than the Tories".
Clegg - Tried to make nuanced points, when what was needed was blunt ones.
Farage - He made his points well and sharply. I fear people are taken in by it.
Bennett - No car crash, an improvement. Largely ignored.

The other two were pitching to a smaller audience.
Sturgeon - Telling Farage that "Scotland already has X" may sound good to the Scots, but it made it sound like the English were paying for it.
Wood - Felt like she was a regular person expressing her opinions. Not a derogatory statement - she could have given the Thatcher "Belgrano question" moment. But she didn't come across as a serious political contender with well thought out policies.

[C0ckney]

Poor Natalie, if you can't remember her name, what hope has she?

yes that's very true.

this is what the public thought in four separate snap polls:

ComRes – Cameron 21%, Clegg 9%, Miliband 21%, Farage 21%, Wood 2%, Bennett 5%, Sturgeon 20%

ICM – MILIBAND – 25% CAMERON – 24% FARAGE – 19% STURGEON – 17% CLEGG – 9% BENNETT – 3% WOOD – 2%

Survation – Cameron – 25%, Miliband – 25%, Farage – 24%, Sturgeon – 15%, Clegg – 6%, Bennett – 3%, Wood – 2%

YouGov – Sturgeon 28%, Farage 20%, Cameron 18%, Miliband 15%, Clegg 10%, Bennett 5%, Wood 4%

a bit of a spread, but looks like a draw overall and probably won't have too much effect on the actual campaign, especially as there won't be another similar debate.

[C0ckney]

Farage - He made his points well and sharply. I fear people are taken in by it.

i've been thinking about why this is and i think i have the answer. the problem is that part of what farage says is essentially true - it is clear that lots of workers coming in, principally at the bottom end of the labour market, lower wages. people are not fooled by 'sophisticated' analyses that tell them that immigrants are good for the 'national economy', a thing so remote as to be meaningless in the warp and weft of their lived experience. most people are unimpressed with the line that immigrants do the jobs that british people won't do - this is clearly nonsense, after all who did those jobs before immigrants came - when what this really means is that british people won't put up with the terrible wages and conditions that some immigrants will. this argument does convince some people, however. there is also some truth to pressures that immigrants put on housing - people who come to a place have to live somewhere - and public services, though of course immigrants pay taxes and so pay for these services as well.

so this message reaches the working classes who recognise its truth and is also useful as a cover for people who want to hide their racism and xenophobia behind a veneer of concern for the working man. but what can the main parties do? they can't take the argument to its logical conclusion, which is that yes farage is partially correct, but the problem is not with the immigrants who come to the UK looking for a better life, but rather with the greedy bosses and landlords who exploit them; in other words, with the exploitation and inescapable logic inherent to the capitalist system and therefore that the solution is for the immigrants and working classes to get organised and combine their efforts against the exploiters (imagine ed miliband getting up and saying that!). thus, they find themselves reduced to making the weak and false arguments detailed above or harping on about 'diversity' and 'vibrant communities', which may play well in islington but causes severe eye rolling elsewhere.

moreover, sensing public unease, they play a double game, on the one had trying to sound tough and on the other praising immigrants in hackneyed terms. both message sound false, both in themselves and because of their contradictory nature. few are prepared to make decent moral arguments in favour of immigration (the greens and the SNP being exceptions). thence comes the idea that UKIP are honest about immigration and the other parties are dishonest.

[kentonio]

The major parties are just afraid to take on immigration properly, because large parts of their bases hate it and will continue to hate it regardless of how the strong the arguments are. Both Labour and the Tories have fairly substantial numbers of xenophobes and racists in their base, although a fair number fo the Tory ones already ****ed off to UKIP thankfully.

[C0ckney]

i don't think that any of the main parties can 'take on' immigration properly because to offer something even approaching a solution for it would undermine other, far more important, positions of theirs. it's true that there are many people (both working and middle class) who are racially prejudiced and/or xenophobic. however, there is a much larger group who have become more open to UKIP's message because of the dishonesty of other parties' approaches.

[Hauldren Collider]

I have heard a little bit of Nigel Farage's platform. My (fairly uninformed reaction) is:

1. Yeah, he seems pretty spot-on regarding the EU in general but
2. Jesus christ, he's so ****ing wrong about immigration, what the hell

He seems 90% of the way to being a decent free-market conservative and ****s it all up with #2.

[Krill]

You mean like most GOP-ers?

[Hauldren Collider]

The GOP is actually vastly better on immigration as a whole than Farage seems to be. Not as in favor of it as they should be, though.

[Dauphin]

Farage is "open" to immigration, provided the immigrants have a high earning potential. Which is why I was surprised by the fact that not one person in the debate raised the point that EU immigrants have been more highly educated and paid more in taxes that they've claimed in benefits and services. The latter is quite a feat when the deficit has been so large over the past several years.

Could have been retorted with the word "Romania"?

[Krill]

The GOP is actually vastly better on immigration as a whole than Farage seems to be. Not as in favor of it as they should be, though.

So you're saying that the Conservatives are the best party to vote for?

[Krill]

Farage is "open" to immigration, provided the immigrants have a high earning potential. Which is why I was surprised by the fact that not one person in the debate raised the point that EU immigrants have been more highly educated and paid more in taxes that they've claimed in benefits and services. The latter is quite a feat when the deficit has been so large over the past several years.

Could have been retorted with the word "Romania"?

You moved recently?

[C0ckney]

I have heard a little bit of Nigel Farage's platform. My (fairly uninformed reaction) is:

1. Yeah, he seems pretty spot-on regarding the EU in general but
2. Jesus christ, he's so ****ing wrong about immigration, what the hell

He seems 90% of the way to being a decent free-market conservative and ****s it all up with #2.

while there are a lot of free market conservatives in UKIP. however, they must compete with other groups like social conservatives, EU obsessives, declinists, racists and of course the 'sod the lot of them' vote; these groups sometimes overlap. they also attract votes from people who have diverse complaints, usually related to economic dislocation, about the present situation. it is these people that farage wants to appeal to more and the UKIP programme seen in the debate was very populist with lots of not-so-subtle racism; it wouldn't have been out of place in a marine le pen speech.