quote:

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· Your family better off: low inflation, and mortgages as low as possible, more people off benefit and into work, a rising minimum wage and more help for first time buyers.

· Your child achieving more: modern schools for all, strong discipline, and a guaranteed place in training, sixth-form or an apprenticeship.

· Your children with the best start: more choice over parental leave for mums and dads, more childcare for under-5s, and after school care for over-5s.

· Your family treated better and faster: no-one waiting more than 18 weeks, guaranteed, for hospital treatment - with choice over where and when - in an NHS free at the point of need.

· Your community safer: local policing teams, cracking down on graffiti, gangs and drug-dealers.

· Your country's borders protected: ID cards and strict controls that work to combat asylum abuse and illegal immigration.

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These aren't extensively different from what the NDP has offered in Canada, given obvious national context.

a) I really feel they take their left-wing vote for granted, they seem to feel that everyone should vote for them just to stop the Tories from ever regaining power. (This is only anecdotal, and I've only lived in the UK since September (and for 1 year beforehand in 2001/2002) but I get that impression from Labour's publicity and speeches.

b) Labour has engaged in a bidding war with the Tories to "out-tough" one another on asylum, making huge claims about "controlling immigration". Independent article on how Labour gives into racist Tory rhetoric By engaging on the issue of immigration (which is really asylum because regular, net immigration to the UK is pretty low), both the Tories and Labour are fuelling the fire of the BNP and other racist groups by making their racism appear mainstream.

c) Labour has been on the forefront of trying to introduce biometric I.D. cards. I cringe at this invasion of privacy. It is, I realize, in part an emotional reaction, and I know France and Germany have mandatory I.D. cards, but the idea just scares me and I don't feel they've really proven the need for it. I don't want them in Canada, and I don't want them in any jurisdiction that doesn't have a history of using them, because I fear the changes they could bring to policing and other state monitoring.

I'd likely give the Liberal Democrats a chance if I could vote here, even though I don't know all that much about them, or, if I were to find out something odious about the Lib Dems, then to the Socialists as a protest.

Edited, as always, because I can't write and make sense without editing.

[ 12 February 2005: Message edited by: dokidoki ]

As to the incipient racism toward immigrants/asylum seekers, I am reminded of this quote I ran across a couple of years ago. It seems pertinant...

quote:

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Most MPs think pluralism is a miner’s disease.
— British Labour MP Graham Allen, in 2002

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If the result of en masse rejection or non-voting of Labourites meant a Tory election, that Tory government would have no real legitimacy and all forms of protest and etc. would be justified.