Care in old age is a tricky issue, but I am not in favour of overbearing state intrusion or a so called "death tax".

People have choices and they should be allowed to exercise those choices as they see fit.

Choice 1:

We have wealthy friends who would rather enjoy their time, rather than care for the wife's aged mother. So mum stays in a very nice old people's home, with the 40k per annum charges coming out of her estate. Our friend would rather sacrifice any inheritance than have to care for her mother herself.

Choice 2:

My sister's sister-in-law cared for her aged mother in her spare room at home until she died. This is a venerable and time honoured way of looking after your own family, but requires someone with the time and dedication to do the caring.

Other than that, the social security system is there to support those who have no means of their own.

Good point!

Labour leadership favourite Andy Burnham backs welfare cuts and claims too many think party gives work-shy an 'easy ride'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3102570/Labour-leadership-favourite-Andy-Burnham-backs-welfare-cuts-claims-think-party-gives-work-shy-easy-ride.html

So now its Andy as well as Liz who backs the governments £12 billion cuts to welfare nice!

Nothing wrong with peaceful protests about policies but it's laughable seeing people holding placards up saying Get the Tories Out, three weeks after a general election.

The fact is the freeloaders,wasters and shirkers don't like, that their days of poncing off the taxpayer will be over and they might have to `get a job` and start contributing.

Interesting article in the Guardian by Patrick Wintour on the run up to the election and how it went wrong for Labour

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/03/undoing-of-ed-miliband-and-how-labour-lost-election

Thank God it went wrong for Labour. The biggest issue facing the UK is the EU and the migrant crisis, especially now the EU is trying to allocate boat people around the vassal states of the EUmpire. The Conservatives hardly have a brilliant record in this area, but can you imagine a Miliband Government propped up by the SNP? Just watch this exchange from yesterday's PMQs to get a flavour of what that would have meant - scroll down to the exchange with Angus Robertson and imagine how Miliband would have responded:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32990218

Is Labour still around then.......not that I've noticed anyway.

The Labour Party is fecked completely!

I read this last night. The thing that most stood out to me was the comment (I can't remember where it was) about one speech 'ticking a box' on a topic. I think this was the biggest issue of all for Labour during the campaign. With no sustained conversation about anything, Labour failed to paint a decisive picture of themselves.

This meant there was enough evidence for those against them to damn them for whatever they wanted, and enough for supporters hear what they wanted. I was far more impressed with Milliband for the first half of parliament, not in terms of delivery, but the strategy was clear. As the election approached, they seemed lose sight of anything other than 'winning' and had no idea how to achieve it.

What's going on now in the scramble for the leadership looks even worse IMO. If your are just in politics to win elections, and are happy to stand for anything to do so how can people feel comfortable that you won't just change your mind at the first sign of trouble?

The Labour Party...the natural party of Opposition? 

Since October 1974, only one Labour leader has led the party to victory at general elections and that was Blair. Callaghan, Foot, Kinnock, Brown, Miliband (I've excluded John Smith) all failures....that is not a good record for a supposedly major political party. 

Or, to look at it another way, this is the first elected majority Conservative govt since 1992...

But, I don't doubt that the largest minority in England is conservative minded - amazingly, for a 'democracy', I bet there are many places that have voted in Conservative MPs, without a break, for more than a century.

The eternal dilemma for those left of centre, principle or power (for Conservatives its the latter, 1st, 2nd....). And of course you can't achieve anything without power. I think lessons can be learnt from the LibDems. Kennedy was left of centre, he had (and with hindsight...) distinctive policies, the human touch (and, incidentally, was the only MP not to vote for coalition...). Clegg went more to the centre, and, in the end, that lack of distinction cost him/them. The idea may have been not being of the left wouldn't scare soft tories and LD MP's might be safe. In fact the opposite was the case,  it put off those left of centre and they went to alternatives, that change led to scores of lost LD seats and 'won' the election - though any rise in the tory vote was only marginal.

But lets not think anything other that a Conservative party is electable, or that they have, despite 'winning' the election, made much of an advance. If they go too far, too right, too slash and burn, the electorate, even in England, isn't immovable. The Conservatives (well, Cameron and Osborne) do, I think, know this - that's why they'll be hard to beat in 2020. They also probably know that even England isn't solidly Conservative, even in England they only won 40.8% of the vote and, nationally, their vote % was way less than Ted Heath got in 1970 and a lot less than Mrs T's vote in 1979.

I agree wholeheartedly. Labour effectively handed the entire electoral agenda to the Tories, because they would not/could not front the argument for their ideology (and the policies that should emanate from that ideology)

It's a problem 'the left' have had for years. One "politics of envy" sneer by those with a vested interest in an elite minority hoarding the wealth (or by their forelock-tugging acolytes) and too many on 'the left' go on the defensive.

You could have said the something about Labour wining a majority on just 36% of the vote in 2005! A Labour minority in England amazingly for a democracy hay Peter.

 I agree with these sentiments and my own political views matter not a jot. The fact is Labour should be presenting a different agenda not a diluted Tory one. The 'political market' in the west is being distorted by the lack of competition and choice and that's not healthy for anyone in the long run. 

You can blame Clinton and Blair for that - "triangulation", "the third way", "focus groups" - the Clinton team invented it, the Blair team picked up the baton, Obama perpetuated it and Miliband's lot, bought their campaign (literally) wholesale from the USA.

The problem for the left in England however, is that the English electorate are right of centre, so an overt left wing agenda will rarely win an election (unlike in Scotland).

Blair only won his landslides, because people wanted a change of party in 1997, without a change of economic policy, which is what he promised.

This may be correct. But in multiple opinion polls I've seen that ask about specific issues, there is invariably a clear majority of people who support the 'leftist' position on most/all key topics.

As people if they would like wealth to be shared more equally and a majority of people agree. Ask if they want properly-funded public services and they agree. Ask if they want a more effective & better-funded NHS and they agree. Ask people if they want people's  jobs protecting from malevolent employers and they agree.

Labour's issue is twofold. Firstly & most obviously, they need to get the message across that they are the party who can deliver these things. Secondly, they need to have an appealing offering on issues like immigration, where they generally act against the broad consensus.

Ask people if they want motherhood and apple pie, and they will agree - that does not mean they will vote for it.

People want all sorts of conflicting things, but at the end of the day, what they most want is a successful economy with decent living standards and reasonable levels of taxation - they will vote for the party which appears most likely to deliver that.

Charlotte Church may claim to be willing to pay 70% income tax, but I don't believe her and even if she does mean it, she would be very much in the minority.

I don't believe that anybody actually wants to pay income tax. We can argue till the cows come home about fairness, redistribution and equality (all of which are laudable aims, IMO), but as a self-employed idiot I can honestly say that high levels of taxation are extremely demotivating and actually have the reverse of the desired effect: making me more likely to seek elaborate means of avoidance.  

The more I read this article, the more it comes across to me, how inept and arrogant the Miliband team (Miliband, his advisers and strategists that is) were. They suffered the 1992 syndrome of thinking they were going to take power and had no contingency plan if it went belly up that night as it did. How that team thought an engraved lump of rock was a good idea was beyond me but to compound the stupidity of it by saying you were going to put it in the Downing St garden, showed to me that these people were no credible. Then to top it all you had Lucy Powell, one of Ed's election coordinators saying that those words on that stone were not necessarily written in stone was just the icing on the cake for this farce.

Talking about Lucy Powell, how she was chosen as an election coordinator was beyond me, too. Been in parliament for just over 2 years at a by election with a turnout over 18%... what does she know about election strategy? David Axelrod was an expensive waste of time, he was about as useful as Ed Stone.

5 wasted years by Labour in Opposition.

Deluded springs to mind.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/watch-ed-miliband-is-too-fing-good-for-this-country--fan-of-former-labour-leader-swears-live-on-tv-10299990.html

There is an attitude on the left that it is the voters who are wrong - in other words, the electorate is undeserving.

At least Alan Johnson understands that it is the Labour Party which is in the wrong place, rather than the voters.

 To expand a little - many on the left so so self righteous and up their own posteriors, that they cannot understand how masses of people can hold a different point of view from their own little world view. That POV is massively reinforced, because they tend to congregate only with like minded people, so don't give alternative viewpoints an airing. This very stupid woman is a classic example - she is also a University Professor, so you can be both utterly naive and stupid and also be a Doctor of something it appears:

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/05/if-youre-a-conservative-im-not-your-friend/

"One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Cameron, and unfriend them. (Thankfully, none of my friends ‘like’ the UKIP page.) Life is too short, I thought, to hang out with people who hold abhorrent political views, even if it’s just online."

- well this extremely silly woman is never going to learn is she?

The Labour party does have a real problem. If they are going to be 'Tory-lite' as Maunder is suggesting, they're on to a loser as people will just say 'What's the difference?' and vote Tory anyway. If they return to their roots and a much more left-wing agenda, it's clear that at the moment, the feeling of the country is against them.

My advice would be to go for the latter option, and wait it out until it's clear (as I think it will become) that the Tory agenda is contrary to the interests of the people of this country as a whole*, favouring as it does those that have rather than those that haven't. And as a more philosophical point, the electorate ought to have a choice between right and left wing policies, not just between right wing and a bit more right wing.

* If you don't believe that such shifts can happen, consider the fate of the Tory party in Scotland

Scotland is a special case though, because of nationalism. Yes, the popular mood does swing between left and right, just as it swings between social liberalism and constraint. However, the English in particular appear to be happy with what some call Anglo-Saxon laissez faire capitalism.

Team Miliband clearly thought a fundamental shift to the left occurred because of the Credit Crunch and acted accordingly - well they got their answer on May 7th. The most successful Labour leader since Atlee has been Tory Blair, who promised as you say, Tory Lite - Conservative economics, combined with social liberalism and increasing benefits handouts - proved popular for a time, but would it work in the future? Perhaps, once people get tired of the real Conservatives once more.

Odd, I'm sure I remember plenty on the right self righteously expressing similar views about the electorate during the campaign if they didn't vote Conservative - I must go back through a few threads (before the disappear...) and find examples.

I mean, surely you think your political views are right too???

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