UK General Election Tomorrow: ME/CFS Thoughts?

[Sasha]

Just think, in eight hours it will all be over and we'll know...

Meantime, here is an article on the BBC site about what you can and can't do in polling stations (in case you were wondering if you can go in dressed like a pirate, you will find the answer there).

 

[Sasha]

Just seen this on the BBC site:

"David Cameron will fall 19 seats short of a Commons majority, according to a joint BBC/Sky/ITV exit poll.

The Conservatives would have 307 MPs, up 97 on 2005, Labour would have 255, down 94, and the Lib Dems 59, down 4. Nationalists and others would have 29.

That means Labour and the Lib Dems together could not have a majority. "​

ETA: The full story is here.

 

[Esther12]

Lib Dems down 4?

Doesn't sound right to me.

 

[V99]

I really believe that none of the main parties are uncaring, they are however blind and brainwashed about ME

 

[Mark]

In terms of being 'uncaring', and blaming individuals, and scapegoating, etc, something I've been meaning to say here for some time is that, ultimately, we should be blaming ideas rather than people. It seems to me that mistakes, bad ideas, "pickled into a rigid dogma, a code", lie at the root of 'conspiracies' and 'uncaring' behaviour - the supposed 'conspirators' often don't realise what errors they share, perhaps? So it could be useful to try to take the emotion out of some of these questions, in order to resolve them. Hard to do, and I have been as guilty of this myself as anyone else, and probably will be again. And that's not to say that emotion isn't important, just a suggestion on how to heal wounds.

In terms of "ME/CFS", there are lots of bad ideas along the road to where we are now, we can go back to Freud as a start, I think, and say it turns out it's a bad idea to try to probe into someone else's mind and work out what's going on. It's very hard to excuse the people responsible for such continued appallingly bad ideas as those responsible for our situation; it's incredibly hard to excuse the way people have failed to listen to what we have been trying to say for decades. And maybe 'evil' and 'having bad ideas' are the same thing? But regardless, it's the bad ideas we should concentrate on identifying and rooting out. Some of these bad ideas are believed very widely indeed, and one wouldn't want to condemn everyone for failing to spot the flaws - it's just human weakness.

I think the exit poll result is not so terrible, and I doubt it will be accurate anyway. Lib Dem squeeze is hugely disappointing if it's true, but the share of the vote will be significant too. What 'the people' want is a hung parliament, I think, that's been obvious for some time: we want our politicians to learn to work together to solve their problems. So I think any hung parliament is a good thing...but we'll have to see how it pans out, there's a long way to go - and even after all the results are in it'll be a while before we know what it all means.

 

[flybro]

LIB DEMS said no to trident, lib dems said will ease restraints on current illegal immigrants,

combine that with the SUN coming out in favour of the torrys, so the SUN readers that might have been thinking LIB DEMS go for torries, and the illeterate SUN readers that were going to vote BNP went for the torrys.

So it looks like stupidity and the pervayors of racicsm and war is set to continue and make the war lords mucho more dosh.

I still have hope, but I'm not holding my breath.

How long will it take the torrys to find common ground with the BNP.

 

[IamME]

In terms of being 'uncaring', and blaming individuals, and scapegoating, etc, something I've been meaning to say here for some time is that, ultimately, we should be blaming ideas rather than people. It seems to me that mistakes, bad ideas, "pickled into a rigid dogma, a code", lie at the root of 'conspiracies' and 'uncaring' behaviour - the supposed 'conspirators' often don't realise what errors they share, perhaps?

Sorry but that sounds rather like patronising gumph and bit of a straw man; I doubt anyone here and hopefully most of the electorate are voting on personality, but on a party and what it represents. So the above is irrelevent. Having said that, if someone commits an illegal or unethical act (duck islands, anyone?) they should at least receive harsh words, unless you have a groundbreaking idea for discouraging wrongdoing without use of punishment and making examples.

Business cannot and will not save "front line services": e.g. the privitisation of post offices and community care has been largely a disaster for the vulnerable. The bottom line" has given us NICE, rationing, mercenary insurance company tactics and the very cult of EBM over genuine science, CBT and its consequent social manipulation (a "life skill" taught in classrooms) when mixed with Labour quasi-eugenics of social control.

Whether Cameron, Brown or Clegg personally "care" about people is largely futile because both conservative and conservative-lite especially are just the desktop wallpaper, not the operating system. If you're looking at the really big picture then an end to global banks and return to nations printing their own money would solve the problems behind the economic system and subsequent inequality, but no parties seem willing to challenge the received wisdom of the global economy. But failing any answerability of global banking cartels, the next best thing is to not keep papering over the reachable cracks.

I don't fully trust Clegg's sweet talking about ME (a controversial minority would seem to be back burner material at best) but it's really beyond time to try something different and the scrapping of Trident (and ID cards) would be immeasurably better than attacking the usual soft targets and signify a new ethical direction.

Both red and blue broadly agree on making it impossible to live withour working. To use a medical not-quite-metaphor, Labour favours "better living through enforced psychotherapy" while the Conservatives favour "do not resuscitate". You can bet if the Tories have a majority they will squeeze the poorest, the sick, disabled and unemployed, worse, while enriching the diet of fat cats more efficiently than Nu Labour ever could, which is not to say Labour has been increasingly fascistic about it (in order to poach as many right-of-centre votes as posisble). A society that has no safety net for the worst off has no safety net at all.

(+1 to Garcia.)

 

[IamME]

LIB DEMS said no to trident, lib dems said will ease restraints on current illegal immigrants,

combine that with the SUN coming out in favour of the torrys, so the SUN readers that might have been thinking LIB DEMS go for torries, and the illeterate SUN readers that were going to vote BNP went for the torrys.

So it looks like stupidity and the pervayors of racicsm and war is set to continue and make the war lords mucho more dosh.

I still have hope, but I'm not holding my breath.

How long will it take the torrys to find common ground with the BNP.

Yes, tragically for democracy, the right wing media has been manipulating votes through scaremongering.

 

[Esther12]

These results are really confusing.

I need to get off-line. I hate not being able to be silly with my energy - I want to stay up all night drinking and watching BBC presenters blathering away!

 

[jace]

It's a dangerous subject, but I can blame the toxo, take a risk, effect.

Takes a deep breath...
It was Labour who caused 18% inflation, the Tory's were only in power after the mess was created, they got the economy back on track. The 3.6 million unemployment & 18% inflation was in the first year. Just as it will be this time around. Again, all the mess at the start for who ever gets into power. At the end of the day Labour are the party that were at the helm of the ship this time.

Just to set the record straight, the high inflation of the mid '70's to early '80's was caused by the OPEC oil shock in the mid '70's. The unions also played the stupid card, and boy, they got their b*lls cut off by Maggie. The world was still adjusting to higher energy prices, I remember being issued with a petrol ration book. It was common knowledge that whoever won the '79 election would have North Sea oil revenues to play with, and at least two terms in power. No wonder things got better for a short while.

In 1988 Nigel Lawson also made the huge mistake of signalling the removal of dual mortgage interest tax relief, (it made it very tax-efficient for couples to take out a mortgage together) six months ahead of actually effecting the decision, which created first a housing bubble and then a crash. By 1989, interest rates were back to 18% or more (base at 15%) in an effort to control inflation, and the building industry was on it's knees.

I was a partner in a joinery, which could not survive the massive interest rates plus a recession in the housing market. We lost the business and the house, in the early 90's, after hanging on by our fingernails for a couple of years. Businesses that had been established for a hundred years and more folded too.

But the great evil Maggie and Co did was to increase the gap between rich and poor, partly by cutting tax rates for the better off. Exponentially. And to New Labour's great shame, they did nothing to bring society back together again by shrinking the gap between rich and poor.

Labour's main initiative in this area was not the redistribution of the tax burden, but rather to increase means-tested benefits to the poor. We now have the crazy situation that some people on means tested benefits alone are above the tax threshold. All makes work for the beaurocrats to do.

So now I hope for legislation to loosen the grip of the two big parties, who have over the last forty years proved that their vision is to narrow, their greed too great, and their hearts in the wrong place.

 

[flybro]

Lets not forget that the toryrs did try to sell the crown jewells, and when they could'nt they sold everything else.

I want to know who finished of Robin Hood, because it sure seems that the shherif of nottingham is taking all the pigs.

 

[Sasha]

I've just woken up to the radio news and found we've got a hung parliament. Disappointing how few seats the Lib Dems got - I haven't seen anything about what % of the vote they got, which would be interesting. What a shocker about people not being able to get into polling stations to vote despite turning up and hour and a half before the polls closed.

How strange not to know who the government is yet! Weird, weird, weird.

Anyway, any change in govt is good - this one hasn't helped people with ME.

 

[Knackered]

I've just woken up to the radio news and found we've got a hung parliament. Disappointing how few seats the Lib Dems got - I haven't seen anything about what % of the vote they got, which would be interesting. What a shocker about people not being able to get into polling stations to vote despite turning up and hour and a half before the polls closed.

How strange not to know who the government is yet! Weird, weird, weird.

Anyway, any change in govt is good - this one hasn't helped people with ME.

LibDems polled around 23% of the vote and yet they've only got 51 seats so far.

 

[pollycbr125]

I think it is disgusting how folk have been denied their vote and even more disgusting that certain polling stations ran out of voting forms . surely this should invalidate certain results . some stayed open later which is against the rules surely the results cannot stand the whole thing has been a farce ..!

 

[Sasha]

LibDems polled around 23% of the vote and yet they've only got 51 seats so far.

Damn! They should have had about 150 seats then. Bring on electoral reform!

 

[helsbells]

Very disappointed for Libdems - didn't expect victory but they must wonder what they have to do before people change habbits and also ditto pollycbr125. Weird everybody i spoke to was going to vote LD but I suppose thats people like me and still only mounts to about 20 LOL - even so feel very bumbed about it all and reminded of what a cloudy issue politics is.

 

[Sasha]

I think it is disgusting how folk have been denied their vote and even more disgusting that certain polling stations ran out of voting forms . surely this should invalidate certain results . some stayed open later which is against the rules surely the results cannot stand the whole thing has been a farce ..!

Incredible, isn't it? I think some places brought the queue into the poll station, locked them in and issued voting slips to enable them to still vote, but others didn't. It should have been easy to count how many people were in the queue and later determine whether it was enough to influence the outcome - I wonder whether anyone did that? I'd heard of queues of 200 people but the difference between first and second place usually seems to be thousands. I hope it wasn't enough to make a difference, but really, how shameful.

 

[Sasha]

Very disappointed for Libdems - didn't expect victory but they must wonder what they have to do before people change habbits and also ditto pollycbr125. Weird everybody i spoke to was going to vote LD but I suppose thats people like me and still only mounts to about 20 LOL - even so feel very bumbed about it all and reminded of what a cloudy issue politics is.

Yes, helsbels (great name!) - we tend to have friends because they think like us and so we are in these little enclaves surrounded by other people voting LibDem this time and think that the whole of the UK is like that...

Still, not too late for them to form a coalition govt with Labour with a referendum on PR as the price. Those fifty-odd seats might still be enough

 

[pollycbr125]

what annoys me is how this country bangs on about fairness and democracy and often sticks its nose into other countries affairs saying how elections have to be fair etc etc

Then when it comes to our own elections just about every rule in the book has been broken . Surely thats not fair , its certainly not democreatic .

you would have thought commen sense would have made it clear that the turn out was going to be high and that if anything they would have had too many voting forms just to be on the safe side .At the end of the day surely there should be a voting form issued for every person who is legally entitled to vote . They know the numbers for gods sake its not rocket science :Retro mad:

 

[flybro]

its about holding their nerve now.

the torrys will say that if brwon cared about the UK he should step aside.

the lib dems i hope will try to form a lib lab pact

but that will still make it hard because lib lab will have to be fairly unnainimous when it come to get anything past.

especially if the torrys pall up with the others just to defeat the government.

agreement within parties has been impossible in the last few years,

cross party agreements is going to be a nightmare.