Gordon Brown announced the Labour election slogan ‘A future fair for all’ yesterday and said the Conservatives ‘are not the party of the mainstream majority’.
An interesting statement about the mainstream majority. At the last election Labour got 38% of the votes and the Conservatives 34% yet Labour had 356 seats against the Conservatives 198. It seems 4% of the votes creates a majority of 158 seats or about 25%. Hardly representative and hardly showing that any party has a mainstream majority. The Liberals got 22% of the vote, their 62 seats representing about 10% of the seats.
It could be said Gordon Brown was right to put through an electoral reform vote recently. Yet there are several methods of electoral reform and it appeared Mr Brown had chosen one that favoured Labour just before it was likely to be of most use. Seems to smack of one poor system being replaced by another manipulation. Seems what you’d expect in todays climate of deception.
The electoral changes are unlikely to get through both houses before the election. Although the next election has changed boundaries on many seats. This is because the city centre seats mainly held by Labour have become very small as people move to the suburbs. So re-aligning these is said to favour the Conservatives a bit. The Conservatives need a lot more than this to make an effect. Overturning such a massive majority as Labour hold is almost unheard of.
Labour have put faith in their slogan of ‘a fair future for us all’. Doesn’t sound very slick, gets me a bit tongue-tied. I could get ‘fair’ in my mind. The ‘us all’ bit sounds a bit absolute, like ‘we’ve abolished boom and bust’ and ‘British jobs for British workers’. Things you can’t achieve. Although even after 13 years of power the Labour politicians in general have a more impressive appearance than the Conservatives although you could say the same about Labour in 1997. The biggest thing against Labour is that they seemed to fall into the trap of the most profligate credit card users and spent excessively so that Britain is the worst placed of any western major economy. Even to the extent that Britains future as a major economy is in jeopardy. On the other hand there are a lot of new schools and hospitals, but it’s now like building a very large garage on your property and finding you can no longer afford a car.