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I've been finding out lately that a disturbing number of you are conservatives/Tory supporters of some stripe or another. Being somewhat of a flaming red socialist myself, I'm interested in how you guys justify the belief that the rich ought to get richer and the poor ought to fend for themselves that seems to be the Tory standpoint to me...

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Liberal Democrats are the most socialist party who has a hope of getting any say at all in government at the moment; Labour used to be the socialist party but then they decided they'd prefer to be in power than to stick by their principles.

Unfortunately the reality of politics at the moment is that most people do not want to pay taxes, even though they'll then complain about the state of schools and hospitals and police and stuff taxes pay for, so only parties who commit themselves to cutting taxes (the opposite of socialism, which relies on fairly high taxes to be able to provide public services) actually get elected. That's why it's so important for people who do realise that we need public services to vote for parties who haven't sold out like this yet.

You appear to have a hidden assumption here that taxes are being used efficiently at the moment.

Not really. I don't believe any of the parties are capable of / will make some amazing change which will make tax use more efficient to the extent that they can cut taxes safely. I do believe that cutting taxes is a downwards spiral whereby taxes are used less and less efficiently because nobody has the money to pay anybody to investigate how to use them more efficiently.

Taxes are never going to be 'used efficiently' in the way people expect them to, because people aren't perfect. OTOH, I think that the major governmental institutions (that don't change instantly with the changing of political parties) do a tolerably good job of it, and that there is no magic bullet that can be applied to make them do better. There are lots of obvious and horrendous wastes of taxpayers' money, but most of them are very hard to deal with. (My mother has been working as a secretary in the public sector for many years now, NHS and local government, and so I do have some knowledge to base this on.)

OK, that taxes are being used as efficiently as they can be.

(I'm happy to accept that you think that they are, because I tend to agree, but I don't like hidden assumptions).

Okay - my assumption is that no current political party has a 'magic bullet' that will let them maintain public services whilst cutting taxes by making spending 'more efficient'. This is not to say that spending cannot be made more efficient, just that nobody currently has a good enough plan to do it on the vast scale that would be required.

Labour used to be the socialist party but then they decided they'd prefer to be in power than to stick by their principles.

Couldn't that be paraphased as 'Labour discovered, through bitter experience, that its former principles just didn't work in practice, and rather than sound nice, but be wrong, they decided to take on the heavy burden of hard, complex, but pragmatic descisions, policies and changes, which would make a positive difference, instead of an idealism which collapsed in the face of reality'.

On reflection your version was more consise so probably wins.

In typical Neil 'oppose it because it exists' I may be coming across as rather rightwing kinda chap, as it happens I'm not. Labour is too right wing for my tastes, and I'd really rather not entrust the NHS to a Tory government. However, I do oppose weak thinking whenever I find it, on whatever side, and I think you glamourise the failure of the Labour party in it's past form.

By "didn't work in practice" you mean "made them unelectable" rather than "didn't produce good governance"; of course...

As it happens; I think a dead stick could've won that election, so long as it wasn't Tory; but hey...

Actually I was going for 'not effective governance of humans', rather like a less extreme case of communism: it really ought to work but it turns out humans are evil and messed up, and so they mess it up.

One word: strikes.

To my mind it's only post William Hague that the Tory party have achieved new depths of deader than a dead stick, before that I had some respect for them. The election kinda indicates that I was alone in this viewpoint.