Political clarity is sadly on oxymoron by the standards current politicians subscribe.
I suspect they actually did quite a lot to mitigate full on Tory mania whilst in coalition, but theyâre never going to be remembered for that, just things like the u-turns on tuition fees.
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Exactly. Compare and contrast five years of coalition (stable government with some competence) with the first bit of majority Tory (complete political derp leading to a full on self inflicted economic disaster) and ask yourselves what the main difference is.
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I agree, but their real problem was the appearance of the thing: Clegg and Cameron having a love-in in the garden at Downing Street and the like. They should have kept their distance more.
Yes, that would certainly have been wiser. Although it did lead to that rather uncomfortable question from Nick Robinson which was hilarious.
Iâm not sure Osborneâs initial bout of austerity was particularly clever. It nipped the shoots of economic growth straight away putting things into reverse. It took until about 2012/13 for wiser heads to prevail and the policy to be backed off a bit.
I always find it interesting just how little the Tory chancellors have adopted austerity. They and their party have shouted from the rooftops about it, but their policies have actually been ones that they would have found entirely unacceptable has they been undertaken by Labour.
In some ways I think this could be the worst of both worlds: by talking austerity they stop people from spending and companies from investing, and this then reduces the benefit of the investment they are doing. Oh well.
âAusterityâ was just a catchy word. There was no real austerity.
There isnât Leader out there at the moment worth tuppence. A Party can only coagulate around a set of policies when a half decent leader has the whip. None of them can manage their own Parties right now, let alone the Country.
The only one capable of that recently used his energies securing Brexit and for the past twenty years the rest of them did nothing more than act as pathfinders for him.
I still hope, somewhat in vain I fear, that Brexit hasnât fucked up either the EU nor this country for my son.
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The Tories preached austerity without actually doing it (weâre still broke), and Labour went along with the pretence accusing them of going too far with cuts because it suited them.
Dogma and party fucking politics - just great isnât it 
The cuts were real enough though. Now where did all that money go?
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Deficit (NOT debt) reduction.
Real austarity, a la the 1950s, wouldâve been âinterestingâ.
Granted, I was looking at it from the other end.
Take Defence, from 2002 on the rate of increase was around 5%, from 2010 on it dropped to 1.5%. As always, Defence inflation ran higher than 1.5% and hence a cut in service was inevitable. It was called âseeking efficienciesâ. Repeat that across most Civil service departments and that is why people felt austerity.
Some saying turnout was less than 30% in Stoke 
And we wonder why some results surprise us 
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Same night as the pottery programme
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Thatâs bad news for the mainstream parties, apart from being just bad news for democracy in general. Ukip voters tend to be fairly motivated.
How could anyone vote for that lying bellend, just want to punch his racist fuckwit face.
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Youâd be surprised, sadly.
No accounting for the (lack of) intelligence of (some of) the general public