Mikhail Liebenstein Posted May 25, 2017 Share Posted May 25, 2017 Looks like Theresa's crypto socialist manifesto has been called out by the UK'S SMB firms. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/05/25/britains-small-businesses-overwhelmingly-reject-tory-manifesto/ Seriously I can't vote for this, it's fair to say the Lib Dems probably have the most free market manifesto. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wayward Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 Business bemoaning an "assault on free markets"...is that a joke? When did we have anything that looked remotely like a free market in respect to any of the markets that meet our essential needs? Food, water, shelter...all grotesquely distorted to favour one group to the cost of another. I don't think they know what a free market is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gigantic Purple Slug Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 Well unless I'm wrong that article reflects what small business owners don't like about the manifesto, as opposed to where the manifesto fails in terms of accommodating small business needs. Which are two slightly different things. For example, why would small business be interested in social care provision ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 It does rather feel like they are dependant on extremely compliant govt, zirp etc. So it's not unfriendly to small business in general, just the current crop drunk on stimulus. Maybe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CunningPlan Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 So from analysing comments on social media they come to the conclusion that people don't like some policies. No sh*t Sherlock. On my facebook page, all I ever see is people moaning about something. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
reddog Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 Not a fan of May's policies, but liberal and labour are even worse. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted May 26, 2017 Author Share Posted May 26, 2017 22 minutes ago, reddog said: Not a fan of May's policies, but liberal and labour are even worse. Well I'm not so sure. I think May is so left wing and authoritarian, it is quite ridiculous. Mrs Thatcher must be turning in her grave looking at the current Conservative manifesto. May's approach is why choose laissez-faire when you can have a massive bodangle of a Government intervention instead! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 3 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Well I'm not so sure. I think May is so left wing and authoritarian, it is quite ridiculous. Could you cite examples? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted May 26, 2017 Author Share Posted May 26, 2017 (edited) 1 hour ago, Si1 said: Could you cite examples? Curbs on executive pay, restrictions on foreign takeovers and workers on boards. Supporting new Grammar Schools at the potential expense of private schools. With Hammond totally failing to address the deficit. Draconian surveillance policies. Allowing increased fines for motorists. She is definitely left of Brown/Blair. In fact she is basically a Christian Democrat on the European model. A fun article here comparing her to Castro: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/conservative-general-election-manifesto-2017-theresa-may-general-election-forward-together-fidel-a7743616.html Perhaps she even makes Corbyn look right wing what with his free market defence policy. Edited May 26, 2017 by Mikhail Liebenstein Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted May 26, 2017 Author Share Posted May 26, 2017 Oh dear, looks like May might be ousted before the election: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/conservatives-election-campaign-relaunch-party-lead-polls-cut-labour-theresa-may-jeremy-corbyn-a7756976.html Total and utter campaign meltdown. Tories Cancel election relaunch. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oracle Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 1 hour ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Well I'm not so sure. I think May is so left wing and authoritarian, it is quite ridiculous. Mrs Thatcher must be turning in her grave looking at the current Conservative manifesto. May's approach is why choose laissez-faire when you can have a massive bodangle of a Government intervention instead! may's brand of state intervention is just slightly less than corbyn's and tim nice-but-dim's/ she was a remainer after all,as was bojo. I don't think they've really got it yet..we want them to stop meddling and get out of the bloody way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BorrowToLeech Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 4 hours ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Well I'm not so sure. I think May is so left wing and authoritarian, it is quite ridiculous. Mrs Thatcher must be turning in her grave looking at the current Conservative manifesto. May's approach is why choose laissez-faire when you can have a massive bodangle of a Government intervention instead! May is a classic conservative. Thatcher wasn't, she was a neoliberal. "Another colleague had also prepared a paper arguing that the middle way was the pragmatic path for the Conservative party to take .. Before he had finished speaking to his paper, the new Party Leader [Margaret Thatcher] reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting [the speaker], she held the book up for all of us to see. 'This', she said sternly, 'is what we believe', and banged Hayek down on the table." (John Ranelagh, Thatcher's People: An Insider's Account of the Politics, the Power, and the Personalities. London: HarperCollins, 1991.) "This fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces is closely related to two other characteristics of conservatism: its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces. Since [conservatism] distrusts both abstract theories and general principles, it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy. Order appears to the conservative as the result of the continuous attention of authority" - F A Hayek https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 4 hours ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Curbs on executive pay, restrictions on foreign takeovers and workers on boards. Supporting new Grammar Schools at the potential expense of private schools. With Hammond totally failing to address the deficit. Draconian surveillance policies. Allowing increased fines for motorists. Ok, I did clock some of those things. I believe the pendulum will swing the other way in due time and I'm happy and robust enough to cope with those. I do believe that free markets have their limits. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
durhamborn Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 4 hours ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said: Oh dear, looks like May might be ousted before the election: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/conservatives-election-campaign-relaunch-party-lead-polls-cut-labour-theresa-may-jeremy-corbyn-a7756976.html Total and utter campaign meltdown. Tories Cancel election relaunch. I must say i was quite shocked reading the manifesto.Labour want to give free money to their client state and grow it.Nothing new there.The Tories though seemed to promise to do nothing to cut the free handouts,but instead take more from people who have worked all their lives.Iv read a lot of manifesto's in my time,and it was probably the worst iv ever read.Nothing in there to tackle the problems we face.A disaster of a manifesto.Hit our own voters,keep handing out free money to Labour voters.Bonkers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted May 26, 2017 Author Share Posted May 26, 2017 (edited) 12 minutes ago, durhamborn said: I must say i was quite shocked reading the manifesto.Labour want to give free money to their client state and grow it.Nothing new there.The Tories though seemed to promise to do nothing to cut the free handouts,but instead take more from people who have worked all their lives.Iv read a lot of manifesto's in my time,and it was probably the worst iv ever read.Nothing in there to tackle the problems we face.A disaster of a manifesto.Hit our own voters,keep handing out free money to Labour voters.Bonkers. Yep.....100% The Labour and Lib Dem Manifestoes are at least costed, and whilst they'd up tax at least there is a ceiling. The Tories could put up NI 20% as theirs isn't. My gut feeling is they genuinely weren't going to have an election so hadn't prepared anything, and then the file on election expenses was passed to the CPS, so the panicked and called an election for fear of losing 30 seats. Meanwhile the Lib Dems and Labour had to be on standby for a snap election. Again this shows how flip floppy and panicky Theresa May is - totally unsuited to being PM. Edited May 26, 2017 by Mikhail Liebenstein Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WinstonSmith Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 Conservatism didn't begin with Thatcher. Difficult concept to grasp maybe but true nonetheless. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stormymonday_2011 Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 (edited) 1 hour ago, WinstonSmith said: Conservatism didn't begin with Thatcher. Difficult concept to grasp maybe but true nonetheless. Indeed, historically laissez faire free market economics has been the hallmark of liberalism. The Conservative party has often followed interventionist policies in areas such as trade and the economy going back to the time of the Corn Laws. Stanley Baldwin used Parliament to create a national electricity grid in 1926. In the history of the Tory party Thatcher is the aberration not May, though to be honest the formers laissez faire credentials when in power don't really stand up to close examination. The banking bailouts after 2007 and the endless props thrown at the housing market subsequently pretty much proved that most of the free market rhetoric the British were subjected to in the previous 25 years was just self serving b"llocks. When faced with potential bankruptcy the financial sector and the City of London proved to be just as keen on taxpayer handouts as any heavily unionised nationalised industry of the past. Edited May 26, 2017 by stormymonday_2011 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WinstonSmith Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 Spot on. If ever there was a PM whose image was utterly divorced from reality then it's Thatcher. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 13 hours ago, stormymonday_2011 said: Indeed, historically laissez faire free market economics has been the hallmark of liberalism. The Conservative party has often followed interventionist policies in areas such as trade and the economy going back to the time of the Corn Laws. Stanley Baldwin used Parliament to create a national electricity grid in 1926. In the history of the Tory party Thatcher is the aberration not May, though to be honest the formers laissez faire credentials when in power don't really stand up to close examination. The banking bailouts after 2007 and the endless props thrown at the housing market subsequently pretty much proved that most of the free market rhetoric the British were subjected to in the previous 25 years was just self serving b"llocks. When faced with potential bankruptcy the financial sector and the City of London proved to be just as keen on taxpayer handouts as any heavily unionised nationalised industry of the past. I agree with this. The conservatives had every opportunity to instill a free market in finance and property but instead set about promoting transfers of wealth to the financial elite. In the absence of a non interventionist option (which turned out to be a Trojan horse), May's option seems reasonable from my perspective. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 1 hour ago, hotairmail said: The Tories grew from being the Party of the Monarch and Church of England, historically the Party of the Land which is inextricably linked with rentierism and finance related rentierism. It was the Whigs who wanted a more modern form of government, to curtail the power of the monarch and the Established Church, to open markets to free trade (Abolition of the EU-like protectionist Corn Laws to put money in people's pockets and stimulate manufactures and consumption). Their extreme laissez-faire attitude and beliefs in 'positive population corrections' had a great role to play in the needless Irish and Indian famines. It was only a result of the third Factor of Production getting its electoral voice (Labour) did our first past the post system squeeze one of the 3 electoral Factors out of the equation and result in a subsequent overlap in policy. Thatcher was really responsible for stepping into Whig territory where a gap had opened up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production In a two party system each party will inevitably cover a lot of ground. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maverick73 Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 What type of businesses do the SMB represent? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PopGun Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 20 hours ago, DrBuyToLeech said: May is a classic conservative. Thatcher wasn't, she was a neoliberal. "Another colleague had also prepared a paper arguing that the middle way was the pragmatic path for the Conservative party to take .. Before he had finished speaking to his paper, the new Party Leader [Margaret Thatcher] reached into her briefcase and took out a book. It was Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Interrupting [the speaker], she held the book up for all of us to see. 'This', she said sternly, 'is what we believe', and banged Hayek down on the table." (John Ranelagh, Thatcher's People: An Insider's Account of the Politics, the Power, and the Personalities. London: HarperCollins, 1991.) "This fear of trusting uncontrolled social forces is closely related to two other characteristics of conservatism: its fondness for authority and its lack of understanding of economic forces. Since [conservatism] distrusts both abstract theories and general principles, it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy. Order appears to the conservative as the result of the continuous attention of authority" - F A Hayek https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/articles/hayek-why-i-am-not-conservative.pdf May: Classical Tory Corbyn: Classical Labour no wonder the neoliberals hate them both. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thisisthisitmaybe Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 Thatcher was a radical who bought wholeheartedly into neo-liberal, free markets Ideology. Theresa May is on the right path here in anticipating a desire for a more traditional conservatism among the people, but she is making I some powerful enemies. Political parties rarely keep to their manifestos, she should have just made the whole thing less specific and focused on attacking Corbyn, which is very much the new strategy by the looks of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maverick73 Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 4 hours ago, thisisthisitmaybe said: Thatcher was a radical who bought wholeheartedly into neo-liberal, free markets Ideology. Theresa May is on the right path here in anticipating a desire for a more traditional conservatism among the people, but she is making I some powerful enemies. Political parties rarely keep to their manifestos, she should have just made the whole thing less specific and focused on attacking Corbyn, which is very much the new strategy by the looks of it. I do wonder what a re-nationalised UK would look like, but I won't be voting to find out.. both parties pledge nothing towards financial responsibilities.. just unaccountable gimmicks ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Si1 Posted May 27, 2017 Share Posted May 27, 2017 1 hour ago, maverick73 said: I do wonder what a re-nationalised UK would look like, but I won't be voting to find out.. both parties pledge nothing towards financial responsibilities.. just unaccountable gimmicks ? What did she say she was going to nationalise? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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