LGBT News UK General Election: MP's voting records

If old enough, I would be tempted to vote Green, their LGBT+ education policy sounds great, and, the fact that so many parties are focusing on education is part of the reasons I feel 16 year olds should get the vote.

 

Not surprising to see such a long list of Conservative MPs..

 

Bloody Tories :/

 

I'm not surprised to see such a long list of Torys.

 

The Greens may sound nice, but they are batshit crazy! One of their policies is to close military bases and turn them into nature reserves and cycle parking mandatory at all houses.

Even if my local Tory MP voted against equal marriage I would still vote for them. To not vote for a party because of one issue is just dumb, let's not forget Ruth Davidson - the leader of the Scottish Tories - is a lesbian, the Tories have the highest number of LGBT MPs in the Commons and were the first party to set up a fund to give LGBT candidates more money for campaigning.

How society treats gay people and the health of the economy are more important than marriage (although important to me). You can make anything a law, but if society doesn't support it, it's not worth shit.

 

David Cameron supports marriage equality and appears to have done a decent job economically. I wish the best to the Tories.

 

Aren't Scottish Tories basically an afterthought? It seems like the entire country is mainly SNP, Lib Dem and Labour.

LGBTQ rights are very important to many LGBTQ people, and I feel that we should understand that if a person does not like a person's view on their human rights, they can not vote for them based solely on that and either vote against them by voting for the person most likely to beat them or write in a candidate.

 

No, not at all. The Scottish Tories are called the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, they have been a separate party since 1965 and have a vote sharing agreement with The Conservative Party. There is a lot of support for Tories in Scotland, but it's too spread about and not focused like the rest, the 2010 election in Scotland got the Tories 412,000 votes and 1 seat, the SNP got 491,000 votes and 6 seats but the Lib Dems only got 465,000 votes and gained 11 seats.

This map here shows who came second place in all the seats and you'll see a lot of Scotland is Tory blue!

 

Huh, I quite like that idea. So much is spent on the military and bombs and what not, I should think some additional shrubbery and flowers would be a pleasant change, and far less costly. One could extend tax breaks, based on that idea. Not to mention, it's hard to picture much nature left in the UK; I recall a certain author remaking the place was so manicured, it was one place where it would be impossible to get lost. Wodehouse, perhaps, or Wharton.

But I'm all for more nature preserves, and bike lanes.

If anything, if I visit the UK, I worry it'll be too crowded by the time I get there; a small island, all filled in with people, milling about all tipsy! =p

(I hope people see the humor, here!)

 

Tories got 16.7% of the vote in Scotland in 2010, putting them last of the major Scottish parties. Lib Dems will do worse now.

I do think the Greens are a little crazy but they can afford to be crazy as they know they have no chance of being held accountable for anything.

 

That stuff about military bases and cycling parking only sounds crazy because it isn't the norm right now. I was reading about a thing called the Overton Window which is really fascinating. It's the theory that public climate dictates what policies or ideas are acceptable enough for a politician to put forward. They'll avoid anything radical or too 'new' in order to hold on to public support. The Greens are just honest. I don't have an opinion on the UK's military policies but I do think that the more access to cycling and sustainable modes of transport, the better.

More on Overton window:
Overton window - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was the Lib Dems who pushed the Conservatives for marriage equality? Or so they claimed at my local hustings when I grilled them on it.
Mr Cameron does seem quite sincere in his seemingly positive stance on our rights but sometimes, after what they did in the 90s (using anti-gay ads and blaming AiDS on us to attract more voters by trying to create a common enemy) it seems like just another stunt to make people vote for them. As you can see the majority of people on that list are conservative.
Also at my local hustings I posed a question on what they intended to do about LGBT education in Schools including sex and trying to orevent bullying. I'd already read their policies online but in person the only one who impressed me was Labour. The others gave some very vague answers about it being down to local authority, and the Tory and UKIP guys said respectively "it's not our problem" and "homophobic bullying doesn't exist".

 

The Lib Dems have taken credit for every good Tory policy and distanced themselves from every bad one - a big mistake and I'll think they'll pay for it tomorrow, if they used their track record in government they could win Tory votes in marginal seats, but they've gone after Labour votes which won't work. But Cameron was talking about equal marriage soon after he was elected as leader in 2006. Don't place a vote just on a manifesto, what the parties values are is much more important, less than 1% of parliamentary issues over the next 5 years will be anything to do with the manifesto, the other 99% will be dictated by party values.

 

Didn't know there were local elections tomorrow as well. They have been completely overshadowed by the General Election, understandably. I've considered voting Green locally but Labour nationally.

Anywho, I'll be voting tomorrow at around 12pm - no doubt there will be huge crowds early morning and in the evening as people vote before and after work. Might as well get it over and done with when the only people voting are old biddies.

 

We had a GLOBAL recession, not a single country got off, but there were many who fared worse - such as the Mediterranean countries who could borrow money at the same rate as Germany and France. Good god it is far from perfect and no I can't say I'm 100% happy where the country is, but I can say I'm happy where it's come from and where it is heading. We can bash the rich all we want, but remember, the 1% pay 25% of all income tax and that doesnt include the jobs their businesses sustain and the they pay.

But for reasons to vote Conservative-

I could give you the party line and say last year the UK created more jobs than the rest of the EU, with 60% of them being 30+ hours and only 8% zero hours contracts and that 600,000 new businesses were created. But it's so much more than that.

Another crisis will come, I don't know when or how, but it will come. So it's important to get into a surplus ASAP so that if a crisis comes, we can borrow money instead of cut - the longer we are in surplus the more we can afford to borrow when we NEED to.

If we keep our deficit there will be another crash in 10 years and the cuts will be worse than this time round, if we fail badly to deal with the deficit we will need bailed out by the IMF and when that happens the IMF TELLS you how much you spend and what you have to cut, you have no control over it.

But one thing that really irks me is when people say the Tories are 'the party for the rich', it couldn't be far from the truth, my main income is disability benefit. The Tories are the only party I can trust to have in government who will do their best to ensure I can work and not be stuck at home after my degree, in the last 5 years they have given employers more grants to adapt the workplace for disabled people than 13 years or Labour did. This government has reclaimed £13bn in tax avoidance vs Labours £5.5bn in 13 years, the top 1% are paying 25% of income tax and the top 0.1% 12% of income tax, more than at any time under Labour. 60 tax loopholes have been closed in the past 5 years too. High income individuals are a vital asset to any country, they pay a huge amount of tax. 5,000 non-doms pay as much tax as 150,000 low paid workers. Getting more money from the rich to redistribute doesn't have to mean putting their taxes up, if you encourage them to invest you can get more money from them while they pay a lower percentage of tax.

Ultimately, yes we need to redistribute wealth. But if you chase the rich out of the country you lose that wealth base and taxes have to go up for normal people. You cannot redistribute wealth if you have no wealth to redistribute. And that's the problem with Labour this time round, we saw what happened in France when they brought their wealth taxes in, the rich left. At least Blair understood that point.

 

"Getting more money from the rich to redistribute doesn't have to mean putting their taxes up, if you encourage them to invest you can get more money from them while they pay a lower percentage of tax."

That's nice in theory but doesn't actually happen in reality does it? Quite frankly I doubt that our situation is any better than France's - the economy appears better on the surface but that's mostly superficial fluff. What is more important than anything else is the quality of life that people enjoy. The UK has endured the longest wage slump in living memory and our productivity is the worst of all major economies. France's economy is growing slowly now but they have not suffered 5 years of uninterrupted declining wages and they recovered their lost productivity ages ago while we have only just managed that - and now our growth is also slowing down, as we have seen with Germany and France, which again recovered much quicker than we did (in fact, our recovery was the slowest in the G7). I'd be willing to bet that your every French person does indeed have a higher standard of living than your average Brit (and your average German) - but I doubt that was the case 10 years ago.

My major problem with the Tories is that they focus more on the deficit and 'balancing the books' than anything else*. Every time they get into power, the UK's social well-being goes to shit - it happened under Thatcher and Major. By 1995 the UK had the highest child poverty rate in (Western) Europe, and unemployment peaked at an astonishing 11%. The number of homeless people also rose consistently until 2002 when Labour's policies managed to bring it down - and it continued falling until 2010 - the year the Tories got into power. Unemployment also fell to its lowest level in over 30 years - after reaching 11% under Major and 12% under Thatcher (with associated strikes and riots that plagued much of the 1980s - and countless other seedy goings on that will forever plague the Thatcher era).

And even then, the myth that Labour mishandled the economy and racked up extraordinary amounts of debt is, well, a myth - considering that debt to GDP was always below 50% and only started rising when Labour were forced to bail out the banks in 2007/2008, and they did run a small surplus during their early years in government.

Oh, and Labour want to reintroduce the 50% tax rate for the highest earners - not exactly the same as France's 75% rate.

 

Obviously, I have limited knowledge of the situation firsthand as I am across the pond. But from watching Question Time as I have quite regularly and seeing the PM debate and reading a fair amount, I don't get how anyone could support Milliband. He just comes off as a dick.

---------- Post added 6th May 2015 at 07:55 PM ----------

Do you want to have trillions of debt like this country who has practically become a slave to a country like China? Be thankful you have a government that actually looks out for future generations.

 

No, I don't, but what evidence do you have to support the idea that the UK would end up like that? I don't even get that.

Funny - I think the same about Cameron. Total sleaze - comes across as very uptight, boring and painfully upper-class - just an out of touch Eton knob. I don't make a habit of judging politicians on how they look or act but since people seem so eager to slag off Ed Milliband because he seems geeky or looks funny, then I might as well slagg off Cameron for similar superficial reasons.

 

All it takes is a few "free" trade agreements before the jobs get sent overseas...or around the corner for you. Things were never that bad here in regards to debt not even 50 some years ago.