Friday 10 December 2010

My political beliefs

At the moment I'm really struggling with my political beliefs. Before the election of this year, I was a Liberal Democrat but since they decided to make higher education more expensive than it already is and pushed through some budget cuts which really do seem rather unfair, I really am having second thoughts about whether I support them.

The problem I'm having is that I don't know how much of it was really their fault because Labour did leave the government with a lot of debt and so they have had to make some harsh budget cuts as a result. However, even they concede that they were actually planning to make budget cuts when they were in coalition talks with Labour and the Conservatives despite the fact that they said they were against the Conservatives making cuts i 2010. Clegg said that he had had a change of heart because other countries in the EU were starting to make budget cuts because they were starting to realise that they also had to cut their debts and so he now thought we needed to take this approach but if this was the case, then why didn't he say this before we all went to the polls? What really annoys me about the fact that he did this, is that he had always tried to make out that the Liberal Democrats were an honest party but in doing that, they hardly seem honest.

Nevertheless, I cannot forget that they have done good things, that might not have happened if the Conservatives had been in a majority government. For instance they stopped the Conservatives giving tax breaks to married couples and withdrawing us from the Human Rights Act. Furthermore, they and the Conservatives have stopped people wanting to do a part time degree from having to pay up front and they have scrapped some of Labour's other ridiculous policies. So I'm left wondering just how much difference there would have been between a Conservative government and the current coalition's government.

But the fact that I'm disillusioned with the Liberal Democrats doesn't mean I support either of the other two predominant parties anymore. I dislike the Conservatives because they support the interests of the rich more than the interests of anyone else, I cannot forgive them for what happened whilst Thatcher was in power and I really cannot stand the views of their more right-wing members.

And although I lend more of my support to Labour than I do to the Conservatives. It doesn't mean I would necessarily support them at the election because I think they sometimes take their issue of equality a bit too far by doing things such as encouraging too many people to go to university in order to bring about "the equality of opportunity", and they try and dictate how governmental organisations should work far too much when half the time they don't even know what they're talking about and I'm very angry that they took us to war with Iraq.

So I'm considering voting for the Green Party but I'm still eager to stop the Conservatives winning in my area (because where I live the Conservatives often win, and they've won every election in that seat since the 1950s, and the only other party who has a chance of winning is the Liberal Democrats), so I'm still trying to work out what would be most worthwhile in the current situation.

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