"""New Labour", in order to be electable, in the culture of greed actively promoted under Thatcherwasm, had to make and did make a range of promises about for example taxation, and I am sure you would support politicians keeping promises.""

What are you on today Richard?....It must be damn good stuff, but I'm not sure I want to get into something which destroys both memory, and critical faculties.

Within two years New Labour introduced some several dozen new stealth taxes.

Even Thatcher never managed to put the whole population into personal debt, and the treasury into bankruptcy. You are a lawyer, and you should be well aware that a company which had suffered this level of mismanagement would be in administration, or bankrupt.

"NEW LABOUR" was cynically remodelled by Blair/Brown, to bring it close enough to Tory ideology to capture Tory voters.

They affected a more moderate centreist position, while in reality they threw out every last principle of labour socialism. It was bad under Wilson/Callaghan, and infinitely worse under Blair/Brown.

In light of that, how can you possibly believe that they would have cared about keeping promises (in fact they never kept any).

They reduced unemployment by cooking the books.

There are no more unemployed. They are "Jobseekers", "In Retraining", "Gaining Work Experience", etc. etc.

Brown, just a few weeks ago, was making much of the fact that there were 33,000 fewer registered unemployed over a three month period.

He stopped mentioning that one, when it was pointed out that there were 54,000 fewer people in employment in the same three month period.

They tinkered with everything (at enormous expense) and solved nothing.

Five more years of totally inept, and unprincipled, New Labour under Brown is exactly what is needed to finish the job of bringing this country down to the financial level of Greece, Eire, or Iceland.

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""It should be a no-brainer and I remain baffled why with your intelligence in some things you cannot see it. Shame about the Medway Labour candidate though!""

I guess we have different ideas about what constitutes intelligence, and for me, it isn't blindly continuing to hand your wallet to the conman who has emptied it three times in thirteen years.

Your mileage may differ.

Don T.