Vote LibDem? Maybe? Please? Just Think About It.

So tomorrow is Election day, vote-agedon if you like, and I would ask you to go out and vote but before you do consider these points.

 You can, of course, vote for who you like and I'm pretty sure that I would no influence over you decision at all but that isn't going to stop me trying. I would ask you to considering voting Liberal Democrat.

 Now some of you will be having a rather significant knee jerk reaction to this but have you thought about it properly? If you are the reader of a Tory newspaper then you will have been told that a Hung parliament would be a disaster for the country and the economy. Their argument is that the credit rating agencies (they said that derivatives were fine you know) would down grade us from a AAA investment and that the markets would hate it. This is untrue. Did you know that of the 16 countries that have AAA rating - 10 have hung parliaments, 12 use system of PR So it is a lie, scaremongering if you will.

 There is also the point that do you think that your decision should be influenced by international money men? People that have no interest in our country and only in your money?

 Let us consider the really big issue, the Economy. Whose fault is it that we are in the situation were it is (maybe) necessary to have massive cuts in Public Spending and that we had a recession? That would be the Tories and Labour. 

  The Tories removed most of the regulation for banking, such as the separation of high street banks and investment banks, and Labour didn't put it back. Labour decided on “light touch” regulation of the City which lead to the Banks becoming to big to fail. Everyone invested in derivatives and many other forms of incredibly complicated financial products, with our money, so that when the failed it effected every economy in the world. Governments, who up until that point were all for independence for the markets and not getting involved, suddenly found themselves forced to bail out private companies. They had lost our money and because of this they had to helped with our money. I am not criticizing Private companies or the Government Bailouts (they had no choice), I am merely pointing out the facts.

 The recession was caused by foolish investments by companies that were allowed to hold Governments to ransom by those very Governments.

The Tories and Labour both have many friends in the City and are only proposing light, cosmetic changes to Banking regulation. Not the LibDems. They want to bring back the separation of High Street and Investment Banks. With this they can let large investment banks fail if they get themselves into trouble because they won't take huge swathes of the economy with them.

 Fairer Tax policies as well. The rich, as they can afford it, should pay more and no income tax on the first £10,000 you earn. The Tories want to change Inheritance Tax in order to help the 3000 richest families in the Country, are you one of those families? If so, vote Tory, if you are not, think about who they will run the country for.

They also support Mutuals, Co-operative and Credit Unions.

On Trident the LibDems don't want to replace it with something that is exactly the same. This will be needed in 20 years time but it is out of date now. It is a Cold War system in a post Cold War World. Why do we need an independent Nuclear Deterrent anyway? Who is deterred? Did it deter other countries from building Nuclear Weapons? I think you will find that that is a no. If anything it probably encouraged them to.

 The threats that we face today are not from other Countries or States but from Terrorist organisations. Did all of America's nuclear might deter Osama Bin Laden and his pilot friends from attacking New York? How about the London Bombers, were they put off by our lovely submarines? No, no they weren't. It is an awful lot of money for just making some uninformed people sleep well in their beds whilst not actually protecting them.

On immigration their policies are the ones that stands out the most. Those that complain about foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs should ask themselves this, would you pick lettuces for minimum wage? Or how about clean toilets, gut fish or pack meat? If we did these jobs ourselves then maybe we wouldn't need outside assistance.

Another example of a this is within the NHS. Many years ago the NHS went to the rest of the World to ask them for some nurses. Why was this? It was because they had to. The Tory government had cut funding for nurses training and were paying them a pittance so we didn't have any nurses.

The rest of the World bailed us out so now I think they deserve a little gratitude. Labour and the Tories say deport all illegal immigrants, interesting proposal but they don't know where they are. That's sort of the point about being here illegally, you have a tendency to hide. The LibDems propose an amnesty on these people. Get them registered and paying tax. If they are here illegally they are not claiming benefits because they can't, so they must be doing something to support themselves. They are working. A lot of the time they are working for gang masters who barely pay them and treat them badly. Why not utilise these people and make their lives better at the same time.

We also have to admit to ourselves that with a rapidly ageing population we are going to need some imported young people to do the work and pay some tax so that we can pay for our care homes, unless, of course, we think that Government mandated minimum family sizes is a good thing? How would the Daily Mail feel about the Government telling you to have at least 3 children?

 They are the only Party with proper green policies, a proper feed-in tariff for micro-generators. Setting aside extra money for schools who want to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings. They will pay back the loan over time from energy savings, creating a rolling fund to help insulate every public building. Investing £400 million in refurbishing Northern Shipyards so that they can make wind turbines. Investing £140 million in a bus scrappage scheme that helps bus companies to replace old polluting buses with new, accessible low carbon ones and creates jobs.

There are many other very good reason to vote LibDem, have a read of the manifesto here, such as a proper relationship with Europe, smaller class sizes, ring-fenced science funding, grown up, evidence based drug policies, tackling tax avoidance and evasion, scrapping the IT card scheme, restoring the link between State Pensions and earnings, Winter fuel payments to be extended to the severely disabled, I could go on but it would bore you, (that is assuming that you are not bored already) all I would ask is that you give serious consideration to voting Liberal Democrat tomorrow.

 I understand that this is not my most well formed arguement or snappily written piece but it is truely what I passionately believe. Please don't be scared into to voting for someone that you don't really like because of newspaper headlines or Politicians trying to scare you, vote for what you believe.