Steps, do please pay attention,
I don't vote labour, I vote anti-tory. Mostly I don't actually think any party is really worth voting for, so I vote against the party that in my opinion does me/ the UK, the most harm. That happens to be the Tories at the moment. IMHO they are very good at convincing people, through a mostly right-wing press, that they want to be rich, when their real agenda is to make the rich richer, hence the expanding wealth gap between the rich and the poor. When it comes to being blind, your hatred of labour seems quite extreme, but that's your choice.
I actually don't like extremes of anything other than getting drunk, and maybe a bit of speeding. I don't like the Torys for being extreme right wing capitalists and I certainly don't like full on socialism. But what I really don't like is dogma wasting my money. The Tory party follows a capiatlist agenda of 'free market enterprise' that is forcing the country to its knees through stupidity, same as the trade unions did with their own brand of stupidity. Unions are basically gone, capitalism is alive an well. If you look at the current policies they might as well have been written by Thatcher, talk about going backwards! A little extra tax would be cheaper to me, and probably everyone else than paying out cash to compensate for dogmatic practices of driving everything to the lowest, cheapest option, which you all keep moaning about. An example of that was in my posting about potholes, scrimping £1billion from the budget for roads costs £2.8billion in additional accidents, (and the deaths of many people) please tell me how that isn't dumb dogma?
Now the Tories are looking to privatise Network Rail, which if I remember rightly, was re-nationalised after a series of terrible train crashes. Potters Bar particulalry stands out as it was caused by poor maintenace resulting from issueing the contract to the lowest bidder. I don't want to see that crap ever again.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01647/potters-1_1647555c.jpg
As for socialism, which country has the most millionares, a centralised state, more small businesses than any other country, can get things done quickly..........China. Would I want to live under that particular regime, NO, but can we learn something from it, YES.
Somewhere between the 2 extremes is where we actually need to be. To me the basic infrastructure of the UK should be under state control, perhaps as a 'Not for Profit' business, but certainly not owned by foreign countries / businesses to extract money from the UK. As we all seem to agree Germany is a model worthy of praise, perhaps we should do it their way???