The Government: Running or Ruining the country?

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Do we have too many Politicians, or do you think they are not getting through to our public? Just want to know your views.

 

I think it goes the other way 'round - the PUBLIC isn't getting through to the POLITICIANS. The winners of any election claim to have gotten a "mandate" from the voters without ever realizing that many, many people view their vote as a choice of the lesser of two (sometimes more, but usually two) evils.

 

More than anything it is a failure to get through to the people at times.

Unfortunately to run a country you have to make a lot of unpopular decisions, no way to avoid that. The problem is that people don't like it. They often think they could do better without knowing the paramaters within which they would be working.

Secondly people tend far too often to consider only how decisions affect them, not if they may be good for the country as a whole.

The popular press have a tendency to "inform" people very selectively about certain issues. Some sides of an issue sells papers, some do not. Those that don't tend to be ignored.

Just as an example from the UK, the current perception that *ALL* asylum seekers want to come here, and we give them all SOOOO much money etc. It's BS. Firstly, we do not take the majority. We do not even take a larger proportion than than many of our European bretheren. However, this does not stop the press portraying it so, and quoting lots of angry people accusing the government of doing nothing about their problems.

Now the real problem in the UK lies in the failure of the immigration system itself, not in current or past government policy. You could argue that policy has made the system which doesn't work, but that fails to ackowledge the changes that have taken place within areas such as ease and cost of transportation for example. It also fails to recognise that this is in fact a European wide problem which we in the UK cannot solve on our own.

Finally consider this on the case of immigration: The only country in Europe that in 2002 had sustainable population growth was Turkey. Some countries already have negative growth [deaths outnumber births, even with an aging population], or we're on our way there. Where will we find economic growth with population decline and specifically with an even more rapid decline in people within the working-age age group? Economic growth does not happen on it's own, we need people to work.