Eight for oh-eight
In 2008 I’d like to see…
1. The Chancellor commit £4 billion to halve child poverty by 2010 in the Budget
2. Labour consistently up in the polls, Ken winning again in London, and the feelgood factor back as through a few bright new ideas, good policies, quietly dropping some duff ones, no clangers and discipline we remind the country why they’ve trusted us for a decade
3. An outright Labour majority on Oxford City Council when we go to bed early in the morning of Friday 2 May
4. The last residents living in Orlit houses on Rose Hill moving into the wonderful newly-built houses, as Taylor Wimpey get stuck in and start building; a new Fresh Start primary school on our estate; crime continuing to fall; and the youth club opening for longer hours
5. A Democrat about to take over at the White House, with a pledge to raise the federal rate of the minimum wage and finally get around to creating universal healthcare
6. A liberalisation of abortion law, to enable women to access abortion on demand; a significant narrowing of the gender pay gap; increased funding for rape crisis centres
7. Hundreds of new houses built in Oxford, hundreds of thousands nationally, and increased regulation to target profiteering and unscrupulous landlords
8. Finally, and more frivolously: for my family, Crystal Palace regaining their rightful place in the Premiership, and, for my adopted home town, Oxford United back in the Football League.
What would you like to see in 2008?
5, 6 and 7 are great. For the others, we can agree to disagree!
In any other year, I’d be working my socks off to make sure that number 3 doesn’t come true, but this year I think finals may just get in the way … :-p
Jonny Wright: you don’t want to see the Chancellor commit £4 billion to halve child poverty? Why? (For that matter why are you opposed to the things Antonia hopes for in 4, too)
I think 5 is a bit optimistic: I predict Rudi Giuliani will be the next US president, disappointing as that would be. Think Obama would have a chance against him but the way the primaries are structured looks to favour Clinton. And neither Clinton nor Obama are promising anything approaching universal healthcare, sadly.
I’d like to see (I’ve only picked things I think are plausible):
1. Increased success for the NRF in Sudan; the “peacekeeping” force not to get in their way too much
2. Labour to go on the attack on Tory policies on family, employment and the economy, exposing their ideas in painstaking detail and re-establishing their reputation as the nasty party run by out-of-touch toffs
3. Increased Labour representation where I live
4. More successes against the odds for migrants and asylum seekers organising resistance to immigration controls; more people to challenge the racist consensus that makes these achievements against the odds
5. Boris Johnson to be humiliated in May, causing the Tories to turn against David Cameron. Cameron to survive long and vicious public struggle - just.
6. See Antonia’s number 6.
7. See Antonia’s number 7.
8. Zuma to pull a rabbit out of the hat re: Zimbabwe.
I’d like to say a calming of the situation in Kenya, but that seems too unlikely.
Antonia somehow I don’t think you’re going to see very much of your list met! Maybe a Democrat in the White House, so long as they don’t pick a crap candidate, and I can’t comment too much on Oxford, but is Crystal Palace really in with a chance of the premiership?
Ooooh, I don’t know, let me think…..
All English patients to get the same drugs AS OF RIGHT that the people of Gordon Brown’s constituency have.
1) How about an English Parliament. A Parliament for England, a country of 50 million souls, the ONLY country in the whole of Europe without a national Parliament of her own.
2) Less snooping from a government obsessed with control and freakery - Gordon, MYOB!!!!.
3) Tony Blair to shut up. He is not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.
4) The creation of a Federal UK. Vastly slimmed down Westminster….. hang on a mo’ do you reckon it’s a sort of turkeys, (or in this case, piggies) not voting for Christmas - seeing that Westminster currently devotes 70% of its time to English-only matters - and hey, you cvan never have too much meddling from Scots and Welsh MPs, can you?
5) Gordon Brown to know the difference between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’….Magna Carta was not a British achievement, it was English - as was the Bill of Rights. (I know, I’ll be believing in fairies, next). Oh and also Gordon - it isn’t “3 million houses to be built across the UK” - You know, and I know that you are talking about England. Planning issues are devolved, or had you forgotten?
6) Honesty in politics. If nuclear power stations are only going to be built in England because both Scotland and Wales have their own national parliaments and therefore have a responsibility to their voters, and have said they will not allow nukes to be built on their soil - then John Hutton should be man enough to say it.
7) My own MP - the dreadful and completely moribundly supine Rosie Cooper to discover she has a back bone afterall.(I also reckon I will win the lottery!)
9) All English old people to get the same residential rights that the old people of Gordon Brown’s constituency have AS OF RIGHT.
10) Did I mention an English Parliament? I have? Then what about that referendum that was promised?
Regards, Alfie,
(ex-Labour voter of 30 years solid - and then I woke up)