If you have an LCD TV larger than 40 inches you are not being affected by a recession.
Bullox!!! You not heard of Brighthouse or Cash Converters??
If you procure household items from Brighthouse and complain of not having enough money and being affected by the 'recession' then you are a mug.
The problem with today's society is that people see things such as Sky TV as a necessity and when paying for it gets tough, they plead poverty.
Hard to see much of a future for Torys as things stand. This party hasn't won a general election for 22 years and isn't looking especially likely to win the next one.
As I predicted in 2010 they have inflicted further damage on themselves by forming their unhappy alliance with the discredited Lib Dems and made only modest progress towards balancing the budget, let alone cutting the actual size of the state.
They make a series of impotent noises about Europe and immigration but fail to deliver anything.
Their biggest cultural/social "achievement" seems to be gay marriage. Hardly likely to win back the Tory faithful but probably not enough to convince many Lib Dems that they're no longer the nasty party.
Their modest success (or rather avoidance of abject failure) in keeping the union together is tempered by the fact that they don't have a clue what they should now do with it, or indeed with England, where people do actually still vote for them.
And it isn't even clear, as they begin setting out their stall for the next election, that any of these things are even important to the Tories. They don't have any ideology, any principles, any vision or anything at all really besides being slightly less incompetent than Labour on economic management.
Despite a strong record on the economy and a fairly sympathetic hearing on the BBC Cameron looks on course to lose quite heavily against a Labour leader who is a bit of a laughing stock.
I know ideology is not fashionable at the moment and doesn't in itself win elections. What it does do though is gel a party together around some guiding principles so that people actually know what they're getting beyond the dream sheet of a typical manifesto and the schmoozing of a media friendly leader. The Conservative Party badly needs this.
What the actual ideology should be is not all that clear. It is a very broad grouping but at the simplest level the split between the Thatcherite radicals and the old corporatist/paternalist Torues is the most obvious split with no obvious remedy.
It's all a waste of time and none of it will really affect me in anyway so I don't know why I bother.