You got to have some sympathy for David Cameron, the current leader of the Conservative Opposition. No matter how hard he tries to put forward his party’s message to the people, nobody seems to want to listen.

The Conservatives are having one huge problem at the moment- The Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown, like Tony Blair before him, is spending a lot of time trying to convince Tory voters that he is like them… and unfortunately for the real Tories, it seems to be working. Recent opinion polls show the Conservatives doing badly behind Labour.

When Cameron was asked if they was ready to fight a snap general election, he swiftly replied, “You bet!“. Yet there have been rumours that all is not well inside the party. Even exposing most of the Labour government’s poor record of late, particularly in banking and farming, hasn’t lead to any effective increase in public support.

That is bad news for British democracy. Labour, because of ten years of mismanagement, do not deserve to be reelected to govern… at any time. The nation needs a rejuvenated opposition, but at present it’s not even to begun to happen….

One of many reports on the protests in Burma, this one from the BBC:

Nine people have been killed amid a crackdown on anti-government protesters in Burma’s main city of Rangoon, state television has revealed…..

Eleven demonstrators and 31 soldiers were injured….

The clashes came on the tenth day of protests against Burma’s military rulers led by the country’s buddhist monks. Hundreds have been arrested…

If people here in the UK think we live in a dictatorship, let’s see what happens in a country where there is very little freedom of expression or is undemocratic. What is the international community doing about this? Like the situation in Sudan, very little. There won’t be any military action or economic sanctions taken against Burma. In short, the rest of the world stands idly by and lets the current crisis escalate.

The National Health Service has had its fair share of critics, but in an article in Monday’s Guardian, it was praised by none other than documentary film maker Michael Moore.

His latest, Sicko, released here on October 26, deal with the problems of the United States’ healthcare system. Several NHS workers had been invited to an advance screening of the film and gave their reactions. Most of them hated the worse aspects of the US system, and despite their reservations, continued to say they liked working in the NHS. The article did give the other side of the coin, but mostly in an article about how the government over the last ten years has been pushing for private companies to deliver healthcare, both along and in direct competition with the NHS.

Moore falls into a trap when he looks at the UK’s healthcare services in a positive light. The problem with the NHS today is that it doesn’t strive to deliver what people want. Despite increased funding over the last ten years, the state of our hospitals has actually got worse, with patients dying because of poor basic cleaniless. For basic and life-saving operations, patients either have the choice of waiting several months for an appointment on the NHS, or paying for them to be done in a private hospital. Some even have to go abroad…. mostly to Europe, and even America…. to have an operation. Drug treatments for long-term diseases is often denied to patients because the NHS either can’t afford to fund it or refuses to pay for it. Then there’s the constant political interference, with several managerial reorganisations imposed by the government.

Of course, the US healthcare system isn’t perfect, and there is a fact that around 50million Americans cannot afford health insurance, but their system still strives to provide decent healthcare to the majority of their citizens. Compare this to the fact that 90 per cent of their counterparts in the UK, who cannot get proper access to theirs… unless of course, they go private.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is being urged to call a general election after receiving so-called high ratings in the polls. But do we, the people of the UK actually want one?

It seems that the only people driving him to do this are certain sections of the media, who obviously feel that he needs to be properly challenged in the public arena. Since there wasn’t a contest to succeed Tony Blair to lead the Labour Party, this would seem to be the perfect thing to do.

However, the present parliamentary term has over two and a half years to run. Surely Brown has better and more important things to do than try to take advantage of a handful of poll ratings and force a month of pointless campaigning, which may inevitably mean that Labour could lose power. After all, when Conservative John Major took over from Margaret Thatcher back in 1990, he waited nearly two years to go to the country… and won, unexpectedly.

Gordon Brown needs to end the speculation right now…. and needs to use his speech at his party conference to tell the media where to get off. NO TO AN EARLY GENERAL ELECTION!