Who broke Britain?

[User32459]

Who do you most blame for our downfall as a nation?

A) Tony Blair and New Labour (97-2010)

B) The Tories (2010-2024)

C) The current Labour government

D) Brexit and Nigel Farage's lies

I think the answer is all of the above and the current government are an absolute disaster, but to be fair to them they've come in at the end when the damage is done. It's not 1997 anymore when they can get away with Blairite policies.

Labour have a lot to answer for but i'd probably go B. The Tories just about got everything wrong. Did they do anything good at all? And ultimately their shocking governance led to Brexit as well.

And the failures of the lot of them will need to Nigel Farage as Prime Minister.

OAPs are costly. But they did generally contribute through their lives. We now have mumpers and dole bludgers reaching old age and who haven’t paid in.

No they didn't which is the point!
mumpers & dole bludgers (whatever they are) exist in every generation..,

Greedy business owners who don’t pay staff fair wages and expect the state to top up people wages.

Nope. No more than generation X have been contributing.

Except X face things like the triple lock being erased for theif pension whilst many have struggled to save for my thing private and on top of NI contributions are having to pay a workplace pension too - today’s pensioners are utterly dependant on the tax payer on a promise that was set to break our backs and futures.

What are the realistic options for that age group though? What would you want to see happen

I would lower the threshold of household income of winter fuel, 75k is pointless

I would temporarily pause the triple lock as it's not affordable at the moment.

Care in the home needs to be funded (along the lines of Theresa Mays proposal) with a charge on the home. I would change the proposed cap on care costs to a % as otherwise you have some losing virtually everything vs those who hardly feel it.

We need to do something about the upcoming pensioners who have higher numbers of renters, maybe a social housing programme to concentrate on that demographic.

Incredibly controversial but waiting lists for NHS treatments and operations need to prioritise younger people. I'm not young.

I don't think any of the suggestions are realistic hence why we are stuck in a downward spiral now.

What would I want to see happen? Means testing of the state benefit for a start off, means testing of winter fuel, means testing of free bus passes, borrowing on yheir homes where they are under occupied.

This idea that all pensioners are a sacred cows who have had the yolk around their necks for decades to pay into a pot and now with their haunches sharply poking through their skin because they’re practically starving to death needs to stop.

There is no magic pension fund - our taxes are paying it.

Means test everything .

A because it was Tony Blairs lifting of workers rights that saw the country flooded with eastern europeans which negatively impacted many communities due to sheer volume of people.
It was not implemented properly ,they had no idea how many people came in , and unfortunately it laid the bedrock for Brexit and has sparked an anti immigration stance since.

Edited to add ...obviously the EE who came here ,who wouldn't !! Not blaming anyone for seizing opportunity etc

Gove's (and his successors') reforms of education have been a disaster, and the curriculum is not fit for the range of human ability and aptitude or the needs of employers across the ecomomy.

Failures to meet the needs of SEN pupils cost parents their jobs or trigger underemployment.

So many secondary students switch off because the dry "academic" curriculum does not meet their needs. Practical and vocational subjects have been massively devalued and often dropped forcing students to flounder in inappropriate GCSE courses and emerge with poor employability, and no aspiration.

The Blair years were better. Subject choices were more diverse and there was replacement of crumbling infrastructure. However the PFIs were often unnecessarily costly in the long term, and they also kept walking down the path of toxic OFSTED and league table culture and started the academies which have brought their own issues. Post-2010, that's become worse, but it wasn't a uniquely Conservative vision.

All those people of our grandparents and parents age paid in and what do they get now? '

We have to stope this rhetoric that people paid in enough because they haven't. Think logically about it!!!!

The state pension is 12k a year so 240k over 20 years. To pay that in tax you need to earn more than 50k for 20 years!! We know most people don't earn that or the equivalent & that's before health care costs, education costs etc.

It's not usual to have not paid in enough and when you have pyramid demographics it works. It doesn't when you don't.

unusual

My PIL are lovely, kind people. FIL retired at 55 (with a full pension as he'd started at 16). MIL has not worked since her mid 20s. Both are mid/late 80s. My parents are similar although my DM has a successful self-employed business for most of her life (but DF preferred her to keep it under taxable levels: tbf he has paid heaps of tax and given a lot away).

Although all 4 are in good nick, fingers crossed, there is absolutely no way 3/4 of them will end their lives as net contributors.

Life expectancy leaped ahead of work expectations (on average of course - not all areas).

I think it would have been very difficult for MIL to work professionally and FIL would have found it a slight that he couldn't "keep" a wife. My DM could have kept operating her business for profit if she'd wanted and needed to.

The ironic thing is that PIL plus other inlaws live in a deprived part of the country that is a net recipient - but blame London.

Immigration has often been used as a sticking plaster. It has its uses, particularly to temporarily cover skills gaps, but various governments have used it to dodge long term planning for training and recruitment for at least 20 years.

To get the domestic population into specific careers, the courses need to be appropriately accessible, affordable and the working conditions need to be sustainable to be retained in the profession. Recruitment processes also need to be practical.

Cuts and staffing reductions have left workers on a knife edge of survival mode and little slack to accomodate additional issues (such as sick leave)

Labours savings on benefits amounted to 5 billion, a tiny % of whats needed.

We will need to tax property & assets, both Germany and France, among others tax the profit when a house is sold.

Reverse the NI cut, thats costing us 11bn per year

I think it may fall upon Reeves to start taxing us all a little more, most can afford it.

I think it may fall upon Reeves to start taxing us all a little more, most can afford it.

Can they?

Lower & middle income paye earners are taxed less here vs other European countries but here they spend a higher % on housing.

No they can’t.

Do you work? How much do you earn? Do you have kids?

I feel like people on benefits are so used to getting everything free or discounted, and money just ‘appearing’, and their social housing being cheap, that they are massively out of touch with how expensive life is when you pay a mortgage and have zero financial help other than the money you earn.

Most cannot afford it. Or they could, in theory, but would have to go without and live life utterly on the breadline and they would give up on work completely. And if people on benefits should be able to live a comfortable life with treats and holidays, why can’t they?

@UrgentScurryfunge no country needs a sudden influx of hundreds of thousands .

Don't look at me for this one! 🤣🤣🤣

Agree.

These people have no clue.

Absolutely none.

You missed out Thatcher. She decimated the steel and mining industries I’m my region and did nothing to replace the jobs. She also started the curs to public services

The huge jump in the National debt wasn't because of the welfare state causing a welfare deficit. It was because the banks artificially creating a housing bubble through excessive lending to the point where the loans could never be repaid. When this inevitably hit the fan, it was necessary for the UK government (among others) to spend unbelievably huge amounts to stop the whole banking sector collapsing. The banks went back to paying huge bonuses to their top employees almost immediately. Austerity continued for ordinary people for over a decade. Private equity now owns an unprecedented amount of land, property and businesses in the UK and elsewhere

We kicked the can down the road in 2008 but never addressed the key problems. So that would be
a) Labour- for loosening regulations and allowing the banks to get out of control in the first place
b) Conservatives for blaming the poor/welfare and stirring up resentment against immigrants for austerity rather than getting to grips with the issue
c) Labour for still failing to address this reality
d) Farage and the shower of bankers in his party who made everything worse through Brexit and who basically sees the chance to asset strip the UK down to the copper wires.

Mn goes strong on tax more, for other people. But I agree there isn’t more there. Labour will have to find another way, it’s due to the earlier NI tax after all.

It started with Blair although we didn’t feel it at the time. Then the tories and leaving the eu and also COVID.

I am not persuaded on income tax. The reality is that unless you are a higher rate tax payer now, you are not contributing. Income tax would have to increase across all tax paying strata to make any kind of meaningful difference. I am a centre left person but pretending that there is a class of exclusively very rich people who can bear these increases is not realistic (I believe that Labour know that too). They will leave because they can. Our tax system is a mess. We have ended up with a system where most working people do not contribute. You cannot run a country with an increasing need for welfare and pensions like that. Yet we have.