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.

Who caused what is irrelevant. The only way out of this downward spiral is to have a massive reset. It’s just part of the cycle of capitalism. The massive reset will almost certainly come with a Reform government. And then it’ll be a bit of a wild ride. There will be a lot of unhappy people, especially those who don’t like working. But it will be necessary.

I think it was with Thatcher.selling off water, nationalised industries, BT, council houses. Hydroelectric was sold to a foreign power.
The others then followed suit. Anything for a quick gain. Lack of longterm planning. Each one gets in and rips up what the last one was trying to achieve.

Brexit divided the nation. It hasn't healed.Farage continues to twist the knife.

Covid didn't help, especially as it came after years of austerity.

We, the people, also played our part. Buying up said industries and housing for quick profit. Many hadn't a clue what you with their shares and sold straight away.

Once council houses were sold off, the idea of a house for profit took hold rather than buying a home.
Then the buy to let mortgages.

UK became obsessed with house prices. Look where that got us!!

Now the people on MN seems obsessed with inheritance!

We begin to live way above our means on personal and goverment level.

We outsourced making things as we wanted cheap clothing etc. Not caring that our manufacturers went to the wall as they couldn't compete with 3rd world countries where workers are exploited.

We bought in cheap food. Expected farmers here and abroad to be paid a pittance for lower quality food.

Maybe we get the government's we deserve?

The trouble with a question like this is the temptation to look for the most recent inflection point and say all our ills stem from there. There’s something to it, because I’ve come to realise that our political culture isn’t quite the stable continuum we learn about – rather it’s a series of lurches from one state to another, and those states can persist for quite a long time but usually they need some sort of crisis to make it happen. I wonder what this one will be.

So in the spirit of contrarianism, how about blaming John Major? A competent government, building up excellent spare capacity and cultural capital, with a mini demographic bonus about to drop – but being politically hopeless enough to bequeath that free hand to his opponent instead. In retrospect it would’ve been better had he not given Blair quite such a stacked deck to play with.

People like to blame Thatcher, but Blair closed more hospital beds than under tories.

But she sold off Water, Gas, Electricity, British Rail, British Telecom - well maybe Major sold off some of those but bloody hell there’s no comparison!
when you add in Royal Mail & that was quite recent - we’re lucky if we get post once a week

Actually I don’t know why I mentioned the decline of Royal Mail because that’s the least of our problems 🙄

I'm really intrigued by this perspective and am interested to know what you think will happen if we have a reform government?

Personally I think any government in charge currently has very little capacity to do anything - we are too far along the path.The big things that cost this country money, NHS and social care, are not fixable through anything that reform proposes.

We have an aging population who don't have the capacity to work. We've created a society which requires two working members of the household to survive so our capacity to care for our own families is diminished. We (society as a whole) take little responsibility for our own health and yet we expect the state to pick up the bill when it fails but if the state tries to make people healthier they get accused of being a nanny state. I can't really see how all this will end for the better.

Blair had a huge majority and didn't even try and repeal any of that. One of his first acts was to effectively privatise the bank of England and brought in PFI to the NHS.

Yeah, they were all great before. 🙄

Blair was more than happy to keep them all privatized and increased privatization, including in the NHS.

Thatcher definitely. Poll tax, selling all the council house stock, poll tax

He could have rolled the sell off back but no, doubled down, sold off the gold, sold off state owned property and let loads of immigrants in causing a housing crisis.

Hmm maybe, I'm not sure. Life for a 40 something year old or a 20 something year old in 1995-2005 was arguably better than it is now. Lower housing costs, fewer mental health concerns, cheaper child care and for much of that period a more functional NHS. Life expectancy in the UK has fallen in recent years and infant mortality increased. However what these figure mask is the widening gulf of inequality. Outcomes for the poorest decile have plummeted whilst those for the wealthiest have continued to improve.

I spoke with my dad once about the formerly nationalised industries that were privatised (because I havw to teach a unit on it in Economics and was born in the 70s so didn't have first hand experience) and it was his considered opinion that there was no way in the 70s and 80s for them to modernise sufficiently without injections of private capital. The government simply couldn't borrow it directly (the UK had to take an IMF loan in the 70s!).

Yes there were many things they could have done differently. Ensured share ownership stayed within the UK? Put the North Sea money into a sovereign wealth fund like the Norwegians? Had better regional policy? Not deregulated financial services?

The books "When the Lights Went Out" amd "Promised You A Miracle" (Dominic Sandbrook) were an eye opening read.

If you can get away from the idea of Thatcher as some kind of inexplicable demon, her views as expressed in her writing are an interesting read. The speech about why the UK should stay in the EU for instance.

Rubbish. It absolutely started with Thatcher privatising everything, launching right to buy, and destroying our industry (rather than reforming it), and with it, whole working class communities. Unemployment was ridiculously high under Thatcher and the Tories at the time l gave no shits about what they did to the working classes. That destroyed the working class work ethic (I hope it is understood what I mean by that, I am not saying all working class people are now work shy because that’s obviously not true, I’m talking about the destruction of communities and a culture).

It was so obvious, even at the time, that it would all have severe negative repercussions.

I don’t know what alternative universe you’ve been living, but life in the UK is significantly worse now than in the 90a and early 00s. We had services, roads weren’t full of potholes, libraries and public toilets were open, it was easy to rent somewhere affordable. I was either on benefits (for some of this time after having a baby) or in low paid employment, and could afford my rent, food and bills without having to decide between “heating and eating”. We had better mental health services, NHS dentists were easy to come by. The service at my doctors was always fine. Never had trouble making an appointment and neither did anyone else! I had a grant to go to university and my parents didn’t need to top me up. I managed fine with the grant and on and off part time work. Normal things felt affordable and services felt accessible. Jobs weren’t too hard to come by. When I had my baby the midwives and my GP did standard home visits. Even though we personally had fuck all money things felt better, easier and you felt more supported than now. I think some of the changes have been so slow and incremental, people have forgotten what we’ve lost - we are like frogs being boiled alive. (And I haven’t even touched on the destruction of our society! That’s for another thread!).

I came to say Thatcher too. The whole "there's no such thing as society" etc. And the waste of the revenue that North Sea oil brought in; gone in tax cuts for the richest. She had a lot to answer for.

A and then finalized by C.

Ww absolutely didn't have better mental health service in the late 90 s early 00,s I wss working as a mental health nurse under Blairs government, yes they threw money at health service but ime it all went in building shiney new buildings ,a huge increase in management tiers ,expensive to implement new initiatives not an actual patient care and it was under the Blsir government services started to get shut down I was redeployed twice in 12 months between 2005 and 2006 due to cuts.

@Ilfurfante “Personally I think any government in charge currently has very little capacity to do anything - we are too far along the path.The big things that cost this country money, NHS and social care, are not fixable through anything that reform proposes”

That’s the thing isn’t it? Ultimately—and I hate putting it like this because it lets people off the hook when it shouldn’t—our entire political culture is to blame, because it stops these really fundamental fixes from being made.

I think (for example) we all know, deep down, that state pensions have got to go. That’s an issue where we can see into the future, and the numbers get worse every year. But they exist now, so how could any government abolish them? They’d just be voted out. They couldn’t even get the winter fuel reforms to stick.

So the only solution left is to wait for the crisis, and try to build something out of the wreckage. But even though this time around we can all feel it coming, nobody knows what and when it will be, so it can’t really be planned for. I don’t see much evidence of anyone who counts having done much thinking about it, in 2025. Even Thatcher didn’t alight on her reforms until she’d already been PM for a couple of years.

That’s why I reserve a special scorn for Blair’s government. Almost uniquely, they had a chance to start over without rebuilding from the ashes, because Major had already done that. They could have done anything – but what they did was always to make the easiest and cheapest choice, and to make it permanent. Which gave us a great ten years admittedly but leaves us, in 2025, in the same position we always end up in – living beyond our means, expensive infrastructure falling apart, an economy hooked on the wrong thing, and in practical terms with no way to fix it.

Which in a nutshell is the problem.

Blair didn't roll back any of the worst aspects of Thatcherism despite having a decade in power - he just accelerated it. Cameron and the Tories didn't roll back on any of the worst aspects of Blairism - they just accelerated it.

Also the 50% aim for universities which also led to housing shortages as so many homes were converted to student let’s bygreedy landlords.

The financial crisis and recession started with A then B had to try and sort the mess.

It wasnt thatcher - she didn’t cause deindustrialisation, she recognised that it was happening. The coal mines were heavily subsidised and awful places to work. Yes there was a strong community spirit in the mining towns, but would any of you want your kids to go down the pits? She was also the first global leader to recognise climate change, something she hadn’t received enough credit for.

Nail on the head. De-industrialisation was happening during the 60s and 70s. The country couldn't afford to carry on the nationalisation and heavy subsidisation of failing industries. Someone had to rip off the sticking plaster. Quite simply other countries could make things (and ship them to us) far quicker and cheaper than we could in the UK. People wanted cheap and bought cheap rather than more expensive UK produced goods. Labour's stupidly high tax rates of the 70s didn't help!