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.

Thatcher followed by Brexit

He also started the fucked up policies around NHS dentistry which is why nobody can access them now, not even children 😠

I think it was Blair followed by successive governments which have allowed the welfare state to balloon to a point where it’s completely unaffordable. Aligned with this, the private sector has been allowed to underpay staff and avoid investing in training through the importation of a cheaper skilled workforce. It is the worst of all combinations, and we have a bizarre scenario where some people are financially better off if they don’t work. Those who pay tax are really struggling to prop up the rest of the country and young people are completely disincentivised because they feel work doesn’t pay, and housing will be unaffordable no matter what they do. The neglect of young people’s interests in favour of silver voters is a disgrace and I blame the tories for that.

Adding a special mention for Liz Truss.

Thatcher. Right To Buy was a terrible idea. I remember when coucil housing was incredibly plentiful and cheap. Not allowing councils to replace tthe sold off stock was criminal.
Also selling off everything that wasn't nailed down. Nothing that's essential for our lives/wellbeing shoud be in private hands. Water/Gas/Electricity/Transport. We have the most expensive energy and our rivers are dying.

I’d say Thatcher did the most damage - selling off the country infrastructure.

Housing
Gas
Electric
Water
Rail network
Half of the public service contracts.

Think of the cost of living today with no profit being made on your bills and decent levels of investment over the years particularly in low cost renewables.

The council houses that would be available today for “regular” workers - my council house street in the 80s was all office workers/ nurses/factory/bus drivers etc. Now the houses are mainly being rented covering landlord profits with no reinvestment.

Brexit also has a lot to do with the mentality but the actual damage was done in the 80s.

Thatcher - as others have said council housing was sold off & utilities were sold off & things like water, electricity, gas, railways are owned by foreign investors who want to pay dividends to shareholders despite running at a deficit. They aren’t interested in investing in waterways & so our water quality is now suffering.

Blair also brought in university fees, privatised parts of NHS & opened door to immigration. He got us involved in Gulf War too.

Doesn’t Brexit come under B?

Thatcher. Selling all public assets, wiping out jobs, driving individual capitalism. Then New Labour for building on her work by demonising the working class.

The Daily Mail who trotted this out as a stupid headline.

On a serious note, at an international level Blair and the Iraq war lost a lot of trust. At a national level the lies around Brexit.

Billionaires hoarding money while controlling the media so we (or some of us at least) look the other way. Always follow the money.

Thatcher and her cronies for making some people so selfish and short sighted.

I also think the British public need to carry the blame for this. The current government was elected on a mandate that didn’t make sense- that taxes won’t be raised and they will secure growth, without any credible growth plans. They public cries in horror at any attempt to tinker with the NHS or welfare related. But we are all in denial if we fail to recognise the need for very significant structural change so that the welfare state remains affordable and does not collapse. The public want everything- low tax but generous benefits and healthcare free at the point of use. It’s not sustainable.

I also blame Osborne and Cameron for how they approached austerity- they just cut budgets everywhere but did not reform the scope of what the state would offer. It was doomed to fail. The public would have been open to genuine reform at that point because there was a general acceptance that the deficit had to be addressed. They completely messed this up.

I don’t believe labour will ever be honest about the changes that need to be made but I completely understand why they were the better option to the conservatives.

I would love to see a new voice in politics which is utterly focused on building the economy and also willing to tackle the ballooned public sector from a systemic approach. New ideas are needed and wholesale change is necessary.

This seems pretty fair to me. The problems are massive. I think a lot of people are conscious that just using usual left or right solutions will not be enough. The country is broke, not enough people working, of those that do the tax take is all resting on a very few percent of the population, and the government is subsiding low wages and housing.

If Labour couldn’t manage disability cuts it cannot manage the last one. We will get a government that will make cuts to the welfare state and brutal ones. I do not see where the money is to keep it going, particularly if we carry on having the levels of migration we had had since Brexit. We are not pulling in contributions to keep up with state spending.

And he started the academisation of schools.

Brexit

Thatcher fractured society

Thatcher may have broken things but she did not rein over a massive welfare state that is unaffordable based on current tax contributions. Britain is going broke. We cannot carry on with the level of benefits we have. This was all very well a generation ago when we had more workers contributing. Now most do not even if they are working. And the number of people claiming is going up and up.

Yes agree with all this.

Agree with Thatchers privatisation idolisation. Destroying the notion we have any obligation towards each other through selling public services/housing to the highest bidder and replacing it with individualisation, competition and division.

Thatcher
Austerity
Brexit
Nefarious bastards that are controlling Farage and his ilk.

User32459. The economy was strong in 1997 I agree. So was the NHS in 2010 when the Tories came in. Take a look at the figures. Also the amount of new schools and hospitals built between 1997 & 2010. Yes there was no money left perhaps in 2010 but at least there was something to show for it.

Broken? Or just no longer better / superior to everywhere else.

Blair and Brown started the rot. We were doing OK until Blair won his second GE - until then, he and Brown basically left things alone and didn't change much as that was their 1997 manifesto. But after their second GE win, they changed too much, too quickly, and made lots of mistakes. Just patched things up with increased borrowing/debt which made the country very vulnerable with the 2008 crash, from which we've never recovered.

The Murdoch news machine.

There wasn't though, because most of the shiny new schools and hospitals had been built on the never-never under ruinously expensive PFI deals that our children and grandchildren will be paying for in the decades to come!