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.

A- we didn’t know it at the time,as life was good.
The crash in 2008;tax credits which people actually now need, handling of covid,paying people for too long to sit on their arses.
Now if course is spineless governments not getting to grip with Immigration,energy companies,water companies etc.

Yeah, Thatcher didn't operate in a vacuum, she inherited a real mess herself. Some of her policies have had really bad repercussions but Tony Blair inherited a good economy and a relatively good social order. By the time New Labour left office both were wrecked and then rather than fix it the Tories amplified it. Cameron was a Blairite and Cameron/Osborne austerity measures were badly administered.

Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher. 🤬

Parties get voted out usually when things go wrong. So really it’s at that point the electorate think yeh time for a switch. Plus reliance on the state has grown.

Any one of you along with the rest of the 52% who voted for Brexit.

I don’t think you can really distinguish between A, B and C in quite that way. They’re basically all just a continuation of the same thing, which is a system that’s completely out of gas and is just begging to be destroyed and replaced with something new, whatever that may be.

If we must blame someone though then it’s A. Their crime was in playing the game too hard, and entrenching their tactical wins far too much – so that’s by the time their high-migration-suppressed-wages-high-benefits model stopped being beneficial, from 2008 onwards, we couldn’t adapt. We were stuck with third sector/human rights/managerial government, and a critical mass of the population treating equality/diversity/consensus like it was a religion – and the result was we couldn’t course-correct. That’s unforgivable and we’re all going to pay for it shortly.

So yes, ultimately it’s Blair and Brown, for killing any chance of correcting when their plans began to fail.

PS It’s a bit worrying that there are still not many signs of exactly what that New Thing is going to be, if I’m honest. Reform don’t seem to be much different, but they’d have a mandate to destroy the Old Thing, so that’s at least something.

Brown and Blair

Absolutely! Blair has a lot to answer for.

Cameron and his austerity and stupid brexit vote which he mismanaged.

B

But you are remiss in not including Thatcher - which is where it all started.

It was Margaret Thatcher who started it all. It's impossible for anyone to catch up without increasing taxes when someone has cut social spending to the bone. She sold off all the nationalised industries and allowed council house sales, while barring future council house building. She was appalling.

Yes, absolutely. She created short term affluence for some, and to some extent shared the wealth, but the legacy is whole regions that still haven't recovered, a ridiculous situation where the water supply and other utilities are in private, often foreign hands and, as you say the social housing disaster.

All of the above plus Thatcher, right to buy has had a catastrophic effect on secure housing for first working class, and then lower middle class generations. It’s also when it became acceptable to not want your children to have a better life than your own.

Blair with PPI, benefits culture and migration did great damage.

But a key problem is our ageing population- supporting huge numbers of people with decades of ill health is just such a burden. In combination with the vast numbers of people apparently too ill to work it really needs some drastic action. Obesity is a huge cost too. Brexit was a disaster, obviously but we’ve been buffeted by external shocks too - Covid, Ukraine, global downturns too.

unfortunately the current government are worse than any others on the list. Incompetent and driven by politics of envy and identity rather than rational, practical economically sound principles.

Thatcher followed by B and D. Thatcher started the transfer of public wealth into private hands and we're reaping the consequences now. Selling council houses and not allowing the councils to use the funds to rebuild was a masterstroke of social engineering. I also agree with a PP that neoliberalism and capitalism are starting to eat themselves.

The people who keep wanging on about ‘broken Britain’?

I think it started with the government and ended with the people.
I mean if we really look about we ain't any better.
We vote and get it wrong.
Campaigning all the time over nonsense.
Enough is never enough.
All the blame game and pointing fingers when it all fails.
We are all just has bad.

Yes. That was originally a Cameron slogan, 2007, so apparently weve been broken for some time )! Not at all helpful.

It goes back much further than that... I was born in 1964, I can remember miners strikes and the 3 day week in the early 1970's. Too much public borrowing back then to build new Britain and improve housing and roads etc, and the UK being in trouble with the IMF. The then government needed more money and I think they refused? Thatcher managed to balance the books by selling off most of the public assets, having stripped them, reducing overmanning for example to make them more efficient, but at a huge social cost with mass unemployment as a consequence.

I agree, she also saw the death knell for many manufacturing industries, with no clear recovery plan for communities heavily reliant on industry creating unemployment waste lands. Many of those communities have never really recovered.

She marked a turn towards service industries, which had ultimately stifled growth. Blair and Brown for creating a situation where employers can pay low wages and have these propped up by state support, making huge swathes of working people dependent on public money. And then Brexit.

In saying that, I don’t consider Britain to be broken, but those policies are certainly coming home to roost now.

It started with Thatcher and selling off council houses and privatisation. Wage stagnation started then to I think.

Austerity was a complete fuck up

Tbf, it was probably 2 world wars that started it all, but I don't think we can really claim that life was better, for most, in 1913 or 1938.

I think we, like many other nations, are dealing with an unprecedented shift in demographics towards an older population. It needs a complete rethink of the whole system, but no one wants to admit that. Blaming any one of those people misses the point.

this

I also think the British public need to carry the blame for this. T

Agree, plenty will vote for Reform because the lies are more palatable than acknowledging the truth.