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.

I blame Cameron the most to be honest.

But where will it end/how do we get out of this?

Autumn tax rises are heavily predicted. So everyone has less money. Less buying power combined with rising prices so people stop buying stuff.

How will that affect our society when our entire economy is based on capitalism and people buying "stuff". People stop buying stuff, shops close, gyms close, restaurants close, manufacturing plants close, delivery drivers get laid off.

Even more unemployed people so it becomes a death spiral.....more people not buying stuff, more jobs being lost. Welfare bill goes up and up due to people claiming universal credit, etc. Less tax coming on.

Is there an alternative? I'm no economist and have no idea.

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.

An ageing population means higher costs

but now we have to reign back on our expectations, which is difficult, when one generation has done exceptionally well, but those before and after much worse.'

historically have we had a time when subsequent generations had it worse then a previous one?

Many posters are obviously quite young or have very short memories.

Britain had an solid but ageing industrial base at the end of WW2. This went into decline from around the 1950s onwards through a combination of excessive unions, mismanagement, and a resulting failure to counter increasing competition from the far east.

This decline was accelerated from 1979 onwards by Thatcherite fiscal policy.

I think the Blair Labour governments' decision to "rub the right's nose in diversity" was a major cause of the damage done to the social fabric of the country, although subsequent and previous governments did little to help.

Brexit has been an economic shock to the country, although an enterprising and economically strong nation could take advantage of new opportunities. The EU had long overstepped its role as the trading block it was originally conceived as.

Politically, the Conservatives have never been anything other than economically incompetent. Old Labour used to be good, but have been reduced to agenda-pushing and pandering to minorities. Reform? Who knows? I would see them as deliverers of karma for the total mess of the last 50 years.

One thing is for sure - in my 60+ years, I have never, ever seen people so furious and hopeless at the way things are.

Maybe it's a good thing? People being forced to return to a simpler life would be great news for the planet. Of course, not everyone will be forced to return to a simpler life!

It's odd to say things are bad/broken now when you look at how we live now compared to a generation or two ago, when a week's holiday and a car was a luxury, for most.

Yes but the means of paying is declining. We have fewer workers contributing actual net tax.

You cannot run a welfare state like ours like that. It is a worthy aim, but where is the money?

We are not broken!
But yeah I'd probably say Thatcher, or maybe it was some dude back in the iron age?

But where will it end/how do we get out of this?

I don't see how we can. Taxes will have to keep increasing and utilities, food etc are not going to get cheaper.

I have never, ever seen people so furious and hopeless at the way things are.

For me it's the loss of hope that's the saddest part.

@bombastix I agree with you, but most of the population doesn't even want to acknowledge we have an ageing population and that it costs.

It’s not ‘broken’, just on a particular phase in the tides of time and events. The two world wars arguably ‘broke’ the British Empire, for good and ill, and a lot of Britain’s prosperity and world status along with it.

There are many things about modern Britain which are so much better than in some of the periods before the various alleged ‘break’ points, people just take them for granted though.

I seem to remember that he expected a few thousand EU citizens to turn up and millions arrived, which says something for the other EU countries at the time and what shape they were in.

I think we have rose tinted glasses. I left school in the mid 80s. School leavers getting any sort of job was big news, most didn't. No-one had much hope as I was leaving school.

Good question.

Economy - Labour and Conservatives. Labour for creating a bloated welfare sense and public entitlement, Conservatives for making it even worse.

General quality of life and services - Conservatives & austerity, without a doubt.

Uncontrolled mass immigration leading to a country currently boiling over, regular riots/protests, terrorist attacks, huge concern for the outlook of Britain in decades to come and further strain on services - Labour and the Conservatives

Brexit - Farage

I suspect I will be adding ‘Reform’ under the ‘destroyed the environment’ caption in a decade or so.

I think we have rose tinted glasses. I left school in the mid 80s. School leavers getting any sort of job was big news, most didn't. No-one had much hope as I was leaving school.

So a whole generation never worked?!

Thatcher

Of course they did, eventually just as those struggling now will likely see better times, but as school leavers, things looked very bleak. And YTS/YOP/Apprenticeships were created and are now available to prevent that situation today. So, really, not everything is worse.

I think the media and particularly the BBC made a significant contribution. I’ve worked in healthcare for three decades and it has ups and downs but all political parties contributed to it’s decline.

Has anything truly improved since the 1960s? I don't know when the shift to shareholder profits happened, but for a long as I can recall (so late 70s onwards), services have been cut and industries have been in decline without any question of where the money has gone. I guess there was a brief sense of optimism in the mid 90s but with hindsight that was based on borrowing that we're repaying now.

I think the introduction of the minimum wage was a big driver of the problem. It creates a pool of people for whom the value of their work is than what it costs, and meant that the state had to step in to pay those who don't. Overall it drove up cost and now we are in a cycle of having the increase the minimums to cover increases which are then passed on with more increases whilst more and more people drop out at the bottom for the state.

No, we have David Cameron to thank for that.

David Cameron had his hand forced by Farage.

Agree. The amount of money spent on care from the public purse is matched by those privately funded. That money is not going back into the economy, and barely covering its own employees and costs, huge amounts of money are being hoovered up by a very small number of private care companies.

I have to disagree. David Cameron decided on the referendum to quieten his own back-benchers.

His first fuck-up was agreeing to the referendum in his arrogance that it was not a risk.

His second fuck up was not correctly and accurately outlining the terms of the referendum.

But the real fuck-up was his complete inability to articulate to the country as a whole the reasons why we should remain. His campaign was a disaster from start to finish.

Really. I mean look what has happened to the Conservative Party. From born to rule to a bunch of no hopers in a decade. He didn’t have to do it, what a fool.