To wonder if life was better under a Labour government?

[Wasloafbetter]

Or are people looking back with rose tinted specs?

I started teaching in the Blair years and I found it pretty awful, although how much of that was down to my own lack of experience and how much was down to government policies is hard to say.

I’m wondering if people are looking back nostalgically (have seen this on a thread this morning where apparently the 80s were a great time for freedom of expression with no pressure to conform, which don’t tally with my memories at all) or whether life was better then.

I’m 42, by the way - was 17 when Blair was made PM.

@thepeopleversuswork

It depends what you mean by a Labour government.

It's not a popular view but I happen to think Blair was the best PM of my lifetime (born early 70s). He got a lot of things wrong but in terms of supporting the economy, trying to create a more equal society but without overspending and support for more social mobility he was certainly better than anything I've seen before or since.

If you're talking about a Corbyn government though my answer would be very different. I think he was at best dangerously misled and naive. And while I loathe this current government I think a Corbyn government would not have handled the pandemic any better.

I thought Blair good until the end - and war part

I wonder where we’d be if the other Milliband went forward

But a Labour government doesn’t make me think they’d do a pandemic better. Starmer wanting to close nurseries at one point, any stronghold by unions would concern me

Maybe people are more affected if they are in public services. Here for twenty years and apart from feeling better about Labour in the past it’s more a mood than something tangibly different for me

Dh talks about free tuition fees which was a big change, I was o/s for study.

I’d welcome a more Blair like Labour - positive and with opportunities but without the war. And a good economy but they need to have good economic policies. Not convinced Starmer does.

I certainly think the vibe was better under labour and councils had more available to them. My sons school environment improved massively under labour. I’m sure if you are loaded it’s fine under the Tory’s but they have created huge instability— many friends who had nice little enterprises around their kids have had to stop because of Brexit , as lots of their customers were non UK and it is now non viable.

Can we not keep bringing up the Iraq war— that was voted on by all parties, it simply was not just a unilateral decision and hindsight is an amazing thing.

Hang on here, are we forgetting:
PFIs which structurally damaged the NHS and was a corrupt idea if not incompetent
Bringing in tuition fees
Plundering off our gold reserves at rich bottom prices
Mass immigration which led to Brexit eventually
Creating a culture of low wages through benefits which saw UK gal behind the entire developed world on pay
Iraq
All of these things did so much damage to this country, most of which could only be counted after labour got kicked out.

@tarasmalatarocks

Can we not keep bringing up the Iraq war— that was voted on by all parties, it simply was not just a unilateral decision and hindsight is an amazing thing.

Should we brush under the carpet that Iraq was the reason that Syria is where is it is today? That the mass movement of people happened this decade? It’s not in our imaginations, and there is no collective responsibility here. Blair pulled the trigger.

@tarasmalatarocks

Can we not keep bringing up the Iraq war— that was voted on by all parties, it simply was not just a unilateral decision and hindsight is an amazing thing.

I don’t think you can expect such a big part of Blair’s time and impact to be ignored.

And I did think he was good, at the start anyway.

I always find Angela Raynor's story about how SureStart changed her life -- to be very moving.

Blair's govt did a lot of things I liked.

I liked the coalition govt -- that was reasonably balanced too.

Johnson's Big Spending 'conservative' govt is a curious beast.

I remember reading that there had always large scale migration upwards in Africa that bottlenecked at Libya. Under Gadaffi, an unofficial agreement was made to intern refugees in camps. When he went, there was nothing so people pushed northwards and it is only since then we recognise it as a European concern.

@LethargicActress

I remember the feeling that there was a lot more money around. My friends and family who had always been on a low income suddenly became able to afford things like foreign holidays thanks to tax credits. I think tax credits were far too generous personally and the system was very flawed, but at least we didn’t need food banks.

My children were at school during that time, one of them has SN, and they were able to meet his needs without it being issue, even when input was needed from specialists from outside school. Now I work in a school and can see the huge difference between the support that was available then and the severe lack of it for children nowadays. I also preferred the system of levels that children were assessed with at school, it was much more efficient and easier to understand than it is now.

And therein lies the problem. Tax credits were a calculated scheme for labour to create a dependent class that would never get to commmad market rate wages and would always be ‘grateful’ for state handouts attributed to labour policies. Tax credits are the reason we have have had some of fhe of the lowest wage growth in the developed world in the last 20 years. Anyone applauding tax credits is economically and socially illiterate. And cognitively impaired to boot - even after seeing the damage done.

I went to college during Tony Blair/Gordon Brown. I received EMA (education maintenance allowance) which meant if I attended all my lessons I received £30 a week. This helped me financially so much, including paying for my travel card and daily lunches.

This is nonsense. If tax credits are the main driver of low wages, we should have seen a measurable growth in real wages as they were phased out in favour of Universal Credit. Has this happened?

My issue is that those in re riot of support like these things may often be, on balance, better off than those who don’t and have p/t jobs throughout sixth form/university. I know that there have to be some measures to define need but I can’t help agree that all Labour was doing was securing support for the future. That doesn’t mean it is ok to make it harder for those who didn’t get benefits, worked in low paid jobs, etc. I’m not explaining myself well - there is more nuance needed here. I want to support those who need it but we also need to manage other groups and it is difficult to balance this. I think they ruined some well thought out strategies that kept lower middle class communities afloat.

Street Homelessness wasn’t quite at the appalling situation it’s in now

I was thinking the same! There were plenty of rough sleepers in my town in the 1990s. When Labour got in, they didn’t solve the problem overnight, but sometime in the early 2000s I realised I hadn’t seen a any rough sleepers for a long time (with the exception of one old man who’d been through the system a few times, but even he got the help he needed in the end).

Unsurprisingly, this improvement didn’t last long once the Tories got back in.

In addition, the US has also seen massive stagnation in real wages- and do they have tax credits, or anything comparable? They do not.Poor working people there are struggling in appalling levels of poverty, and are employers saying “Oh no, look at our poor employees- we must pay them more because they have to visit the food bank to get by”? Are they fuck.

The drivers of higher wages are: Labour shortages, legislation ( like the NMW- introduced by the Blair government), and collective bargaining.

@crackofdoom

I think on there are legacy tax credit claimants plus UC just masks those in low pay paying high rent.

I also don’t think we should underestimate the resentment and loss of morale in some communities as they saw some living good lives on benefits, new immigrants taking control of their lives and working hard and then they were left in a kind of no man’s land. There are a lot of single women, no pension, no property, no real security as they hit their 50s that will be an issue for the future and I think there absence in the job market can be traced back to that period (lack of it skills, no route in to new jobs, ?)

There was a massive improvement when Labour went into power under Blair. Waiting lists got far shorter, schools & hospitals were better funded. The difference was like night & day. Blair & chums were certainly not perfect, but in comparison with the Tories, they were 1000% better for normal families.

*Choirgirl2021

Oh and the housing market mess started under Labour as did student loans*

It started with Thatcher deregulating financial markets while also selling off council houses. (But the Blair government failed to do anything meaningful to alleviate the damage).

Not all @FuckYouCorona that’s my point. We are ordinary and we’re much worse off. We’ve never recovered. I feel they just took from some and gave to others but only within W/c communities. Better off communities had all the real advantages.

OP You need to go and spend a week in a school. The difference will be apparent very quickly!! Teaching is nothing like it was pre-2010, primary education is nothing like it was pre-2010. It makes me so sad for those kids (including my own DC!)

There was a massive improvement when Labour went into power under Blair. Waiting lists got far shorter, schools & hospitals were better funded. The difference was like night & day. Blair & chums were certainly not perfect, but in comparison with the Tories, they were 1000% better for normal families.

Of course it did. There was money, they spent it and left the infamous "I'm afraid there is no money left" note when they lost to Cameron.

I'm mid-40s and remember New Labour - it was New Labour, not Labour remember - with distinctly mixed views. Good bits - Surestart, more money in public services than in the 80s I'll admit, idea of lifelong learning.

Bad bits. Lifelong learning via tuition fees and privatised Unis. That's the kind of creation of mixed feelings I saw all the way through. Budgets were highly controlled through this time and an awful lot was just waste. Patterns of public finance changed hugely in this time. No longer was money given to the council who could decide where it was spent, money was put in different pots, every penny had to be specifically requested, huge sectors were set up specfically to write the requests, internal marketplaces were set up that were hugely wasteful, and everything was target-based. Those targets became what public services were all about and the actual needs they were supposed to deal with were rated as secondary and have now been forgotten entirely. There were some people who made an absolute fortune out of all the bureaucracy that was set up. There were also large numbers of unelected quangos set up, and again some people made a fortune. The net result was that an awful lot of public money made its way into private purses at this time. Worse, that became the established pattern and only way to operate. Giving money to the loud and vocal became the norm.

As a young working person at the time, who was trying to work up the ropes from nothing I discovered that the work and wages I'd tried hard to get into became lower valued, because giving wages to people who worked for it became a dirty idea rather than just giving money as freebies to the loud and vocal. The people who made a mint were generally the older generations. Meanwhile this was also when buy-to-let landlords were set loose on us, and the cost of housing quadrupled. No one gave a shit, because some were making a fortune - again transferring public money to private purses - and that made it all right.

In short it was a time of strange marriages of right and left ideas that didn't really go together, and unsurprisingly a time when inequality and divisions started to grow. Working people were the losers, and the already rich and feckless were the winners. Not to mention of course, this was when intergenerational inequality kicked off.

I was a teenager when Blair got in. Life did seem better then, except for the house price inflation that made me despair of ever owning my own home. And tuition fees. The economy was booming, but it very much felt to me as though the older generation had pulled the ladder up after themselves.

Now our infrastructure just feels so rundown and neglected. Our schools, hospitals, social services and justice system/legal aid seem to be running on fumes and the goodwill of the staff. And whatever happened to SureStart centres, daycare centres for adults with disabilities and respite care?

Sorry that was long. I never voted for New Labour, and I will not be voting for a renewed version of it. I guess I won't be voting any more.

My take on it is that there may have been money but was it put to good use in areas that had a defect for so long? For example schools where generations had lacked real funding suddenly for good funding whilst those families moved to other areas that lost their funding. The political games were huge and only some could play them. It is good imv that people move to areas and rejuvenate them, it’s progress and healthy for everyone but it didn’t need to be so aggressively done and exclude existing communities. My parents were immigrants here - everyone benefits from an existing structure and over time you understand why things are the way they are and can look for initiatives that help everyone but I didn’t see any of that happening - I just saw some pretty crude tactics at play that were always going to lead us to where we are now.

If you massively expand NHS debt then it's easy to "fund it properly"

Student loans? Didn't see Labour bring back grants.

There were plenty of homeless people around during the Labour years too.

As for the effect on families, ask those in Iraq...