Results like these at a general election would mean Tory annihilation

[noblegiraffe]

Says a BBC headline this morning.

Anyone else stockpiling popcorn?

Very sadly, we shall still be paying for PFI financed school and hospital buildings until they are no longer viable. It was buying infrastructure on the never never. Never properly finished and never paid for.

But shiny 'evidence' of money being spent for the greater good. Not that it has helped improve either health or education,

I hope older voters show the same contempt for the Tories at the next election as the Tory leadership showed towards their survival during Covid.

Our children will be paying for the billions wasted on useless PPI etc from the Tory VIP Lane.

I think older voters will probably take a long view @verdantverdure . In my 67 years I have been promised a whole load of lovely sunsets, so I no longer believe anything that sounds too good to be true, because I realise that it's all mostly political casuistry. I believe that you can't promise free lunches or better deals for everyone, and it is not possible to tax your way out of a crisis by raping the rich... because anyone clever enough to become rich is clever enough to know when to disengage.

Or relocate. Wealthy people are not trapped by geography. People of modest means are. And really poor people have nothing to lose.

Our local PFI hospital building is very high spec. It’s six years off the end of the contract so there will be considerably more money in the local health economy then. Most contracts are 30 years and it’s absurd to say that they only have such a short lifespan.

Excellently put and deserves a repost.

Goodness’s me! Johnson duped the not so bright electorate with three words! Get Brexit Done. That’s all it took. Who looked at anything else at the time? Well I did but millions didn’t.

Max Hastings and others warned about his personality - lying, untrustworthy, and devious. However it’s difficult to predict exactly how a leader might react in a pandemic but Johnson surrounded himself with sycophants and his wife who bolstered his ego but were mostly useless. Nadine Dorries, Gavin Williamson and Matt Hancock for starters. People who might actually know something we’re sidelined. All those SPADS too. All political. None with a science background, unless you count Nadine who was once a nurse. Nearly all advantaged. I’m not against advantage in life. It’s what you do with it that matters. Anyone sensible could have predicted the disaster of Johnson. Millions don’t appear to be sensible though.

What horrifies me is not only that Johnson was happy about Covid killing old people, he knew that it would be a particularly horrible death where essentially people would drown in their own secretions. But for him that mattered less than his mates' business profits.

While it's true to say that the car park will still be there and the walls and roof may still have many years in them, the technology within a hospital is changing all the time and some elements regarding the plumbing for air/oxygen, the design of operating theatres and aircon for the appropriate number of changes per hour may all conspire to require significant refurbishment or replacement when the contract is up.

I hate how these threads just go back to stuff that happened so long ago!

We can all go back in time & with hindsight say yeah that was a crap decision, they made a mess of that!

Why aren't people more concerned about what's actually happening now?

If that were the case the government would have a constant rolling programme of hospital upgrades. It hasn’t.

Not all old people though. His dad was vaccinated before anyone else I seem to remember.

Nonsense! where do people get these "facts" from?

PFI costs the country approx £2bn per year & it was first used by Major, carried on for 4 years by Osbourne.
£2bn wouldn't even run the NHS for a week ans is peanuts compared to the money Sunak wasted on CV support loan fraud = 10s billions or the 100bn Truss cost the economy (and in mortgage costs)

Of course its critics cannot say how these extre hospitals etc should have been paid for and what the NHS would now look like if they'd never been built?

Tax Credits is just another name for income support, first introduced in 1948, widely expanded by Edward Heath in the early 70s.

Of course the real reason we have seen in work benefits increase since 2010 is public sector wage freezes, mimicked by the private sector, unless its director pay, which the right wing have no problem with....

Long ago? it was 2/3 years, the current PM was chancellor!

CV and how it was/is handled is costing the country billions and cost 10s of '000s of extra deaths, that might not matter to you but they do to those affected & those who work/use in the NHS, Schools etc.

There were a LOT of younger people on here basically saying the same, though. "Why should I/my family be inconvenienced to save a bunch of boomers who vote Tory and should really just die already,"

It's that kind of blind short term-ism that they rely on.

Got you fooled. Wise up.

I was talking about the PFI!

I sort of include the disastrous handling of COVID in the now!

The threads just get filled up with 'but Labour' replace with which ever suffix you want - PFI - tax credits - Jeremy Corbin without addressing now & the position the Country is in after 13 years of a Tory Govt!

It's like coming on & saying but Thatcher - privatised our utilities, destroyed the steel industry bla bla

Yes it all has implications and affects the position we're in now I understand that - but bloody hell we're in a mess & we need a change!

@TizerorFizz

"Anyone sensible could have predicted the disaster of Johnson. Millions don’t appear to be sensible though."

+++

So who is at fault here - Johnson for being the out of his depth bluffer and proven liar or the voters knowingly electing an out of his depth bluffer and proven liar as PM and then complaining that the PM is indeed out of his depth bluffer and a proven liar?

Or the Conservative Party members who nominated and voted for Johnson as candidate.

@1dayatatime
I consider the Conservatives were at fault for not backing the Teresa May Brexit deal. They disrupted government to an intolerable degree. Then the Conservative members voted for Johnson I believe against the wishes of MPs. The electorate clearly agreed and served up a 80 plus seat majority. The public clearly voted for a hard Brexit. I don’t believe most truly understood the implications and most didn’t care about Johnson’s employment record and clear personality traits that made him unsuitable for PM. His lack of attention to detail, his superficial grasp of issues leading to errors and the fact he lies.

As Mayor he was a showman. He fronted policies others worked out. He turned up and made “Boris” type speeches. He couldn’t do that as PM. He was not up to the job. The voting public were warned but “getting Brexit done” was the only real topic at the election and even that slogan was bluff.

If we don’t wake up as a nation, we are taken as fools. Johnson and others like Cummings saw this. Many Voters, it appears, are myopic and gullible. Sadly.

I am very unhappy with most senior politicians. They have ideas but few can actually be carried out without further consequences that they haven’t thought about. It’s short term political gain over what the country needs.

I think you have to blame the manipulators not the easily manipulated for Johnson.

So not the sloganised Brexit voters, possibly not even the Telegraph-reading Conservative members...

But surely his fellow Tory MPs knew what he was like and what they were inflicting oh our country?

The idea that Tory MPs did not know what he is like is for the birds. He promised them jobs.

The joke is on us.

Tory MPs shortlist. They didn’t make the final decision. Tory members did. As with Truss. Voters voted for Johnson snd Get Brexit Done. We are a democracy after all. There were alternatives all the way along but they were not taken and people like Farage whipped up dissent against a sensible pragmatic approach. Which ever way you look at it, poor decisions all round.