To ask what the country was like under a Labour government?

[user6776]

I'm too young to remember a proper Labour government. I was 12 when the Tories got voted in back in 2010 so that's all I've ever really known.

How much better was it than it is now? Why did Labour lose the election back then anyway?

Interested to hear people's opinions.

I have a question too. And this might be the fault of Rishi.

If you got rid of the top up benefits and increased wages, wouldn’t that cause inflation. Which wouldn’t necessarily benefit those on lowest incomes as they are being paid more but everything costs more? So either you’d have to cut profit margins, or as a PP said have a control on wage multiples or put the money back into society to benefit the lowest paid in a different way E.g. hugely subsidised means tested childcare or rent controls or food vouchers and the like.

I’m not sure the U.K. is ready for that with the current voting system. A left wing electorate won’t work with a split left wing vote and a FPTP system.

I feel like if/when Labour get in at the next GE, they are going to need to learn from things like the postwar West German economy to get some ideas of what to do that are more than just tinkering at the edges.

More on austerity:

“A new study from the thinktank the Progressive Economics Forum (PEF) uses official figures to show that the total economic damage inflicted by austerity is significantly higher than previously thought, needlessly cutting more than half a trillion pounds from public expenditure.

Using figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the paper demonstrates that governments from 2010 onwards could have maintained historic rates of growth in public spending and still have reduced Britain’s government debt burden by 2019.

The cost of failing to maintain this rate of public spending growth, and instead imposing spending cuts, came to £91bn of lost public expenditure in the final year of the austerity programme, or £540bn over 2010-19.

Despite claims by Coalition and Conservative governments that austerity was necessary to restructure the economy and promote growth, the research shows that the primary economic impact of austerity was through weakening the bargaining position of labour rather than boosting business investment, undermining real wages and job security over the 2010s. “Expansionary fiscal contraction”, as promoted by government supporters at the time, did not take place.

Research author, economist, Dr Robert Calvert Jump, said: ‘Austerity was never a necessity, but a poor economic choice whose effects are now all-too apparent. A return to spending cuts in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic would inflict a similar, dramatic cost on an economy that has barely recovered from the last round of cuts.”

progressiveeconomyforum.com/publications/the-macroeconomics-of-austerity/

They did the usual, spend spend spend until inevitably the pot ran dry, then handed the shit to the tories who had no qualms about cutting back to claw back from labours expenditure. It's like a merry-go-round.

False.

Demostrable nonsense.

You'd like to think it was.

Truth hurts.

Fake news

It was amazing. Sure Start centres, hope, prosperity, just a great feeling all around

Yes you'd love to dumb it down with fake news. It's the truth, they were useless.

Yes the rose-tinted glasses on this thread are incredible.

I remember my private school place on a scholarship being ripped away and being bullied to within an inch of my life at the failing local high school, and not being able to take the GCSE options for the career I wanted because my school didn't offer them. In a building with "danger asbestos" stickers everywhere, yet somehow apparently all these crumbling schools are the Tories' fault.

I remember graduating in 2008 with a 2:1 from a top uni and working in McDonalds for 2 years because the economy was so broken my only way out was teacher training because I didn't have the rich parents I'd need to work for free on an "internship" (all unpaid back then) to get a career job instead of a name badge job. There were very few apprenticeships and they were mainly for trades back then.

I remember Gordon Brown wanting everyone to get a biometric ID card, ostensibly to control foreigners, and only massive pushback shut that down.

I remember as a child my mum's benefits being cut off every few months due to issues and the fact we couldn't afford basic stuff like our rent because HB didn't cover it then either.

I remember young women being trapped in a cycle of poverty having baby after baby starting at age 16/17 as it was the only way they knew how to stay afloat because "education education education" didn't reach them and then they were trapped in a benefits system which didn't reward or facilitate a return to work.

I remember the expenses scandal, and the racist rhetoric Margaret Moran MP used to post through our door telling us she wanted travellers out.

It makes it very hard to vote for them. But from the level of pink nostalgia on this thread I won't have to. Total hypocrites but obviously won lots of people over as people believe what they say rather than what they do.

What's that saying from Terry Pratchett's Night Watch? "The new duke's the same as the old duke." We always think a different party will fix things but they never actually do because it's in their best interest when they see their time is close to ending to just fuck shit up and leave it for the next ones to carry the can.

Not a single politician gives half a shit about anyone but themselves. We used to know that in the 90s before we collectively fell for the PR.

I was 17 when Blair came in and I remember the optimism everyone had at the time.
Then Iraq happened and it all fell apart.
I had DD in 2006 and the local surestart centre was an absolute lifeline for me, I was there 3 or 4 times a week and tax credits allowed me to be a sahm, by the time DS2 came along in 2010 the surestart centre was only available if you met certain criteria and then it closed in 2012. It was a real shame, it was so well used and the staff were wonderful.
I also lost my tax credits and had to go back to work part time. DS2 really needed me home, he was non verbal and I wish I’d had more time with him before he went to school. Luckily he had a wonderful speech therapist and he was chatting away by the time he was 6 but it was a real struggle at the time.

Don’t forget Baby P. I’d argue you hear more about it now because of the increase in social media.

All politicians are greedy, money grabbing, selfish people. The majority of them on both sides came from wealth, they do what is best for themselves, not what is best for the people.

The basic issue is the country spends/ owes more than it takes in.

The school I was teaching in was well resourced, well funded. We were able to provide councilling services and other essential pastoral care. Teacher retention was high , curriculum was good and varied and vocational subjects valued.
I could afford to eat and have holidays, see a doctor the same day, council's had money to repair roads and clean streets I could go on. It makes me so sad what came after

i have worked in social care since 2000. Regulations have rightly increased and tightened the last 25 years, meaning higher standards and an empowering person centred approach BUT since tories came to power the funding just isn’t in place to deliver best practice. Local authority cuts mean the most vulnerable in society are the hardest hit. The tories have completely screwed over those receiving social care and social care workers. Social care is very much the poor relative of the NHS, who are underfunded too.

I worked for both the Labour & the coalition government. The difference was striking. I saw the difference between the two governments within about 6 weeks, the first thing they did was completely withdraw all the public funding which we were allocating to local community projects & environmental projects. This was swiftly followed by taking away all our organisational powers of external communication & the ability to criticise the government at all, we were effectively gagged.
Labour weren’t perfect, they fucked up. They did however have policies & funding in place which were aimed at supporting all of us. All those public services from the NHS to Sure Start centres, youth clubs, council rubbish collections, parks, filling in pot holes in the road - these thing’s definitely got sorted more than are now. They invested in this country’s social & environmental infrastructure. The Tories in contrast have always been about making a small number of wealthy people more wealthy, it’s money first with them.
The other thing & it’s a massive one for me is that there was no gas lighting. Since about 2015, in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, the Tories have lost any integrity they had before & their behaviour has just gas lit us al. From Boris Johnson’s party gate to Cruella Braverman’s calling homelessness a “lifestyle choice”, the Tories actively provoke division, where Labour invested in communities.

Zero hour contract, PFI's, full of popular ideas with little ability to budget for them and weak in immigration control and foreign policy abysmal.

All political parties are liars and in it for their own ends but what the red team are now is not the "labour party".
They arent for the working british man/woman.

On the other hand, Rishi rat and DAVID CAMERON!!? The mind boggles..

The only other thing i would add is "Diane Abbott" 😳

And then Tory supporters bang on about “net takers”, conveniently forgetting the value of the work itself, and the profits it generates for others. Without nursery nurses, care assistants, cleaners, refuse collectors, warehouse operatives, shop assistants, agricultural workers etc. society would grind to a halt, but hey, they’re just parasites on benefits.

Whichever political party gets voted in next year there’s going to be no/very little public money to spend. This will obviously limit what can be spent on public services.

I do want to add though that I feel Kier Starmer is different & I don’t think it gets talked about very much. He’s spent most of his life as a human rights lawyer, which to me shows he’s genuinely motivated to help others. His wife’s an NHS nurse & my neighbour used to work with him & says he’s a good man! My other experience of him is that I used to manage a community project in his constituency & he’d turn up to all the events. He remembered our community worker & once stopped her in King’s Cross station to ask her how it was all going & if he could help.

I meant to quote a post about low wages needing to be topped up with tax credits, so workers can make ends meet.

I think this is a fair and excellent summary. The only thing I'd add is that Labour made a massive mistake going into the Iraq war... but the Tories supported them all the way and I believe that they would have done the same thing.

I've only ever voted Labour,but I have to say this simply isn't true. Maybe it was how you perceived life, but it wasn't like that for the children I was teaching in the 00s, nor anywhere across our inner-cities. We had many many children who lived in over-crowded accommodation, who were at real risk of knife crime on their way home from school, and whose families lived hand-to-mouth. Community projects made a big difference to children's lives and these had good funding sources under New Labour, but there was a lot of poverty. (28% of children living in poverty was the lowest figure reached during the Blair/Brown years, the lowest it has dropped to since 1990 is 27% in 2010, 2013, and 2021, obviously under Tory or Coaltion governments. So neither party have ever really delivered in terms of alleviating child poverty).

I think the thing is that the Blair years felt hopeful, there was investment in communities, in the arts, in education - but actually for many people this never equated to an improvement in quality of life. I think times were a lot less divisive and politicians did at least seem to want to make a difference.

It was a good time to become a parent, ds was born in 2004. I got child & working tax credits which nearly doubled my wage, it enabled me to work part time which helped as I had a newly severely disabled husband as well as a baby to care for. I got one free tub of formula a week just by showing my prescription card at the chemists. We had a Sure Start worker who came to see us once a week, she was a lifesaver & it meant if I wanted to I could go out & know ds & my husband were being looked after. I took ds to the Sure Start playgroups until he started preschool. Labour introduced NHS Choose & Book which enabled you to see a consultant at a private hospital & get any treatment needed there, I had 5 operations all in the private hospital.

No

The government could divert the tax credits money saved to companies as an incentive somehow. If you pay your employees enough, you get a corporation tax cut or something. To let companies absorb the cost of higher wages and stop price of goods rising

Of course economically more people earning more means more people spending more, which helps business

The Tories never get this. They keep the money at the top and strangle the economy
.

The last labour gov tried to share it out to grow the economy