I agree about rose tinted glasses on this thread..life was better if you were in a position to benefit from the labour policies which in their heads were upwardly mobile aspirations that they assumed everyone would be delighted with - initiatives like the Child trust fund (which let’s face it, only worked with MC families who either knew what to do with it or had the income to add to it). Sadly this did not apply to the lower socioeconomic groups. The disincentive to work or study for young women with families did little to further along the feminist cause and in reality, kept women at home.
Sadly, the reason you now can’t get a GP appointment or find an NHS dentist started under new labour. The contracts given to GP’s (which in reality saw them paid considerably more for agreeing to do less than they were before) and conversely their dental contracts then woke dentists up to the fact that it was much more appealing to start a private practice instead. So they did. Whilst I don’t disagree that GP’s were not well rewarded at the time, the initiative did not create a load more of gps….
People like Camilla Batmanghelidjh with access to unchecked funding were lauded by The Guardian and New Labour with zero scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, fraudulent behaviour was discovered when someone took a closer look. Upset about David Cameron’s return to the cabinet? Have a read up about the return of Lord Peter Mandelson. Same shit (financial scandal/cronyism), just a different political party. Upset about who you think is running the press/directing the government? Read Piers Morgan’s diaries from that era and note how many private lunches/dinners/meetings he had with Blair and other members of the government at the time when he was the editor of the Daily Mirror. The Sun was not at the time ‘a Tory Rag’ but supported Labour.
So yeah, just like when corporations try to present they have reduced their cost base by making staff redundant only to hire them again via an agency to do the same job for more money, Labour ‘invested’ into infrastructure/public services via PFI initiatives. Who benefited from those contracts? Well it certainly wasn’t the taxpayers and certainly not by the education/health system now crippled by interest payments. Not much scrutiny at the time there either as I recall. As for the rise of the ‘buy to let’ empires, this wasn’t on the Tories watch either- Between 2000 and 2007 buy-to-let mortgages rose from 46,000 to just under 350,000. During the Blair years, 500,000 council homes were sold, replaced with 7800 on average a year. Even Thatcher’s government built around 17,800 council homes a year.
Labour had 3 terms to replace sold social housing stock, future proof the NHS, social care and education systems and the mandate to improve the national infrastructure. None of these things were achieved. In behaving like pools winners from the 70’s with a ‘spend, spend,spend’ culture, They gifted to the coalition the ability to rip out huge amounts of cost with what was considered at the time ‘waste’ because it seemed as if every initiative was both disparate and expensive. Would parts of the country benefit from Sure Start now? Of course they would, but these things have been left tainted.
I don’t know what the answer is, but it certainly isn’t the introduction of unchecked spending which benefits the already wealthy in the process. For those hoping they will, Labour won’t raise direct taxes. They didn’t before and Rachel Reeves had already stated they won’t if they win this time. What is clear is that whatever happens, the same level of scrutiny applied to this Government by various groups must continue - especially by those hoping to welcome in a Labour government.