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.

Nope, the economy was growing, they poured vast amounts into the NHS, after 4 terms of Conservative cuts, not least pay.... i need 2 lots of non urgent surgery in 2008/9 i waited a few weeks, i had an NHS dentist.

Even after the bailouts of the banks, Debt to GDP was 65%, since then it has risen to almost 100% but here is the difference, what have we got to show for it?

3 weeks to get a GP appoint, 24hr waits at AE and 8m on waiting lists oh and crumbling schools and hospitals.

Whatever Labour may have wasted, has been more than matched by Covid fraud and quite frankly, incompetence - £26bn thrown away on HS2, either have fucking HS rail or don't, doesn't need years of wrangling before a decision is made.

& how much has been wasted over Brexit? both money and in european relations?

And I remember everything mostly working well, even the trains which are now so unreliable and expensive it’s impossible to rely on them.

The trains were as unreliable as they are now! I used to travel a lot by train in the late 90s / early 2000s and it used to be hit and miss whether the trains would even reach their destination - I remember a lot of unplanned replacement buses across Yorkshire / waiting on Doncaster station for hours.

Awful,

Yep, train services were grim in the North, completely run down and unreliable.

There was (generally) a lot of optimism under the Blair/Brown govts. - at least until Iraq - but I’m old enough to remember the earlier Labour govt., 98p in the £ tax for higher earners (not the super rich) the consequent ‘brain drain’, various other negatives that finally led to the Thatcher govt.

It wasn’t all roses, far from it.

I might add that the massive rise in buy-to-let (and the consequent explosion of private landlord-ism) was at least partly caused by Gordon Brown’s removal of mortgage interest tax relief for owner occupiers, but retaining it for landlords. Not to mention the automatic 10% ‘wear and tear’ allowance. God knows I’m no fan of the Tories, but that (and the mortgage interest relief anomaly) was only finally removed by Osborne.

I can only assume that Labour thought a big increase in the availability of private rentals would absolve them from having to do much about providing/improving social housing. Of course hardly anybody foresaw the colossal rise in house prices and rents - or perhaps I should say nobody did.

And despite Labour’s endless complaining about the sell-off of social housing, they had 13 years in which to scrap Right to Buy, but they didn’t. Could that possibly be because they thought it would lose them votes?

Our whole family had a NHS dentist. Now my 11 year old has been kicked off the list of the dentist she’s been with since birth.

@Lancrelady80
All Prime Ministers are ‘unelected’

We have a government that wants to reward ‘strivers’ but makes it impossible for people to get anywhere because they’re obsessed with helping the people they knowC their class keep money and make more money.

If a monkey hoarded bananas, kept more than he could every need and watch the other monkeys starve, scientists would study him to see WTF was wrong.
When a human does it, we make him PM

Look what happened when Liz Truss tried to implement growth policies. She was out the door in less than a month. It was wildly unpopular (obviously) and the optics weren’t great but I for one understood what she was trying to achieve, even if she went about it the wrong way.

Will be interesting to see what Stamer et al will do differently next year. Let’s face it, it can’t be much worse.

Lots of rose-tinted specs on here. One of our local train services was so bad in the 1990s and 2000s an action group was set up to demand a better service. It took years and years to get any change, and it was long after the Blair/Brown years before that happened.

The Thick of It started in the 2000s and was definitely taking aim at New Labour (and the Tories, especially in the final series). Thanks to Mandelson, there was a huge emphasis on spin and media training, and there were plenty of people at the time who thought there was often more style than substance to policy announcements.

I think one of the reasons politicians nowadays are not often very good is that so many of them have done nothing very much except work in politics. This applies to all the parties. In the past MPs had often spent decades doing other things first. When I was growing up a great many MPs had served in the military during WW2 or National Service. If they'd served as Trades Union officials or councillors before becoming MPs they'd have had a day job as well.

Nowadays a typical CV seems to be:

Join party, spend time canvassing and sitting in meetings
Degree in politics or PPE + internships at party HQ
On graduation, work for an MP as a research assistant, or in a think tank, or do policy or community work for a council/charity
In spare time, tick another box by getting elected to be school governor or charity trustee - spend even more time sitting in committee meetings
Get elected as councillor - meetings, meetings, meetings
Fight no hope seat at general election
Get reward of winnable seat
Elected as MP before age of 40

Just utterly not, the pot was dry by the time Gordon brown took over, Blair left him to it and by that time people were sick of open door immigration policy and then they led us into a recession. Mumsnet are full of people that love Labour that dont like to hear the truth or who were not old enough to remember and if you want to get me started on tories. Well I just don't have the time.

Lots of rose-tinted specs on here. One of our local train services was so bad in the 1990s and 2000s an action group was set up to demand a better service. It took years and years to get any change, and it was long after the Blair/Brown years before that happened

The 90s was mainly under a Tory Govt, so your bad train service was purely down to Tory underfunding.

Of course it takes years to undo poor transport policies, no Govt can wave a magic wand and conjure up track, trains, signalling, drivers etc etc etc.

We saw that with the NHS, it wasn't until the end of Blair as PM that we saw improvements in healthcare, it took the Tories just 4 years to undo that with Cameron's Austerity.

I worked on one of the many a and e departments that they closed, low and behold when we were stood protesting outside, borosilicate Johnston joined us!🤣 I've worked under both governments in the NHS, they are both terrible

So have have i, we got wage rises under Blair, we got funding, we didn't have 25 ambulances out side AE or 8m waiting for surgeries and most importantly, we had skilled EU staff working here.

My DD works in community services within the NHS, its a disaster zone, months for people in urgent need of assessments and cannot get them.

You simply cannot staff multiple AE depts 24/7, there were too many, in my area, we saw one closed down, replaced by 2 MIU's, the Tories closed down one of those MIU's, more strain on the AE dept now, which 24/7 full because too many patients on wards who should be in the community but there is limited care staff, why? because of Brexit - which the Tories gave us.

I'm glad i'm out of it now.

Wales is under a Labour government - ask them.

Actually I worked for the NHS when labour got in and it was doing brilliantly back then, labour came in and started privatising everything and it's been a slippery downhill slope since 🤷‍♀️

Yes, obviously. But with Blair there were many people who voted Labour because of him and his optimism and general demeanour. Especially the newest batch of voters. The personality of the leader of a party always has an impact on how people vote. That's how Boris got in. It's why Corbyn didn't.

The general public had had no say over whether or not they agreed with Gordon Brown's view of how to run the country. A different party leader / PM can take things in a very different way from their predecessor, creating dissent and chaos. (See Liz Truss for an exemplar.)

And the papers lost no time in pushing the "unelected PM" angle.

Don't even get me started on the war in Iraq.

Shh. You're disturbing the narrative with your pesky facts. And @Firebug007 . Just because you were there.

Oh, I must have been imagining my Dad lying dying on a trolley in A&E in 2002 because there were no beds...

It was generally better-innit line of work anyway-I was then a newly qualified social worker. More funding and more budget for staff. Everything felt more optimistic until the wheels fell off with the Iraq war.

I don't think there will be anywhere near the same feel good factor if they get in next time. The country is in a Far worse state as a starting point, society is much less cohesive, and Keir Starmer doesn't have the personality to carry it.

I was also quite young but old enough to remember EMA payments to support me through 6th form, Connexions advisors to support me through difficulties in my teen years, and Sure Start centres when DD was a baby. £3k/year uni tuition fees, Student Finance provided special support grants (in addition to loans) to support me through university whilst also being a new young mum. Life was very different.

Honestly, if I had been in the situations that I had faced under a Tory government, I would not have survived.

I agree.

jasflowers
Even after the bailouts of the banks, Debt to GDP was 65%

Not if you include the bailout debt (most charts seem to exclude it);

PS: Net Debt (including public sector banks) as a % of GDP

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/timeseries/ruto/pusf