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.

Extra Money for Ale we called it.

Haha.
I guess.
I did get my £100 bonus once the day I went to see The Darkness so treated us to a seat upgrade (from the moshpit) and a band tshirt 🤣.
Mainly it meant my £20 for 4 hrs work at Holland and Barrett on a Saturday meant I didn’t need to pick up other shifts in the week.

One thing I do remember back in 2008/9 was my brother starting college and him getting the £30 a week. This helped a lot with bus fares / lunches etc as I mentioned before my parents didn't have much so this took some of the strain off. Just the little things like that that stopped when the Tories got in.

Haven't read the full thread but this is really worth a watch OP:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p09wg9cm/blair-brown-the-new-labour-revolution

@herewegoroundthebastardbush I'm going to give that a watch!

Cannot see the revised figures in your link, was it anywhere near 98% ? after 13 years of austerity, you'd think, even with Covid, we'd be in running a huge surplus or did Austerity actually cost us more than the short term savings.

Anyone knows that skimping on annual maintenance ends up costing far more.

Didn't we also recover some of this bailout money?

The safety net for vulnerable people was still there.

The NHS was safe

It's good because it shows both sides - they were very much not saints, but it gives a real idea of how, in those days, politicians (probably even Tory ones!) wanted to make the country a better place to live and work. Verrrrry different ideas about how to do that, but that was the overriding goal, that was why (most) people went into politics instead of taking their big brains and privilege off into investment banking or similar where they could be paid far more.

You look now at the Tory party and you see a level of total callousness that even Thatcher (and I say that reservedly, she was a horror) would not have been guilty of. It's true amorality in a way that is frightening. Not to mention the intellectual calibre of those in politics has dropped alarmingly. You look at someone like Suella and imagine them against a mind like Ken Clarke's, and however much you might disagree with both of them it's plain to see you're looking at completely different levels of intelligence, of comprehension skills, of basic ability to form and follow through a complex but coherent argument.

The OP asked what it was like under the last labour government. And for those of us, who were there at the time it does really rather depend on what stage of life we were at. I was in my mid 20s, thankfully healthy so not much cause to use the NHS, had been state educated and both parents were healthy. Fast forward 23 years later… and your priorities change. I can’t know what it was like to access adult social care in 1997 so I can’t give my opinion on it but I’m not about to criticise someone who did and their opinion of it. I can give an opinion on what the mood of the country was like and to me, it was all jam tomorrow. Keep re-electing us and will implement change. This went on for 13years. I don’t think anybody ever thought Tony Blair was an honest man - he always seems like a bit of a snake oil salesman to me. Oh, and he cabinet was stuffed with the privately educated elite. If people think that the government today is sleazy and full of liars, I would ask them to cast their minds back to the Iraq war, the very unusual circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, and the sexed up dossier. How on Earth they retained power after that, I’ll never understand.

As I said previously, same old, same old just a different political banner.

Because when faced with two electoral open goals (2017 and 2019), the Labour Party did what it has a nasty tendency to do and ran a candidate for PM who, while acceptable to the Party (well much of it) was totally unacceptable to the voters.

I go back to the days of Harold Wilson and it is as true today as it was then that Labour does not win general elections, it's more that the Tories lose them.

I was in my late twenties in '97 and voted for 3 Blair governments - and I would do again as long as they cut out the identity politic/trans woo/momentumites from Labour.

How much better was it than it is now?
Like everyone on here I was 25 years younger and so I'm looking back with rose tinted specs to the heyday of having no responsibilities and a lot more energy than I have now. There was a lot of hope in '97 when Labour won, it was a good time. The country was financially on the up (nothing to do with the Labour win, that's just where we/EU were generally heading). There was money to spend and Labour spent it on improving lives of children/poorer people. If you didn't have children/live in poverty I'm not convinced anything benefitted you that much. Labour were also the first to bring in uni tuition fees and sell off bits of the NHS.
However, as time moved on money became less plentiful and the spending continued which resulted in debt (this led to austerity IMO). Then there was the Iraq war and the 'dodgy dossier' which was very unpopular.
In summary, some good, some not so good.

Why did Labour lose the election back then anyway?
After 3 terms and a change of leader the Labour party sort of fell apart before our eyes. The usual stuff - infighting, bad feeling, scandals, running up large debt on the public purse. It always seems to happen after a party has been in a while - it's like they run out of steam.

IMO if/when Labour win the next GE don't expect a re-run of '97. The UK/Europe/the world is in a very different place to what it was in then. We are not on the up as we were in '97, in fact no where is on the up.

I'd forgotten about poor David Kelly. Something very wrong happened to that poor man.

Not to mention the intellectual calibre of those in politics has dropped alarmingly. You look at someone like Suella and imagine them against a mind like Ken Clarke's, and however much you might disagree with both of them it's plain to see you're looking at completely different levels of intelligence, of comprehension skills, of basic ability to form and follow through a complex but coherent argument.

Very true, for all parties IMO

Has to be said though when you see the public reckon Boris is acceptable, it does make you wonder about their decision-making skills...

He was stitched up and he killed himself. It was awful but the conspiracy theories annoy me.

This graph shows how Labour continued to reduce the deficit in their first term of office, but then when they start splashing the cash, the deficit grows substantially, even before the global banking crash. It's why Brown had to keep extending his "economic cycle" as his mantra had been to balance the borrowing over the economic cycle, but it simply never happened because he was spending too much! He basically just borrowed money to create the illusion of economic growth.

Why did Labour lose the election back then anyway?
After 3 terms and a change of leader the Labour party sort of fell apart before our eyes. The usual stuff - infighting, bad feeling, scandals, running up large debt on the public purse. It always seems to happen after a party has been in a while - it's like they run out of steam.

There's that, and also the frankly bullshit way the Tory press managed to pin the global financial crash on Labour. It was always bullshit but a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth and they used that to full advantage.

Nice dick move. I always assumed he was being bullied and that led to his suicide but don't let that stop you from making baseless assumptions 🙄

It was awful. I was a disabled single parent under the last labour government and access to money and food was non existent. My condition wasn't eligible for DLA (but is for PIP), tax credits were a farce (UC for all its faults is much better), and hospital waiting times were obscene. People say more food banks are a sign of a bad government but to me it's the sign of a good government. We didn't have them under labour so I would go for days without more than a sandwich or a bowl of cereal a day. I hated living under labour and would equally hate to live under a Labour government again.

Sorry, I did assume. It was just sounding like the stuff you often hear where then it was MI5 did it, and then Robin Cooke gets brought up and I put my head in my hands. But you weren't doing that and I jumped ere i was stung so I do apologise.

I am the child of a parent who committed suicide and whenever I hear people speculating about poor old David Kelly's death I think about his family, how horrible the whole thing must have been and probably still is for them, and how it must rub salt in the would to have people adding al that other crap to it as if what was done to him wasn't bad enough. That's not an excuse but i offer it by way of explanation.

jasflowers
Cannot see the revised figures in your link, was it anywhere near 98% ?

Much higher:

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

2008 Jul 43.3 %

2008 Dec 141.5 %

2009 Dec 148.5 % (peak)

2014 Jun 97.2 %

2019 Dec 98.8 %

2020 Sep 114.6 %

2023 Aug 111 %

It's because people wanted to see more state educated, non Russell group/Oxbridge graduate MPs representing us.

I don't disagree that the press tried to pin the global financial crash on Labour (much the same as the press try to pin the poor state of the NHS on the Tories while ignoring we're just coming out of a global pandemic.) Neither assumptions stand up to much scrutiny IOM.

However there was still infighting, bad feeling, scandals, running up large debt on the public purse that led to their defeat in 2010.

I'm sorry for flying off the handle, and for your loss. I've had a bad 24 hours with a teenager x

Suella went to a fee-paying secondary school, then Cambridge, then the Sorbonne. What's her excuse for being thick as pigshit?