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.

Milk is free at infant school for all pupils as are school dinners.

I actually think that it would have been better for the country if Gordon Brown had been prime minister in 1997 rather than Tony Blair.

I think the Blair years are really what started the descent into spin vs actual policies.

Of course there is a general correlation between malnutrition and poverty, but lack of vitamin D causing rickets, or bandy legs as you said is not a disease of malnutrition. Vitamin D is freely available to anyone who spends time outside from March - September. If anything it's a disease of spending too much time indoors.

Vitamin C is cheap and freely available in oranges and immunisations are free.

If you're seeing lots of children with 'bandy legs' due to a lack of vitamin D is because they don't go outside.

Things didn't feel so extreme, so binary. People seemed to appreciate nuance more.

Part of that I think is because of the George Bush rhetoric after 9/11 - you're either for us or against us.

Again I think a lot of this is to do with social media giving idiots the impression that their opinion is important (yes I appreciate the irony as I type this on social media 😬)

Little old Blair was dying to privatise the nhs. He spent the money then it ran dry.

Mandelson is an intellectual colossus compared with most of the cabinet of recent years - I give you Nadine Dorries, Gavin Williamson, I could go on for a long time. All the Tory grownups like Rory Stewart and Sanjid Javid have pissed off in disgust.

The rise of TB is directly correlated to the huge amount of public spitting which was definitely not as prevalent as it is today in the late 90’s.

The country was in so much debt.
Labour were big spenders and we didn’t have a pandemic, wars or anything to worry about in terms of serious issues financial and otherwise. It was so extreme that they basically bankrupted the country, so once the financial crisis hit the global economy in 2008 we were in terrible shape to deal with it.

People have short memories.
Labour are cack handed with the economy, they always have been. We are in for a rough ride if they get in, taxes will immediately rise for vanity projects and postering. NHS will not improve and not will education but mass immigration will rocket as will our bills.

I didn't say anything about seeing kids with bandy legs. But I can read the stats, which do support a rise in these 'Victorian diseases' since the Tories, and which do demonstrate economic correlation. Hence I'm weighing in.

*But between October and early March we do not make enough vitamin D from sunlight. Read more about vitamin D and sunlight.
Vitamin D is also found in a small number of foods.
Sources include:

• oily fish – such as salmon, sardines, herring and mackerel
• red meat
• liver
• egg yolks
• fortified foods – such as some fat spreads and breakfast cereals

Another source of vitamin D is dietary supplements.*

At least be accurate if you're going to be so basic. Rickets is at least in part a matter of nutrition. How much salmon and steak do you think poor kids are eating?

Economics has a bearing on how much time you spend outside. For simple e.g., if your parents both work full time, you'll be in wraparound care at school, so in the winter you may both go to school in the dark and go home in the dark, end even in the summer if you're picked up at 5.30 and go to bed at 7.30, assuming you want to get dinner and homework done as well, that's not a lot of opportunity for soaking in the 'freely available' sunlight then is there?

And at the weekend, if your parents haven't got any money, you're more likely to stay indoors using the things they've already paid for - gaming stuff, toys, books, telly sub, to say nothing of FOOD - rather than going outside (no garden in tower blocks, lack of green spaces in urban areas, fuel costs enormous, public transport failing) to somewhere you can enjoy the sunshine for free? And assuming you make it to the nearest wood or public park, that's all you'll be doing - no activities, no stop for coffee and cake, no lunch out, none of all the other little expenses middle class families think nothing of that makes a day out with the kids more manageable and enjoyable for everyone.

And before you start I'm not saying it's impossible for poorer people. But it's harder. everything is harder. And some people strive their socks off and do it anyway, but most people - like most middle class and most rich people - take the path of least resistence. And with little to no disposable income to smooth the way, that path is a lot less beneficial for the poor than for the rich. Which is why we look at things at the population level, not at the "well I grew up in a slum in 1950 and spent every day out on my bike and my mum always had a good dinner on the table, even if she had to go without herself, if she could do it anyone can" anecdata level.

Christ is that true? 😮

How disgusting

I'm so glad that trend is over.

Having to avoid huge wads of gob all over the pavements. It was vile.

We are in debt now after 13 years of Tory rule. This lot are also "cack handed with the economy". They have just cancelled HS2 after wasting billions on it. They squandered billions during the pandemic. We are already having a rough ride.

Maybe people now are just wondering about the other colour of rough ride and whether it could be worse. At least Starmer seems like an adult, is maybe what they're thinking?

Ah so you're not a healthcare professional that sees children in that capacity but you just notice 'bandy legged' children? Your ridiculous statement makes more sense now! All children in KS1 currently get free school meals which is great and a mid morning snack of fruit, milk is free for under 5s then circa £15 a term if not eligible to have it free; that's subsidised for sure. Yes nutrition plays a part but some people on here chat like we are back to Dicknsian times and (purposefully I expect) omit the other more potent factors that affect childrens health.

I'm sorry, I was getting you mixed up with @VictoriaPlummm re: bandy legs.

The best, most freely absorbed source of Vitamin D is from the sun. Yes, you can also get it from food but the best source is the sun. Hence there not being masses of vegetarians with rickets.

Yes, steak/oily fish etc are expensive. Pulses and cod liver oil in a bottle less so (how I get vit d in winter).

As for economics influencing how much time you spend outside? Well personal economics influences everything but sitting in a park, going for a walk outside isn't one of them. I've lived in cities, towns and rural and been for walk in all of them - even inner city areas.

IMO education re: health/nutrition plays a huge part and sadly that is not great in this country.

Yes, read up about the PFI buildings, they are costing us a fortune. Billions each year.

I mean I (like most middle class parents I imagine) give my kids a multivitamin every day. The ones they will eat without a fuss are the strawberry flavoured 'gummy sweet' ones that cost about 8 quid for 30. Of course I can get the plain chewable tablets from the supermarket which are around £4 for 90; but they're going to moan their heads off about that, every day, when I've spent a long day on my feet getting moaned at by customers working as, e.g., a waitress or a shop assistant or a care assistant, I may find it slightly harder to have that argument than someone who's been sat in an office all day with time to bicker on Mumsnet. I may decide to pay for the expensive ones to avoid the argument, and go without elsewhere; or I may decide to keep that much needed £4 for the food bill rather than go without something else to buy a tub of chalky tablets I can't persuade my kids to eat. Or I may persevere and jam it down them somehow, but the point is I will have to work SO MUCH HARDER to get the same outcome as a nice middle class mummy who just pops a couple of jelly Peppas down her little darlings and doesn't need to think about how much they cost.

I think Tony Blair would have done ok, but Gordon Brown as Chancellor and then PM ruined the whole economy.

Tax credits meant that employers did not have to pay a decent wage as the government would just top it up.

You could rent a multimillion pound flat in central London and housing benefit would pay the rent as there was no limit.

There was definitely a change in peoples attitudes, which are sadly now irreversible, thanks to the rise in benefit culture. Benefits are a good thing to help the most vulnerable and needy in society but it's gone way beyond that now.

The introduction of Tax Credits was a good idea in thought, but unfortunately it created a monster in the end; wage stagnation and a change in people's attitudes about work. It became less about helping struggling families to top up their income to how can someone claim the most from benefits whilst doing the least amount of work. Foreign workers picked up the slack to some extent by doing the hard work British people turned their nose up at because why should they when they can just get top ups from the Government? This led to further wage stagnation because foreign workers were happy to work for far less money an hour, so when you add it all up it created the perfect shitstorm.
Now peoples attitudes are so far gone that life seems unfair because after the "foreigners went home" after Brexit, wages were still low, benefits are less and people have to work more to even take home the same income. When someone was used to working and getting top ups to now working full time and no better off, life will seem shit. Add to that the COL and people are just buggered.

Credit was also massive during the 2000s! Getting loans/credit cards/100% mortgages was easy and people got themselves into a right mess a lot of the time.

To me the 2000s were all about what people could get and what they were "entitled" to without any of the responsibility that goes with it. That's a hard thing to come back from.

Pretty grim in the 60s and 70s. High taxes, high interest rates and high inflation.
All I remember about the 90s (having left the UK in 1988) was labour selling off the country's gold reserves and spending the country's "savings" for social engineering purposes.
Whilst I am all for equality of opportunity, I am not so keen on people being spoon-fed.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten about the gold reserves being sold off. That wasn't Browns greatest hour IMO.

Ofc we are in debt now after the pandemic and war in Ukraine! Blair did not have that excuse. Starmer is anything but an adult 😂

Tory debt didn’t start in 2020.

There definitely was a limit to housing benefit. Where did the idea there wasn’t come from?

There absolutely was one and it was really low. Benefit also got paid to the tenant not the landlord which meant many people became homeless or had a rent shortfall every month because they used the money on other necessities

BIossomtoes
Tory debt didn’t start in 2020

Other charts are available!

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

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