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.

A larger population generally means more taxpayers @RudsyFarmer, doesn't it?

Lots of those babies born during the last Labour government are adults now.

Unfortunately or government lets global corporations pretend they don't make a profit here so they don't need to pay tax, and leaves plenty of tax loopholes open for the billionaires and oligarchs.

They also keep much needed workers shut up in asylum hotels for years when they could be earning and paying tax if their asylum applications were processed promptly.

But then the Tory donor with the asylum hotel contact wouldn't get so many £millions of the taxes you and I pay.

If our government wasn't corrupt and processed asylum applications in four months instead of two years it would cut the costs by 80%.

So there's just one example where costs are not higher because of a higher population, but because the Tories have rigged the system to provide the maximum amount of our money to their mates.

I notice you haven't resorted to any figures, just batting a soundbite back. That's because there are a number of respected sources as you are no doubt well aware that have concluded Labour are no worse (and in some cases better) than the Tories at managing the nations' finances. So the bollockspeak about "Labour spends all the money" is just that - bollocks.

How long ago was that thought? We have a much larger population now which has stretched many facilities. I do think we are conflating bygone times with governments of the time in a lot of cases

Who has presided over the huge increases in population? almost 700k new migration alone last year, yet at the same time hasn't funded public services and built the infrastructure required for this pop. growth?

Labour had additional funding for areas hit hard by EU migration, one of the first things the Tories did after 2010 was end that funding.

The problem with Labour was there seemed to be a belief that if you weren't on benefits and weren't a single parent - then you weren't deserving of any help.

My parents slogged their guts out, working full time and extra hours to bump their pay. My mother earned minimum wage and my dad worked shifts, on low paid, unskilled work. I grew up in a deprived northern town on a council estate.

At the end of the month, they would only be very slightly better off than the young woman two doors down, who had her first child at 16 and had literally never worked a day in her life.

I went to school with someone who was one of seven. They received free school meals and yet spent three weeks in Florida every summer. We had our first holiday abroad in 2003.

The council estate was once a relatively pleasant place to live. But over the years crime and vandalism took over. People would destroy their council houses, yet no action was taken against them. There was plenty of crime, which became worse as we entered the 00s - people would wake up to find their tyres slashed. Crime became so bad we moved to a different town.

I wasn't eligible for EMA at sixth form, yet I knew some who received £30 a week. They'd have parents who had separated but in many cases, their fathers had very good jobs and lived in big houses. They had bought cars for their kids and they would use the EMA for petrol money. They received this money simply because their parents weren't together. I only knew of one person who received EMA who was genuinely struggling - she only qualified for £10 a week.

The welfare state is too cruel now, but back then it was far too generous, and despite middle class protestations, people were paid a healthy wage to sit at home and have more kids.

My parents say they were doing well in the early Cameron years, when things had rebalanced slightly.

There was a huge amount of unfairness and it's now either forgotten about, or denied by people who had never been around it to see it.

I despise the current shower and will be voting Labour at the next election. But I think the 1997 administration introduced a lot of the ills of today's society and made things worse long-term for short-term gain.

We had a shiny new PIF hospital with A&E department built under Labour, completed in 2003.

By 2009, the A&E department had been closed and the hospital was largely a very expensive white elephant.

But who gets the blame for closing the hospital? Yep, not the ones who actually closed it. Our hideous former Labour MP also once blamed the Tories for closing the A&E department.

@BriocheBunn

The problem with Labour was there seemed to be a belief that if you weren't on benefits and weren't a single parent - then you weren't deserving of any help.

Yep, nail on the head. Our prospective local Labour candidate for the next GE is all over Facebook and Twitter going on about increasing benefits and increasing public sector financing, etc. She's not uttered a single word about economic growth, improving local employment/businesses, etc. She's ALL about spending! Labour just havn't changed at all and don't seem to realise that the answer to the country's finances is getting people working, not paying them to be idle!

Sure start centres still exist

https://www.gov.uk/find-sure-start-childrens-centre

Have you tried clicking that link @Purplebunnie ? It is just a landing page telling you to ring your local council...

This is what Wikipedia says about Surestart centres in England: "In February 2020, the reviewed report has shown that 1300 centers have been closed during the last 10 years, meaning more than one in three Sure Start centres were axed under the Tories, the brutal cuts have seen 1,292 of the vital family centres shut since 2010, ministers admit. At their peak in 2009/10, there were 3,600 centres. The austerity slashed numbers by up to 85 per cent in some areas."

The situation will not have improved since February 2020

Sorry I just tried it myself and yep you're right. Not sure how to get MN to remove my posts

The problem with surestart in some areas was they became very popular with the yummy mummy, sah crowd. Nearly all the courses got booked up long in advance, and the people who actually needed them struggled to get places.

I heard parts of the press reporting that at the time but it didn't make sense to me. Most middle class families wouldn't go anywhere near the places where Sure Start ran - they were in areas with multiple indices of deprivation.

I didn't experience that.

At the one I attended lots of sessions were drop in casual type things run by the mums for the mums with qualified staff available in the background if needed.

For anything limited on numbers anyone on benefits, anyone who was disabled or struggling with mental health, or who had a child with extra issues or who was experiencing domestic violence etc got priority.

Pretty awful tbh. So much waste. Tax credits disincentived work. New deal for lone parents ie they have to work, that's not so bad.
Decimated standards of education and dumbed it down so much you could get a piss easy btec ict equivalent to 4 gcses. We dropped down the pisa rankings fast.
Introduced uni fees.
Parenting orders Introduced so parents punished for kids behaviour, made to take parenting classes etc.
Huge rise of the nanny state.
Rise of dependency culture that thatcher worked very hard to remove, and so a lack of ambition generally.
Race to the bottom.
Gra introduced which has caused so many issues for women, not because they believe twaw but because they were so anti gay marriage they'd rather do that as workaround.
PFI we pay so much for now and insane management fees in nhs, new Dr's contracts that mean no gp works evening or weekends anymore.

Cameron was hamstrung by Clegg then brexit then covid so I would def say the tories did far better on both of those than Labour would have.

This is nonsense, they had targeted activities based on HV referral etc.

I could only access some of the services on offer due to not having a specific need (fine by me).

And where else could I have accessed the advice I got there? The support helped me parent better. Is that not good for society?

@BriocheBunn can't agree with you here. I know someone well who gets very good child support maintanance over £700 a month which she gets to keep and now can't be arsed to work more than 8 hours a week as she gets full benefits too and her CSM is no longer taken into account. She is doing better than many of my friends working full time and gets all her nice HA property rent money covered too.

It's not a black and white issue. Attitudes have also changed- how many times on here do we get mothers with quite old kids

Saying they don't want to do more than 20 hours- many claiming too -
This wasn't purely a labour thing. I worked full time with a 4 month old when labour came in.

So after 13 years the Tories haven't changed any of that? not a single thing.

I mean UC means we pay out more in in work benefits than ever before.
Still got GRA, not even reformed.
Ed no better and far worse teacher shortages.
Health an utter disaster zone.
After the Covid debacle, i don't you can accuse Lab of the "Nanny state" the Tories even told us we couldn't visit dying relatives and locked up student in their halls.
PFI costs the NHS around £2bn per year and we ve many new hospitals for that, would you like to get rid of them?

All the top jobs went to Conservatives in the coalition, Cameron did what he wanted, as all Clegg wanted was the illusion of power.

The Tories have trebled migration since the high numbers in 2004 and non of the current migrants will ever go back, unlike many EU migrants plus we've still got a skills & labour shortage.

I'm just loving all the Tories saying Labour will be shit because...um....the Tories have made everything so shit they won't be able to do anything. 😂

Why not Google it?

Totally agree @jasflowers -

The last Labour government started well - mainly because they took over at a time of economic prosperity and had lots of money to spend. They borrowed huge amounts though and the resulting austerity of the following Tory government was because of that. They also allowed the economy to overheat which was part of the cause of the financial crisis. It’s difficult to know if the tories would have done any different- maybe spent a bit less which would have been worse for some but maybe better for others in subsequent years.

They lost the election partly because people wanted a change and partly because of the financial crisis which damaged their economic credibility. Tbf part of the success of the last labour government was that the previous conservative government had left the economy in good shape so it had money to spend. Part of the failure of the coalition/Tory government was that the financial crisis had damaged the economy so much that they had difficult choices.

so nothing happened in a vacuum

It is entirely inaccurate to say that “global corporations can pretend they don’t make a profit here” and not pay taxes. Recent governments (both conservative and labour) have imposed many extremely complex rules on global business to maximize uk tax take from these entities.

It will be all sunshine, unicorns and lemonade.

I was a teenager under the last Labour government. We all had high hopes for our futures, university was affordable and graduate salaries better.

The NHS was fantastic- there were always headlines about waiting times (most of the press right-owned, hated labour) but Labour had introduced a 4 hour wait time in A&E, among other things, which had a high compliance rate & was actively monitored.

The country was progressive across the board and my peers & I expected it would continue to be so. How wrong we were - apart from marriage equality, we've lost decades and in some cases a century of progression under the conservatives.

We have everything going for us.
Squandered since.

My son ws born in, 2010 a couple of weeks after the con/dems were elected ,he was diagnosed with autism i 2013 when he was three and a half and also gor a a,place in a special school.from reception I. 2014 ,he's 14 next week and still goes to a special.school in fact all the special schools in my LEA have doubled in capacity over the past 20 years.

Yes it was such a shame that Labour brought in tuition fees wasent it ...
Also I worked for the NHS during the last labour government it wsent as fantastic as you make out I ws. Redeployed twice in 12 months in 2005-2006 due to cuts