To ask what the tories have ever done for us…

[Tootiredforallthiscrap]

To compliment the thread about labour and give a bit of balance, let’s discuss the legacy of 14 years Conservative government. Never voted for them myself and although we now have 2 out of 3 Tory MPs up here because of the Brexit effect I haven’t seen any great improvement in our town. In fact if anything it’s pretty much gone to the dogs. So good and bad, what have they achieved ?

It was the bloody tories that privatised the water companies....I believe we are the only country in Europe to have done so. They put profit before safety or the environment.

So it was indeed their fault and greed that has left us swimming in our own crap.

This.

Also, @Paul2023 , you have to wonder how a water company, we'll take Thames Water as an example, can go bust when they are the only supplier of something that everyone in their catchment area has to have. Talk about mismanagement of funds.

I would sort of dispute that the utilities were sold off to put profit before safety or environment though. They were sold off to raise money as the government didn't have any. I concede that this did have the effect of a) not having to raise taxes, and b) enabling people to make money on an individual level. The latter being appealing to a good many Conservative voters thus the net effect being similar.

Introduce the right to buy support people during the pandemic financially pay out cost of living payments bus fares reduced

Should there be some punctuation in there? I'm struggling to read it.

Prob ably yes I struggle with how you do it will have to try I guess

Introduce the right to buy
Without mandating and funding that the houses sold be replaced with similar council housing stock, thus creating the current rental crisis - well done, Tories.

support people during the pandemic
Like every other government in the world did, nothing special. Oh, and parties, and Eat Out To Help Spread The Virus.

financially pay out cost of living payments
Again, like every other government did.

bus fares reduced
And now there's an increase to the cap because... inflation. It isn't compulsory for bus companies to increase fares.

For me the one that really matters is marriage equality - that was a big one and it's one the Tories sholuld be proud of - but they only got it through Parliament because they had support from Labour, the SNP and the Lib Dems. The majority of people who voted against were Tories.

It isn't compulsory for bus companies to increase fares.

Only if they want to stay in business. Otherwise, they need a bail out from the government. Otherwise known as the taxpayer.

They helped to save our small business during Covid with the handouts and loans

True, but not all bus companies are increasing their fares to the new cap.

Beyond that we need a debate about what we want in terms of sustainable transport, because public transport in the UK is just appallingly bad. I grew up in the Netherlands - and I didn't own a car until I moved to the UK, because I just didn't need one. With the environment in crisis, there are difficult questions to be addressed.

That is nothing to do with the Tories and everything to do with the way clinical research works in the UK, unlike other countries it’s embedded into our NHS; we were already set up and waiting for a pandemic to happen with all the ethics and approvals in place to go ahead and research a cure for when the time came (I don’t know if that makes sense, but I work in research and the way approvals work is a bit complicated)

Oh, completely agree. I go to Lisbon a lot and the trains there are reliable and cheap. And government funded.

This begs the question of taxation though, as most people here seem to want champagne service for lemonade money. Everyone wants excellent health care, great public transport, fabulous pensions, clean streets etc etc, but nobody wants to pay more tax despite the UK having lower levels of tax than most comparative countries, if not all.

Then you get into the conversation about whether we trust the government to administer the funds collected properly. I don't think either Labour or Conservative excel in this area, which makes people less inclined to want to pay more tax.

I feel like this needs repeating at regular intervals.

Think of all that wealth trickling down

Ironically, it actually showed the way this should work normally. It is only slower because of the bureaucracy around the process and not because it actually takes that long to develop a vaccine. It was fast during the pandemic as all the usual procedural blockers were unblocked.

And most of those procedural blockers involved funding.

Lots of people I've heard about are unhappy that they can't access Ben

.posted too soon ..
.. benefits and didn't receive any help with furlough payments, they don't always declare tax and are willing to defraud the HMRC because of their unhappiness at just about everything. This doesn't help matters either.
No wonder governments are keen to make it hard to pay by cash for things ..

The only people I know who didn't receive furlough payments were the small business owners who take all their income out as dividends. As such, they weren't actually paying themselves a wage with the appropriate tax and NI.

Quite rightly, the government used actually wages as their measure for furlough payments, thus the people I describe above were not eligible. Can't have one's cake and eat it.

Labour would have done the same, I don't think it's something to particularly praise a government for, that they didn't let people starve when not letting them physically go to work.