Why have the Tories mismanaged the country so badly? (title edited by MNHQ at request of OP)

[HebburnPokemon]

Genuinely interested in views on this: why have the Conservatives made choices to preside over the virtual demolition of this country? - to the point where they are facing the biggest defeat of their existence. They have not only damaged the country, they have destroyed themselves! This level of self-harm is unheard of.

I'm trying to make sense of it. Even Covid & Ukraine cannot explain the sheer degree of this implosion. This is not your bog-standard "political cycle" of ruling party enjoying a decade of power then inevitably falling out of favour. Lib Dem are on course to become the opposition ffs!

0 accountability. Plus, US lapdog. Political alliances over own people.

Can you elaborate on your points @dontcryformeargentina please?

"Slowly at first, then all at once".

They had a tough hand to play with the economy, and played it dreadfully.

The first error was austerity, which made the economic recovery worse. Perhaps against a big global economic revival they would have got away with it.

Then the Brexit gamble, which was meant to silence the cranks but instead brought them into power.

The party has been flailing around ever since, alienating almost everyone and scaring away any remaining competent managers.

The first error was austerity, which made the economic recovery worse.

Yep. Austerity was an ideological rather than economical decision.

Then the Brexit gamble

Party over people 😫

The party has been flailing around ever since, alienating almost everyone

Why though? Why didn't they (privately) acknowledge the two above failures and seek to repair? Why did they continue to implode?

Is it not obvious that Britain doesn't act its own self interest? We do what we are told by US. For example, War in Iraq?
In terms of accountability, I don't think you need examples.

Needing to keep rich friends on side for when they need to call in the favour later.

I'm talking about the Tories specifically, so not Tony Blair et al. And specifically the last 14 years. It's been self-harm on steroids.

Haven't they always had a desire to do that though?

I wonder what impact Liz Truss had. People don’t tend to mention her first but her policies still have ramifications. Would they be slightly better off if Sunak had one that first election instead of her?

There have been so many issues that have just come to a head. I don’t get how it took so long for people to realise how incompetent they are.

I think because they actively pushed out the moderates and managers. So they had no one to form a competent government even if they wanted to. Ideologically it took a while to recognise Brexit wasn't going to be a success, and if they repudiated Brexit they really would have no natural supporters remaining at all. So they are kind of stuck. Meanwhile Labour made itself much more palatable.

Once a party starts to fall apart, I think it goes downhill fast. Because party discipline shatters and people stop caring about the job.

They were wiped out in 1997 also.

Then what? Blair and Brown. Billions spent on illegal wars in the middle East that achieved nothing. Didn't ban right to buy. Didn't build new social housing. Introducing tuition fees was the first thing Blairs government did. Expensive PFI contracts for hospitals. The NHS pays £4 billion annually in rent to private investors because of deals under Labour. I could go on.

How short memories are.

Alternative views exist. The country has not been virtually demolished.

The angry venting that started with the EU referendum, rose considerably with COVID and seems stuck on high volume won't go away with a change in government.

Pay levels for MPs affect who applies for the job. It's set at a rate that is too low to attract the best candidates. We have an angry aversion to paying enough to attract higher skilled people to the job. This will only get worse over time, not better.

They are largely made up of the super wealthy so a lot of their disaster economic policies don’t really affect their own pockets - and in fact Brexit and Covid actively helped some of them become very much wealthier. I know bankers who made an absolute fortune on the back of business uncertainty in the early COVID weeks. Sunsk’s company played a huge part in the economic crash of 2008 too - while Sunak became a multi millionaire of the back of it. They’re utter fucking scumbags.

@Hepwo that depends how cushioned you are from needing to use public services which have been utterly fucking decimated by austerity.

They were wiped out in 1997 also.

No where near as drastically as they will next week. Blair did not have a hyper majority like Stalmer is going to.

We don’t know what the outcome will be yet!

None of us are cushioned from using public services.

They put the party before the country. Then they just became a bunch of venal, self serving rats fighting in a sack and fucked both the party and the country.

They wrecked the UK and faith in our democracy.

Quite we don't live in a cartoon world of villans and heroes. It isn't that black and white.

Their insincerity and lack of accountability. Brexit sseemed like a ridiculous vanity project, Cameron and remain were so arrogant and smug they didn't bother to put strong arguments forwards, just behaved like they'd obviously win. Then as soon as that was done and everything was broken he just walked away from the mess he caused.

Covid and party gate, the notion rules don't apply to them and they're above everyone else. They seem completely out of touch. I'm not saying everyone else is better, but they are not a party I would consider trustworthy and they act in their own individual interests not in a way that is good for the country.

Forgotten furlough? The government paid how many peoples wages to stay at home and not work. Gosh scumbags indeed.

I guess the bill has come in for all of that now but no one complained about furlough at the time.

Instead of looking at what works in close-by European countries (regardless of Brexit, we are still a European country), the Tories just tried to copy either the extreme free-market USA or Asian countries with a lot of state involvement (e.g. in their harsh education systems).
People are happiest and quality of life is best in the affluent socially-democratic Scandinavian countries, which really the UK should be able to run in a similar manner to, but the Tories have taken the UK so far down the USA/Asian copycat route that I wonder if it will be possible to get back to European principles and ways of living.

For the NHS, the big Tory mistake/deliberate policy was to undo all the Labour targets that had achieved 4-hour waiting lists in A&E (utopia now!) and 2-week cancer waits. I guess it was no coincidence that Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt had previously written a book about how to dismantle the NHS, or something like that.

Obviously Brexit, but that was mostly Cameron wanting Farage and the right-wing Tories off his back, huge miscalculation on the referendum, and then Johnson seeing a way to run the country without any pesky rules that he couldn't change himself, deregulate everything, including water quality.

I think previous governments of either side have managed to rein it in. There was a time when corruption was dealt with.

They put the party before the country.

By destroying their party? 🤔

Wouldn't it be interesting to have a parallel universe where we could see where the country would be if Labour had been in power since 2010. I doubt it would be pretty.

I have voted Conservative since 1979. I don't think the Conservatives deserve to win this election. Rishi's final nail was D Day as far as I am concerned and let's not forget he was the architect of furlough. However whenever I said on here that the lockdown was disproportionate to the statistical risk and furlough would have to be paid for, I was accused of wanting to kill grannies.

I shall vote Conservative because I think the Conservative candidate where I live is the best candidate for the constituency and I shall vote for my constituency MP. To be fair if the Conservatives lose in my constituency, we will wake up to a Canada 1994 scenario when about 4 Tory equivalent MPs were left.