I'VE JUST SEEN BLAIRS SPEECH FOR THE FIRST TIME AND.....

[lissielou]

im really going to miss him. i know a lot of you dont agree, but at this moment im proud to have had him leading our country for the last 10 years.

OK, that's one.

And this govt did introduce university tuition fees - but the plans were inherited from Labour and the universities were expecting the funding; it was the previous administration which abolished grants and introduced loans though, so the expectation of debt is down to them, not Labour.

They are not responsible for City salaries.

Poverty has been reduced - relative poverty has increased but again that's not down to them.

"Proper" jobs all gone to Asia? Tax haven? You cannot be serious.

House prices? Blame estate agents and individual greed.

I've no experience of Public Services being less efficient - perhaps you do? And please explain the future consequences of PFI as you obviously know far more about it than me.

Inherited from the Tories, doh!

And, talking about children's futures - school meals were ruined by Mrs T (after first taking the free milk away )

Since Jamie's campaign the govt has now put £280m back into the system, but Mrs T took £400m out over 25 years ago.

Moondog "public shool twats who are still stunned that one of their lot isn't in charge". Umm, think is is one of their lot actually, it was what nearly scuppered his chances of being selected for Sedgefield - he was a posh public school twat.

Message withdrawn

Oops - just discovered that my memory failed me on student finance

what I like..

his govt. banned fox hunting - always despised cruelty as sport - as for losing country jobs (hell of a lot more miners were ruined during the tory years & they were doing something useful)

Banning smoking in public places - will make my visits to restaurants more pleasant, will discourage 'social' smoking, will possibly save the lives of non-smoking bar staff. (Roy Castle never smoked & died of lung cancer, almost certainly from second hand smoke)

limiting advertising to children to protect parents from pester power. Oh and coming down hard on cigarette advertising, I seem to recall the tobacco industry was a big financial supporter of the tory party..bit of a conflict of interest I think

I'm old enough to remember the last Tory govt & I will certainly not trust them again.

doyouwantfries. im with you on all of those. as i said earlier i grew up under thatchers govt in an unemployed household that had to mix milk with water just to make it last! i remember too vividly what it was like then, so for that matter do the steel-workers, the miners (for which the repurcussions of those decisions are still being felt now)the surestart schemes have been mentioned, but what about tax credits, they mean that lots of young families are up to £45pw better off. and yes there have been mistakes there but often down to incorrect information being given initially.

I think this labour govt have really missed an opportunity to get more people off benefits and back to work. It was something the Tories were unlikely to be succesful at as everyone was always going to suspect theri motives. Labour have not been brave enough in my opinion, except bizarrely over Iraq where they appers to be foolhardily brave.

Pruni - I wasn't commenting on whether he was a "good" or "bad" public school boy just that he was one and you can't use the Blair vs the Old school tie network agrument because he's a part of it.

When talking of cigarette advertising, it's worth pointing out that after the boss of Formula One bunged his party a million quid they were exempted from the ban.

I'm for banning fox hunting, not because I like foxes, but because every fox hunter I've met is someone I'd pay money for someone to piss off. The Labour party wanted to ban it for much the same reason, Blair didn't care either way.

The ban in public smoking was coming anyway. Insurers were putting serious pressure on all employers to ban it because of fire risks and being sued for allowing your staff to be exposed to poisonous chemicals.

What "limits" to protect kids from "pester power" ? Not much enough to care about.

As someone who pays a shed load of tax because I got a grant to go to university, I'm not impressed that he has enabled more middle class kids to do meda studies, especially when funding to science departments has been cut so hard that many have closed.

I do think that the drive to send everyone to university apart from one dog in Aberdeen and a couple of boys in Guildford has been a disaster for a generation. Quality of education has not improved just more people with pointless degrees. I would so much have liked the govt to have found a way to bring in well respected tertiary vocational training rather than focussing so much on (50% of) everyone having a degree.

Remember the government inherited the Tory's spending plans which means that a lot of spending was locked in for their first term. Otherwise they could have made more social reforms earlier. I'm no fan of Tony and his stuck-on smile, but I still say that I've got access to better services for my kids than my mum had. And what about the Tories' intolerance - Aids, homosexuality, any possibility that young people might enjoy themselves by dancing... Our attitudes now are much more tolerant.

I agree with the points about the tories.
But wasn't the point of New Labour to be better than the tories ?

Don't let them confuse spending which takes time to fix, and social policy which doesn't.

As for tolerance for young people, they didn't remove the tory laws, and added extra laws to stop them protesting.

Never, in my wildest dreams would I have thought that a create of the night like Michael Howard would be able to successfully attack a Labour government for being "inhumane" in immigration.

Recall if you will that Labour policy was to separate children from their parents, sending them back to places that they knew for a fact used torture and murder against them.

Howard attacked them also after racist thugs killed asylum seekers. This would have been bad enough, but they were in uniform working for the state.
None were disciplined, and it was only after a media outbreak that new "guidelines" made for slightly less vicious attacks on unarmed female asylum seekers.

Yeah, really tolerant.

I think tony blair himself is pretty good as politicians go, and it's his sleazy friends and his decision to go with USA on Iraq that's been his undoing. Funny how loyalty can be the thing that undoes you!!

Got to disagree about the northern ireland success. I think 9/11 and the fact that the usa wouldn't turn a blind eye to funding irish terrorism was probably a bigger factor in that all panning out alright.

It's aged him though, hasn't it. Probably why more women don't go for the top job!!

lissielou when I read your posts I think you must be Anji Hunter on here in disguise {grin}

lol mpo

oh I think it's a bit steep to say that tax credit errors are all the fault of the form fillers. I'm sure that politicians committee last week that told GB the error of his ways over them would agree with me.
Will someone please tell me what surestart vouchers are?

"I think Tony Blair is essentially a Good Man and always have done"

I love you more and more everyday Moondog.

It's Boris

ww there are gov. policies that contribute to the disparity in earnings in the UK today. Is it not true that in the UK the gap between rich and poor is getting bigger?How can you give the credit for reducing poverty but not increasing relative poverty
Are you not familiar with personal tax agreements? DO you not think that one reason why the UK is so popular a place to live for some people not born here is that they can be non-resident for tax purposes? Again many policies have contibuted to high house prices we're talking about it on another thread right now....
PFI involves inviting private companies to pay for the building of public buildings (schools hospitals etc). All well and good. Banks are borrowing money at rates as low as 0.5% (admittedly a bit low for gov.) PFI involves paying it back at much higher ratesover a more prolonged period of time, so that if something was built using tax it would cost 10,000,000 using PFI it ends up costing 50,000,000, however the organisations involved are allowed to hide these sums from their books making everything look rosy. There have been other allegations about PFI contracts eg can only use PFI company for maintenance whihc then charges 5 times the going rate. (I have no personal experience of this).

surestart vouchers are vouchers that entitle families with young children/pg mothers to free fruit, veg and milk (formula or dairy)

and nearly forgot lol @ anji hunter. im not but i am a staunch supporter of blair.

"income disparity" can be made to prove anything you like. It is true that the gap between the richest and the poorest has grown. It's also the case that the difference between the average and the poorest has shrunk.
Yes, of course Britain attract the very rich. That's several things, including tax.

It's not a politically popular thing to say, but people with this degree of wealth, can live pretty much where they like.
If you tax them more, they will go somewhere else. They spend a big pile of money here.

High house prices are caused by the way that local politicians of every party resist the building of new ones. They do this because screwing with homebuilding is popular with voters, ie the people who complain about high house prices.

PFI is crap yes, but it was a tory invention.

I would never have guessed lissielou

OK so your first name is Cherie?