Why are the Tories allowing this to happen to the country?

[Perfect28]

I'm no fan of the conservatives, to say the least, but I can't understand why they are allowing our country to go to shit with zero interest or intervention?

Of course what might have happened under a different Government is that we might have had a single Prime Minister for the last year rather than 3 and two leadership contests.

Yep, I don't understand it - especially 'working-class' tories.
My SIL voted Tory in the last election - she works in a shop on NMW but thought Johnson was a 'good laugh' 🤦🏻‍♀️

High-earning people might get taken to A&E in an ambulance but will get to funnelled through to a private surgeon asap. People on low incomes who voted Tory are absolute fucking idiots.

The problem is the environmental lobby, they oppose everything, Wind farms, Solar panels, Fossil fuels, New Factories, Coal mines etc etc etc.
They have the illusion they are helping counter climate change, THEY ARE NOT, because we all just buy what we need from China and other places where they burn coal. All we have done is export our CO2 and pollution.

The £millions we have spent on CO2 targets has just been wasted instead of on the services we need, until we start consuming less resources nothing will change. But then that might restrict our lifestyles.

He’s smirking all over parliament at least once a week for PMQ’s. Of course you’re right in that he actually says very little.

on topic - I suppose this is what the carcass of capitalism looks like. It has limits and wealth can’t be generated indefinitely in a reality that limited resources. It doesn’t have to look like this but the nature of humanity is there is no ceiling to our desire for ‘more’ without imposed limitations.

Personally I don’t really see the attraction of being wealthy surrounded by poverty but that’s probably one of the reasons I’m closer to the lower end of the spectrum.

@red4321

do you actually know how we got the money for the pandemic ? As I do

as effectively it cost nothing.

the issues started due to brexit and the lack of confidence due to partygate and other terrible Tory choices (liz and KK and believing that BS)

that’s when the economy started to really be affected and perform very differently than other countries.

brewit has made in a lot harder to react in terms of business and the shortage of employees

so the real divergent issue for the UK is the mess of Brexit don’t kid yourself it’s anything else and don’t believe the BS thqt it’s as bad everywhere it’s not.

Don’t be surprised that after you have had a decade of Labour who will inevitably get in at the next election, you arrive back at the same conclusion.

Power corrupts and people get lazy.

As much as i belive we have one of the best democratic systems in the world, it’s fundamental flaw is that there are ever more and more politicians (labours plan for this will see an explosion of more of them) and that their primary purpose is to get re-elected, so long term planning doesn’t happen in the right way.

Underpinning it, you have the civil servant. As much as his reputation is trashed these days, on youtube, Dominic Cummings gave a speech in 2014 at the IPPR, which is very accurate on the state of the civil service.

There was no money left when the tories took office, which triggered a decade of austerity, in a near zero growth envrionment (which has normally been the economic saviour of the west) coupled with an increasingly nanny interventionist state, along with a pandemic, a war, an energy war (in everything but name) and the result is a COL crisis.

Are there corrupt politicians…. Yup. In every party. Just look at the people behind any politician….

The fastest way out of our economic spiral - Growth, End of the Ukraine War. Neither is considered particularly politically brilliant at the moment. Truss burnt one one of those bridges badly, and the Ukraine war is a precursor to the risk of a war over Taiwan, so the west can’t back down. So don’t expect anything less than another decade of what we are going through now.

You can blame the current lot of idiots in police at the moment, but as far as I can see, the true culprits, were those who wasted our strategic resources of fossil fuels and spent every penny earnt from them, so that we have effectively been living in overdraft for 50 odd years, rather than creating a legacy for the country in the form of a sovereign wealth fund. As people who live permanently in overdraft will tell you, it only takes a bump in the road or two, for the wheels to fall off.

Exactly forever42

Re funding: I’m no economist but I think borrowing (ie increasing public debt) is preferable to austerity. We’ve tried austerity since the last crisis and don’t seem to be better off than the countries who went down the investment route. Maybe our bankers are richer.

There are European countries with higher public debt than ours but whose nurses, doctors and teachers train for free, and whose parents benefit from free childcare enabling them to work, which in the long term must surely be better for the economy than an under-educated population in poor health?

The rich will be bloody lucky to get an ambulance now, won’t they?

Or an A&E service.

Meanwhile the Labour front bench wang on about abolition of the Lords and ‘the most vulnerable’ actually being middle class ‘non binary’ blue haired university students. God I miss David Miliband and Andy Burnham in Parliament.

But, as crap as we all agree things are, I've yet to see an actual funded solution.

The effect of the pandemic on public debt was pretty catastrophic. There would always be a day of reckoning and here it is. Many on here wanted longer lockdowns and more public support.

It's really not all rosy in the private sector either. It's back to cost cutting and redundancies (not exactly news you wanted to deliver just before Christmas). Look at the big US tech firms and the number of staff they're cutting. The private sector is not immune.

Add in a war that has been a key driver of inflation and it's not an easy set of issues to resolve, whether you're a Labour or Conservative supporter.

There are European countries with higher public debt than ours but whose nurses, doctors and teachers train for free, and whose parents benefit from free childcare enabling them to work, which in the long term must surely be better for the economy than an under-educated population in poor health?

You’re not wrong but for some reason the notion that these things being allocated funding is akin to ‘nannying’ and stealing from peoples pay packets has a firm grip on the nation.

“You can blame the current lot of idiots in police at the moment, but as far as I can see, the true culprits, were those who wasted our strategic resources of fossil fuels and spent every penny earnt from them, so that we have effectively been living in overdraft for 50 odd years, rather than creating a legacy for the country in the form of a sovereign wealth fund. As people who live permanently in overdraft will tell you, it only takes a bump in the road or two, for the wheels to fall off.”

Spot on we pissed the lot, Thatcher has a lot to answer for closing down our strategic Industries, Blair and the rest were no better.

You can blame the current lot of idiots in police at the moment, but as far as I can see, the true culprits, were those who wasted our strategic resources of fossil fuels and spent every penny earnt from them, so that we have effectively been living in overdraft for 50 odd years, rather than creating a legacy for the country in the form of a sovereign wealth fund.

Just think how much our gold reserves would be worth now. The ones that Gordon Brown sold when prices were depressed.

Yes to all this, well put. People demanded lockdown (mostly on the left) and here is the bill. You can’t shut down the private sector for the public sector and it not impact later on when funding goes down.

We’d be in a far better position here and globally without Ukraine which is having a bigger impact again.

Labour dealing with this would be interesting as they like to be seen as and are pro union but still wouldn’t have the funds.

Just think how much our gold reserves would be worth now. The ones that Gordon Brown sold when prices were depressed

Quick google tells me he sold off 3.5bn $ worth.

Brexit, an entirely Tory project, is causing losses of £100bn. to our economy. Per year.

Not really in the same ballpark are they.

At least Labour are not loony left of Corbynites…. But you are right, there’s no real money left and our politicians have been living off the printing machine and zero% interest for too long. That doesn’t exist any more and we are already heavily taxed to our limits.

Labour will probably get in, and find that they are rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic.

Private A&E doesn't really exist in the U.K..

So when the Royal Family, for example, need urgent care they turn up at the local A&E? Of course not. There's private urgent care services available 24x7 & there's a good chance that many of the consultants running them also work in the NHS.

Where are the private A&Es in the UK. I'd like to know in preperation for the strikes 😬

He did sell $3.5bn of gold. Comparing gold prices at the time with now, suggests gold is worth 7x what it was when he sold. Making this a $21bn loss compared to if we had kept the gold and sold it today instead.

Gordon put the sale money into savings and then we had a shocking 15 years of low interest rates. So that money has only made 60% of the original value back = making it worth $5.6bn today.

Of course, we still have that money and interest rates are rising so it is likely to earn us more in coming years. But if we had the gold and sold it today, we'd be getting the higher interest on $24.5bn rather than $5.6bn. But that's the truth about almost any asset sale. Mostly assets are assets because their value goes up over time, at least in line with inflation if not more than.

I still don't think it compares to the fuck ups of later governments (Brexit, as in your example) but felt the numbers needed spelling out

@SantasFlaws what are the figures for the Truss/Kwasi experiment?

Theres been a whole lot of history since the selling off of the gold and it’s barely relevant now. I won’t pretend to understand the ins and outs but I have read various articles defending Brown’s decision as he made a decision many others would have based on the markets at the time. It was always a gamble but it wasn’t an uninformed or reckless one. Certainly not to the degree we have seen in recent years.

They’re not allowing this to happen, they are doing everything in their power to ensure it does happen!
It makes them rich, richer in Sunak’s case!
Open your eyes.

Sunak cost us £11 billion this year by failing to insure our debt. £3.5 billion vs £11 billion.

It’s an interesting position how these things are remembered by the public isn’t it?

Yeah but it’s shit in Germany too.
Not only is this untrue but even if it were true it wouldn’t help us here would it?

I used to think The Conservatives were incompetent but now I think they are just self serving grabby scum

For clarity: I personally liked Brown and like him more and more as the years go on.

I'm not dissing him. I wanted to take a stark look at the numbers to make sure I wasn't rose tinting it.

And yes, Truss's little econoexperiment was catastrophically expensive. A total ego-driven eff up.