9 ms·

This. The last decade has been absolutely devastating to the UK. We were actually getting somewhere before that - good investment in infrastructure, in educatio

by dmje 4y ago

This. The last decade has been absolutely devastating to the UK. We were actually getting somewhere before that - good investment in infrastructure, in education, long term thinking about all the things that require long term thinking. And then the Daily Mail oldies kick in with Brexit b/s, Truss, Sunak. And now we're a dysfunctional and mostly irrelevant backwater. Sad times.

jemmyw 4y ago
I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election. The Tories were presiding over some pretty bad austerity politics and LD lost their support base by going into coalition. Plus Miliband seemed like a really decent chap, known face from the previous Labour government but not tarnished. I had left the UK by then so I wasn't paying much attention to what went on, but when I did pay more attention when Brexit was rearing its head Cameron seemed like such a wanky toff it's hard to understand how his govt had not only got back in but were in a better position.
- Lastodon 4y ago
  From my memory what mainly lost his backing from the general public was the horrendous antics of Dianne Abbot and her place at the front bench of the labour government. Everything that woman said and did leeched coherence and unity from the shadow government.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    Such as? (Abbot is the most maligned person in UK politics; I believe someone did a survey of all hate mail (or email?) sent to the House of Commons, and found that a whole third of it was for her alone. I would simply not trust media-informed views of her, unfortunately)
  - Lolaccount 4y ago
    I'm not a fan of Abbot, but it's ridiculous to pin what happened on one person. Get a grip.
- smcl 4y ago
  I too was looking on from abroad, the only things that reached me were that Miliband was a little bit goofy and that he wan't the favoured candidate by the Murdoch papers (where he took an absolute hammering, I think we all saw the picture of him eating a bacon roll)
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    Both those things would endear the man to me.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Honestly he was a good guy, and was one of the few MPs who didn't get caught up in the expenses scandal. Yeah I think unfortunately people were easily persuaded that this made him look incompetent (I didn't vote, would have voted SNP and my constituency comfortably elected an SNP MP anyway). Shame really, given what transpired in the eight years that followed. It wasn't the last time a left-leaning Labour leader got that treatment, Corbyn was similarly crucified in the press.
- revelio 4y ago
  >> I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election. Huh that is very easy to understand. There were two main reasons: 1. Labour had left the government essentially bankrupt, literally leaving the coalition a note that said "there's no money anywhere" iirc. The new government had come in and discovered the finances of the state had been utterly ruined. The numbers were stark and voters had accepted the argument that budget cutbacks were necessary to try and right the ship. Labour had sort of accepted that this situation was true, but failed to take it seriously. Miliband supposedly had a minor meltdown after he tried to give a long speech without notes, and then realized only afterwards that he'd forgotten the entire section about the deficit. That was the number one issue in British politics at the time! 2. The EU had been building as a bigger and bigger problem over time. Voters were increasingly upset that their concerns on major policy areas like immigration were being systematically ignored by all the major parties, except for the eurosceptic wing of the Tories. Neither Labour nor the mainline Tories nor the Lib Dems wanted to tackle this problem. UKIP came along and started hoovering up votes from both left and right by promising a referendum on the EU. Cameron saw what was happening and decided he could end UKIP, win the election and also crush the eurosceptics by promising an EU referendum he was convinced he could win. That caused a whole lot of voters to abandon UKIP and vote Tory in the correct belief that Cameron would honor his promise. The rest is history.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    Point 1 was pretty dumb if people believed that. The UK government wasn't in a unique position after the 2008 monetary crisis, but they were pretty much the only government that could have borrowed and spent out of it and didn't. The results seem to speak for themselves. I didn't know there was a building EU resentment (beyond the stupid stuff I'd heard growing up in the UK). I was living in Europe at the time. It all seems so bizarre.
    - revelio 4y ago
      The issue for (1) was that the government had already been borrowing and spending a great deal. Blair was fairly restrained but after Brown came in, he opened the taps and government spending and borrowing skyrocketed. Then the financial crisis came in on top of that too. At any rate, regardless of what you think the right solution was, the population agreed that spending at such high levels above tax revenue wasn't sustainable and some cutbacks were needed. And again, remember, Labour accepted this argument! They didn't try to claim it was wrong. They just didn't seem to take it seriously and often forgot about it. So the Conservatives argued that Labour couldn't be trusted with the finances now Blair was gone and they'd create a re-run of the 70s, and voters agreed with that argument. Resentment against the EU had been building for years due partly to the totally incorrect initial claims made about immigration levels, and then the lack of interest/ability in controlling it. Even voters who weren't that affected by it saw that there were now real issues that affected local people which had effectively been removed from democracy and felt that was wrong. So there was a broad coalition being built by Farage, both the people who cared primarily about immigration levels and wage suppression of the working classes, and also those who cared about the constitutional issue it was exposing.

by dmje 4y ago

jemmyw 4y ago

I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election. The Tories were presiding over some pretty bad austerity politics and LD lost their support base by going into coalition. Plus Miliband seemed like a really decent chap, known face from the previous Labour government but not tarnished. I had left the UK by then so I wasn't paying much attention to what went on, but when I did pay more attention when Brexit was rearing its head Cameron seemed like such a wanky toff it's hard to understand how his govt had not only got back in but were in a better position.

Lastodon 4y ago
From my memory what mainly lost his backing from the general public was the horrendous antics of Dianne Abbot and her place at the front bench of the labour government. Everything that woman said and did leeched coherence and unity from the shadow government.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Such as? (Abbot is the most maligned person in UK politics; I believe someone did a survey of all hate mail (or email?) sent to the House of Commons, and found that a whole third of it was for her alone. I would simply not trust media-informed views of her, unfortunately)
- Lolaccount 4y ago
  I'm not a fan of Abbot, but it's ridiculous to pin what happened on one person. Get a grip.
smcl 4y ago
I too was looking on from abroad, the only things that reached me were that Miliband was a little bit goofy and that he wan't the favoured candidate by the Murdoch papers (where he took an absolute hammering, I think we all saw the picture of him eating a bacon roll)
- jemmyw 4y ago
  Both those things would endear the man to me.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Honestly he was a good guy, and was one of the few MPs who didn't get caught up in the expenses scandal. Yeah I think unfortunately people were easily persuaded that this made him look incompetent (I didn't vote, would have voted SNP and my constituency comfortably elected an SNP MP anyway). Shame really, given what transpired in the eight years that followed. It wasn't the last time a left-leaning Labour leader got that treatment, Corbyn was similarly crucified in the press.
revelio 4y ago
>> I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election. Huh that is very easy to understand. There were two main reasons: 1. Labour had left the government essentially bankrupt, literally leaving the coalition a note that said "there's no money anywhere" iirc. The new government had come in and discovered the finances of the state had been utterly ruined. The numbers were stark and voters had accepted the argument that budget cutbacks were necessary to try and right the ship. Labour had sort of accepted that this situation was true, but failed to take it seriously. Miliband supposedly had a minor meltdown after he tried to give a long speech without notes, and then realized only afterwards that he'd forgotten the entire section about the deficit. That was the number one issue in British politics at the time! 2. The EU had been building as a bigger and bigger problem over time. Voters were increasingly upset that their concerns on major policy areas like immigration were being systematically ignored by all the major parties, except for the eurosceptic wing of the Tories. Neither Labour nor the mainline Tories nor the Lib Dems wanted to tackle this problem. UKIP came along and started hoovering up votes from both left and right by promising a referendum on the EU. Cameron saw what was happening and decided he could end UKIP, win the election and also crush the eurosceptics by promising an EU referendum he was convinced he could win. That caused a whole lot of voters to abandon UKIP and vote Tory in the correct belief that Cameron would honor his promise. The rest is history.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  Point 1 was pretty dumb if people believed that. The UK government wasn't in a unique position after the 2008 monetary crisis, but they were pretty much the only government that could have borrowed and spent out of it and didn't. The results seem to speak for themselves. I didn't know there was a building EU resentment (beyond the stupid stuff I'd heard growing up in the UK). I was living in Europe at the time. It all seems so bizarre.
  - revelio 4y ago
    The issue for (1) was that the government had already been borrowing and spending a great deal. Blair was fairly restrained but after Brown came in, he opened the taps and government spending and borrowing skyrocketed. Then the financial crisis came in on top of that too. At any rate, regardless of what you think the right solution was, the population agreed that spending at such high levels above tax revenue wasn't sustainable and some cutbacks were needed. And again, remember, Labour accepted this argument! They didn't try to claim it was wrong. They just didn't seem to take it seriously and often forgot about it. So the Conservatives argued that Labour couldn't be trusted with the finances now Blair was gone and they'd create a re-run of the 70s, and voters agreed with that argument. Resentment against the EU had been building for years due partly to the totally incorrect initial claims made about immigration levels, and then the lack of interest/ability in controlling it. Even voters who weren't that affected by it saw that there were now real issues that affected local people which had effectively been removed from democracy and felt that was wrong. So there was a broad coalition being built by Farage, both the people who cared primarily about immigration levels and wage suppression of the working classes, and also those who cared about the constitutional issue it was exposing.