(no subject)

[mrph]

Tony Blair appears to have accepted the inevitable and is expected to finally announce a timetable for his resignation within hours

I know that some of you will disagree, but I have to believe this is a good thing. Blair's been there too long, he's lost his credibility and he needs to go.

I don't want to see Labour disintegrate completely - it's not healthy for British democracy when one party is unelectable - but they have to face the future and start fixing the things that the Blair years have broken.

Personally, I reckon he'll be gone before the end of January. Perhaps sooner.

Comments

[girfan.livejournal.com]

My only issue with him is that he sucked up to Dubya and was influenced by Bush's actions. Whoever is the next prime minister needs to separate the UK from the US.

[zarbi.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. In other respects, Labour has done some great things (devolution, human rights act, and so on), even though Blair's attraction to the USA has been strange and troubling. I do get worried when those who have full rights to things like marriage and who may be too young to remember the sheer awfulness, social, political and economic, of the Tories in the 80s start to call Labour a disaster. For millions of those oppressed by the Tories, either by prejudice or unemployment, Labour has, on the whole, been hugely better. I say this as someone who voted Lib Dem in 1997.

[livingarmchair.livejournal.com]

Winter of discontent, anyone?

The only reason the UK had to go through the pain of the 1980s was to get away from the Keynsian economics the country was being run under and move into a free market model - full employment, great, but funded by the state, and so uttery stagnant that it was unable compete with other industrialised nations in the market.

Britain was the poor man of Europe - people forget this - with strict import controls and heavily protected industry that was atrociously run and being manipulated for political means by politicians and trade unions. It was also producing goods that were substandard and pretty much unsellable outside a dwindling Commonwealth market. Quite why the government should be making cars, planes, boats, running airports, etc, is anyone's business.

Labour's tactic for getting unemployment down is quite simple: expand the public sector. They can't do it by building factories making stuff that no one wants anymore, running at half capacity. Areas like the North East have seen zero growth in industry, but huge growth in public sector employment.

In real terms, though, Labour have actually just continued the process the Tories started in 1979 (And tried to start under Harold Wilson), although there are already rumblings that public sector bills are too high and this is going to come back to haunt whoever's in government next.

[zarbi.livejournal.com]

There was a lot more pain in the 80s than was necessary.

All that matters as a measure good economy are three factors: inflation, unemployment and growth. These started to get out of control (without all three being simultaneously under control by government) at the start of the 1970s. I remember the awfulness of the 70s. Britain was indeed the 'poor man of Europe' as a result of both Tory and Labour failings (who can forget Ted Heath's failures?) - neither managed to control the excesses of either management or unions during that decade. But the 80s were also a mess, as shown by the repeated recessions. We had phenomenal income from the 80s from North Sea oil, and it was wasted on tax cuts. Subsequent Tory governments attempted to gain income from privatisations, many of which have been recognised (even by Tory ministers) as major mistakes, such as that of the railways.

No lessons on politics or economics are needed here. I worked in university departments that were decimated because the conservatives failed to meet their promises of matching industry funding for research. I worked in companies that were slowly and painfully shedding employees while Norman Lamont was talking month after month about the "green shoots of recovery".

The only time for over a century when inflation and unemployment and growth have been well managed and stable has been under this Labour administration. Some may say it was started under the Tories, but this is irrelevant - they had 18 years to prove that they could do this, and they failed.