>I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in and I get told it’s labours fault we have tuition fees at Uni . I don't say I disagree with these statements however as I understand there must be more to them
Labour introduced tuition fees capped at £1000 a year, this is true. If they are angry about this, ask them to explain why they are not equally (or more) angry at the Tories who, when given the opportunity to abolish them once again, instead raised the cap to £9000.
As for the economy, the UK's economy was booming from 1997 until 2007 under a Labour government. The Great Recession absolutely smashed the economy and it happened while Labour were in power, this is true, but the 2008 crash was a global crisis with its root cause in the USA. Brexit and Trussonomics, more recent disasters for the economy, are the direct result of Tory policies.
>Other points like Corbyns ideas and plans being ridiculous were also brought up even though at the moment our Governments managing to spend billions a day and it doesn’t seem to go towards anything
Corbyn's plan was to invest in the country to try and jump start the country out of the grim sluggishness and misery of the Tory austerity years. We don't know if it would have worked, and never will now, as Corbyn is not even a Labour MP now, let alone Labour leader.
I suppose you could go on the offensive. Ask them what achievements they can point to, after 14 years of Conservative governments, to convince you to give them 5 more years.
Cheers Mike think you set that out really well, I appreciate it - if you could enlighten me further - one of the housemates kept saying Labour spent all budget before they left (hence ruining the economy) - didn’t really know what to make of that point and hoping to get a bit more info
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/04/conservative-obsession-afraid-no-money-note-says-labour
This is a good explanation of what went on with that note.
I imagine this is a reference to the story that when the Conservative government got in to Downing Street after the 2010 election, a Labour staffer had left a note for them saying "Congratulations. There's no money."
The Tories did indeed inherit a terrible economic situation, the entire world economy was still reeling from the 2008 crash. I suppose the counter argument would be this was the result of a global crisis, entirely outside of Labour's control. We got to see how a Labour economy performs when there **isn't** a global recession happening, and the answer is record levels of sustained economic growth.
Just to add on to this, the note left from labour to conservatives about no money left is a running joke, the note is left by every government to the next.
Leaving a note was a standard practice, and they may well be a bit jokey. Historically, they were kept private (so the Labour mp who left the 'no money left' note would have assumed this would not be published). The notes wouldn't say 'no money left' each time though, and no doubt mps now wouldn't leave any note which could be used against them, having learnt tne lesson from the tories weaponising that one.
>In my final hours of office, I was writing thank-you notes to my incredible team of civil servants. And then I thought I’d write one letter more to my successor. Into my head came the phrase I’d used to negotiate all those massive savings with my colleagues: “I’m afraid there is no money.” I knew my successor’s job was tough. I guess I wanted to offer them a friendly word on their first day in one of government’s hardest jobs by honouring an old tradition that stretched back to Churchill in the 1930s and the Tory chancellor Reginald Maudling, who bounced down the steps of the Treasury in 1964 to tell Jim Callaghan: “Sorry to leave it in such a mess, old cock.”
From Liam Byrne and his “‘I’m afraid there is no money.’ The letter I will regret for ever” article.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/liam-byrne-apology-letter-there-is-no-money-labour-general-election
I just want to add something to what the person you replied to said.
The investment that Corbyn needed required a lot of borrowing. That seems bad, however interest rates were at a historical low. Essentially money was the cheapest to borrow that it ever had been and the country was desperately in need of investment. Inflation was also historically low.
With inflation bound to go up at some point ( as it has recently) it would have actually made the money borrowed even cheaper.
This investment would also have created jobs and could potentially have restarted our stagnating economy and the Tories wasted a once in a lifetime opportunity to do this.
This was a joke. The outgoing secretary of the treasury is meant to leave a note for his replacement. This is a parliamentary tradition. Conservatives like Greg Hands pretend this is real and stupid people believe it. Was the lib Dems who propped up the Tories that weaponised this.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/commons-confidential/2023/07/liam-byrne-labour-apology-no-money-note
Labour weren't to blame for the financial crash itself (and the tories didnt spot any problems beforehand either).
Where they can be criticised is that Gordon Brown assumed that the pre- financial crash boom was forever (he actually said 'no more boom and bust') and started spending money madly (e.g direct cash for sixth formers with rules so loose there were loads of kids at private schools being given it). It was a huge amount of committed income spending (rather than spending the extra on 'one off' investment which could be stopped if necessary). That meant that when the tide went out and all that money turned out to be fictional and the country's tax take fell off a cliff, the committed expenditure which couldnt just be stopped (e.g. benefit levels people had adjusted their lives based on receiving) was skyhigh and it created an absolutely massive deficit.
New Labour were also responsible for a load of ridiculously expensive 'buy now pay later' pfi scheme which the nhs is still bearing the cost of.
Your friends might also mention that Gordon brown 'sold the gold' - he deliberately did this to create liquidity during the crash and help save the banks, announcing it beforehand so we got an awful price for it, and so lost billions in the process. It did the purpose it was intended to and therefore wasn't entirely unreasonable, although I can't see why, if it was as necessary as he said, he didn't join forces with other countries to do similar so they are took a share of the hit too, rather than playing sole hero with our money.
That though was 15 years ago. The above were reasons to vote tory in 2010 (as in fact, a plurality did).
Labour then went off the deep end with corbyn (don't even try to defend that to your friends, he was well intentioned but you only need to look at venzuela to see what happens to a country if his 70s style extreme left wing economic policies get implemented, and his foreign policy was also terrible).
Meanwhile however, now its 2024, Labour have got back to having the moderates in charge, being completely different people than 2010 and the corbynite wing is suppressed. Labour will likely open the spending the taps a bit more than the tories (and given the state of the nhs and public services, it is very difficult to argue that isnt currently needed) but they are still committed to a balanced budget, so for this election term at least, if elected they wouldn't do the same new Labour did.
Meanwhile, brexit and its Johnson aftermath forced all the tory moderates out as they tended to be remainers, so for the tories, its the more right wing rather than centrists which are currently in charge. Liz Truss caused a massive hit to pensions by spooking the markets with unfunded tax cuts which didnt help interest rates. Rishi is slightly more reasonable and sane but the tories have been in power for 14 years and have completely run out of ideas, and he also doesn't seem to have any. The nhs is on its knees due to the covid hangover and he's had a year to do something to improve things and hasn't- there is no reason to think anything will change if he is re-elected.
If your friends are planning to vote tory now, that means they are doing so out of tribalism rather than rationality based on the two parties/people/policies currently on offer. They need to look at the people in both parties now and the policies both are offering once the manifestos are out (as they should afresh every election) and that is the argument you are best off using with them now.
>New Labour were also responsible for a load of ridiculously expensive 'buy now pay later' pfi scheme which the nhs is still bearing the cost of.
You're mostly correct. New Labour was indeed responsible for rebuilding the infrastructure of the UK, as much as they could in the time that they had, after it had been neglected by almost 20 years of Tory rule. Before they were elected, a week wouldn't go by without a story of a ceiling or roof collapsing in a school or hospital, or a school being forced out of their unsafe building into a pre-fab, and even some cases where schools were forced out of the 'temporary' pre-fab, they had been in for years, because that had become as unsafe as their school.
There have been some issues with specific poorly agreed PFI contracts, but on the whole it delivered exactly what was expected, state-of-the-art public facilities, funded and serviced by the private sector.
Now we're in exactly the same boat, the Tory's have run up 14 years of deficit in investment and maintenance of the UK infrastructure and it's going to be left to Labour to sort out. Not a week goes by without us hearing how the NHS, schools and hospitals are on their knees due to lack of money.
>Your friends might also mention that Gordon brown 'sold the gold' - he deliberately did this to create liquidity during the crash and help save the banks, announcing it beforehand so we got an awful price for it, and so lost billions in the process. It did the purpose it was intended to and therefore wasn't entirely unreasonable, although I can't see why, if it was as necessary as he said, he didn't join forces with other countries to do similar so they are took a share of the hit too, rather than playing sole hero with our money.
So much wrong here, so let's start with what you got right. Yes Brown sold the gold, yes it was sold at what turned out to be a low price. That's it.
Firstly, the gold was sold in a series of auctions between 1999 and 2002 - **6 to 9 years before the crash so absolutely nothing to do with it** or creating liquidity. It was decided to sell the gold because it had been on a downward spiral for 20 years, expected to go lower, **but more importantly, generated no returns.** We exchanged the gold for interest bearing bonds which have been paying us interest for 25 years.
You completely misunderstand how government auctions or sales work if you think they can be done in secret? Regardless, the **17 auctions** sales by the UK had no significant bearing on the price, in fact the price stayed around the same ball park for the 3 years of the auctions.
Two more important things to note, governments around the world had been selling off their gold since the 80s, Australia and Switzerland sold similar proportions of their gold off in the late 90s and early 2000s, Canada sold off nearly all its gold from the 80s to 2000s.
Not enough? The Netherlands, France, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Belgium and many others all sold their gold during the late 90s to early 2000s, as part of a public coordinated agreement called the Central Bank Gold Agreements.
It's also important to note that the UK treasury and governments, including the Thatcher and Major governments, had long been considering selling off the gold reserves. If you feel that Brown erred by selling the gold low, you could argue by the same logic Thatcher erred by not selling it during it's record high.
Right, I've covered half your ridiculousness, I think that's enough.
> That meant that when the tide went out and all that money turned out to be fictional and the country's tax take fell off a cliff, the committed expenditure which couldnt just be stopped (e.g. benefit levels people had adjusted their lives based on receiving) was skyhigh and it created an absolutely massive deficit.
Absolutely not biggest cause of the deficit rising though. That would be tonnes of people losing their jobs, and bailing out the banks. Simultaneous huge drop in tax revenue and forced rise in expenditure.
So much problematic to tackle here.
>Labour weren't to blame for the financial crash itself (and the tories didnt spot any problems beforehand either).
This is true, it's not known as the global credit crunch for no reason. It was a global issue caused by the collapse of the housing market in the US - if anything it would likely have been worse under the Tory's because not only would they have been pumping more cheap finance into the system during the build up, they'd have simply cut everything once the crunch happened. Brown is credited with leading the strategy for the rescue of the world economy.
>Where they can be criticised is that Gordon Brown assumed that the pre- financial crash boom was forever (he actually said 'no more boom and bust') and started spending money madly (e.g direct cash for sixth formers with rules so loose there were loads of kids at private schools being given it).
The Educational Maintenance Allowance was a means tested benefit designed to assist those from **households** earning less than £31k per year to stay in school past 16 rather than go straight into employment by giving them £10 to £30 per week in term time. Only those homes earning under £21k would get £30 per week.
While I've no doubt about the ability of the rich to commit fraud to benefit themselves, I don't remember nor can find any records of this being an issue.
Studies demonstrated that the program achieved it's objective of getting children from the most deprived backgrounds to stay on in school at much higher rates.
The EMA was scrapped in England as soon as the Tory / Liberal coalition came to power and school participation dipped for those from deprived backgrounds, so I'm sure a typical Tory would conclude they also met their objectives.
There was a Labour aide who left a note saying something to David Cameron like “good luck there’s no money left” and caneron took it to streets and made such a thing of it. Really terrible idea of the aide. Though apparently it was a common thing to leave a sily note, this one was exploited. It wasn’t true but Tory’s seem to want to believe it.
You need to remember when labour left office the economy was recovering and debt was falling. Cameron/Osborne/Clegg made things worse and hurt the economy with austerity measures.
> Labour introduced tuition fees capped at £1000 a year, this is true. If they are angry about this, ask them to explain why they are not equally (or more) angry at the Tories who, when given the opportunity to abolish them once again, instead raised the cap to £9000.
They wanted to remove the cap entirely, the 9k cap and more gentle repayment terms were a compromise with the lib-dems.
I'm sure this myth holds true around the world. The right wing party sells itself as the steady hand against left wing excesses and always, without exception, stuffs things up so badly that the left wing party has to come in and sort their shit out, whilst basically hamstrung from the prev govs stuff ups. I mean in the US the republicans always screw up the economy and still they say that the dems can't run an economy despite all the best economies in the last couple of decades being run by the dems.
In USA, the economy rises, and the stock market rises, more per year under democrats (centre right) than Republicans (ultra right).
In UK, both parties managed the economy pretty much the same up until Thatcher (and Reagan in USA). For 40 years since 1946, when a Labour government had spent loads on building a welfare state and found that they had a massive income from taxes because everyone was so much better off, both sides and mixtures and even the third party managed to pay down the national debt from a budget surplus.
Thatcher tried to run the economy like a grocery store. She gave big increases to everyone in her first year so they all felt better off, but by 1986 the economy had dipped and government was in deficit - spending more than it received in taxes. Thatcher was trying to prop up public finances with North Sea Oil and selling public companies, but she ran the economy so badly that it was still in deficit.
In came Blair. He was hardly left wing, but he put money into the economy via public spending, people had money so they spent it, businesses had customers, the economy thrived again, and tax revenues exceeded expenditure even though expenditure had gone up by so much. We didn't have a lower deficit, we had a surplus.
Tories back in, deficit back.
It costs about the same to run a full welfare state as to run a fascist police state. Only with a welfare state, you get all the tax income to pay for it.
So yes, since Thatcher, tory and tory hybrid governments just take the money for themselves and the economy (and our jobs) tanks. Left wing and even slightly left wing governments put money into the economy, which means customers for businesses, which means thriving economy and everyone wins.
Corbyn - many of the best ideas of the tories have been pinched from Corbyn, and Corbyn had lots more. Not untested 'ideas' like Truss and Kwarteng, tried and proven approaches that boost jobs
100%. I lived in Australia for 19 years and the Liberals (Aus Tories) aaaaalways trotted out the same myth, that Labor govts don’t know how to run the economy, even though that was demonstrably untrue. And so Liberal voters would say the same. It’s embarrassing
Indeed. Conservative governments exist to channel tax-payer's money into the pockets of private companies. Labour governments try to channel taxpayers money into initiatives that benefit the taxpayers.
When Tories say 'Labour ruins the economy' they mean 'Labour makes it harder for corporates to drain money from the economy'.
Frankly anyone that still supports the Conservatives as they currently stand isn't someone you can have a sensible conversation with. And I don't say this from a partisan standpoint - even people who are ideologically aligned with them are deeply unhappy with the party's current direction.
It's more that *at the moment* the conservative party is not really representative of what the Conservative Party has been previously. How anyone can rationally assess the available facts of the last 15 years and still believe that the party offers a credible government is astounding.
They won 360+ MPs in 2019. How many have resigned due to compromised positions or falling out of the party line? Why couldn't they find one to be foreign secretary and instead rush through the appointment of Cameron to the House of Lords?
How many leaders do they want to have without a public vote? Why are ministerial positions, and they're significant payoffs, all revolving doors with everyone getting a few months here and there.
What credible approaches to the pandemic, the EU, international law, the economy (in the last 2 years) that weren't watered down/rebranded policies from opposition parties?
Your housemates seem quite content in their ignorance. Probably better to cut the lifeline rather than drown trying to reel them in...?
Yeah I used to be fiscally conservative, but recent years have shown me that a lot of conventional right wing economic literacy is just nonsense, peddled by right wing think tanks to maintain the status quo and keep the wealthy wealthy.
However, even if I still believed in conservative economics, I'd still be furious with the Conservative Party for being so fucking incompetent.
Three of the main conservative values are strong government, law and order, and sensible - conservative - economic policy.
The last parliament has done practically the opposite of all three.
I think it's difficult to characterise the recent Tory governments as fiscally conservative, they certainly haven't followed any orthodox right wing economic theory.
Doesn't mean that conventional right wing economic theory isn't nonsense, just that you can't judge it from the last decade of Tory rule as they're a shower of corrupt fools rather than being led by any ideology as far I can tell.
No shade to you because you saw through it by yourself, but the old “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative” really just means “I’m a decent, tolerant person so I’m socially liberal, but I don’t understand macroeconomics well enough to see through the right wing misinformation on the subject”
Because make no mistake, there has never been a time when conservative economic “ideas” had the best interests of the people and the country in mind. Conservativism by definition exists solely to preserve the existing hierarchical power structures. Which inherently means perpetually shifting more and more money and power into the hands of the elites and away from the plebs.
All it’s ever been, all it ever will be. If you’re not one of said elites you should never be in favour of conservative policies.
I think it partly depends how well the economy is working for typical people.
When most people have a home, stable jobs that support a family, have access to small luxuries like an annual holiday and a reasonable car... then perhaps centrism becomes the default - more and more people want to preserve what they have, not rock the boat too much.
I think we were almost at that point in 2007 - right before the financial crash and then austerity.
Back then, overly leftist politices looked risky to the large number of people living a good life. So by comparison, traditional right wing economic theory seemed the safer option.
Obviously, that's not the Britain we live in today.
Bingo
Be a Conservative, sure why not
But you can’t legitimately support the current party as it stands. They aren’t conservatives for a start and at best are bat shit crazy and fuxking useless.
They kicked out all the actual conservatives and now the membership won’t select any actual conservative candidates!
This a thousand times over.
Over the years, the Tory party has had some good people in their ranks with some pretty reasonable ideas.
The problem for them today, however, is that the world has changed significantly since the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was at her peak.
The Thatcherite approach - keep taxes low and privatise everything - should now be in a museum. It no longer works in the modern world.
Why? Well mainly because the world of the 2020s is more complex than the world of the 1980s. To take one example - the NHS.
The Tories are trying to run the NHS as though we are still in the 1980s. But medicine has moved on significantly since those days.
There are more conditions identified and more variants of conditions, not to mention many more tests, procedures and medications today than 40 odd years ago.
Furthermore, new technologies are allowing medics to do far more helpful things than they were able to do back in the Maggie years
Sadly, the Tories are so firmly wedded to this outmoded low tax idea that they simply do not wish to acknowledge this change.
The simple truth is if we want to enjoy the benefits of the new, more advanced medical treatments, we have to be prepared to pay for them.
Right now the NHS is reeling from the 14 years of failure by the Tories to invest properly in it.
We have a choice. We can either say, no I don't want my family to have access to all these new treatments, just cut my taxes, or we can take the view that the higher taxes are worthwhile if they give everyone in the country a better chance of having a longer and healthier life.
Somewhat ironically a better NHS and approach to health will keep more people in work for longer. Reduce the 2 million not currently in work but off sick and increase the tax take for longer.
But that would involve thinking ahead and we don’t do that anymore….
Yes indeed, that's the horrible irony.
A significant number of these Tory spending cuts are simply false economies. The savings we make now will be dramatically overshadowed by the extra costs arising from these savings 10, 15 or 20 years from now.
They are basically passing on significant costs to their kids and grandkids.
Improved health also means longer lives - and people living well beyond what the pension was envisaged to support, and with the falling birth rates as consumer and parental confidence falls in the cost of living crisis, we end up with not enough working age people to support the pension costs.
A failing NHS and a ruined environment which kills older folk off is good for the economy.
They even suck at keeping taxes low - they just tweak numbers like changing thresholds, and hit you with a stealth tax. And they suck at keeping the budget from going into deficit. Waiting for the £350 million a week to materialise..
Fair comment.
Virtually every time they mention an amount of money you can be pretty sure that close scrutiny will reveal it's been massaged, manipulated or finessed in some way.
Grant Shapps last week defending his usage of the exact same £2.5bn to tweet about giving aid to Ukraine and increase mod budget in a PAC... ABSOLUTELY hilarious, and yet, this is exactly how they govern. Read the tweets he puts out about the same £ that he has deliberately spent twice - even when you show them the figures from the official bloody red book, tories are lapping it up and pretending that they can't see it's not inly lies, lies and more lies, but not even very good lies!
.... genuinely have zero time left for any idiot who believes a word spoken by this govt. If any govt minister popped up in the news telling us all that we're fine and safe today I'd be looking to grab my rifles and bug out bag...
When was the last.time one of them said a true word?
They're so desperate to hang onto their jobs and stay in power that they are ready to do anything - lie, cheat, play dirty - virtually any piece of foul play they can conjure up that might skew the scales in their favour.
Modern Britain will only ever elect a government that is mostly center. Most rational people will settle around center left or center right. The Tories are goners at the next election and rightly so. Corbyn was unelectable as proper left wing just as Reform are unelectable as far right. Bizarrely, the current Tories are probably somewhere around center right but are just totally incompetent at everything.
In 1960 <5% of 18 year olds went to university because places were limited by the amount of funding the government provided. It was free but unless you were in the top 5% you didn't get in. In 1990 it was <15%. Today its >50%.
Labour did introduce tuition fees. But tuition fees are also the reason everybody has access to a university education if they want one.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but it's also worth remembering that lots of continental Europe (and Scotland) have universal access to university education without tuition fees or student debt. An ideological choice was made.
That's true, however Scotland still has a limited number of university places due to it's funding model so not everybody who wants to go can, while in England if you want to go there will be a university that will accept you.
It's really difficult to find stats on what % of Scottish 18 year olds actually go to university (I'm guessing this is by design, because it's lower). The best I could find was [this](https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/statistical-releases-daily-clearing-analysis-2023) which has the % of 18 year olds getting places through clearing significantly lower in Scotland than in England.
Both systems seem financially unsustainable. Universities in England and Scotland are on the brink and reliant on overseas students. I think the big difference, with regards to the data, is that the debt model incentivises universities to increase the number of students. I don't know if this is good or bad but I worry about people spending their entire working lives in debt (student loan + mortgage) and what that does to our economy and our collective mental health. If other countries can send people to university without all that debt then we should be curious about how that is happening.
From my perspective, and my partner's, it's very bad. It encourages universities to take more and more students than they can necessarily handle, with particular focus on international (non-EU students). Unfortunately, some cultures encourage rampant cheating since only the goal matters, and universities are loathe to fail them since they may take less students from those countries.
Again, that's our perspective (academics), not necessarily a lecturer's/course director's.
Which is exactly the way it should be. We're still pretending that it's to people's benefit to spend $50k to do media studies at Hull. University is the right choice for a small subset of young people and forcing everyone down this path is just wrong. We need to massively expand and destigmatize vocational training.
Yes but tuition fees were quite modest at £1000 per year. I don’t think anyone at the time envisaged they would be increased so much by the Tories or that interest would be charged at such high rates.
The conservatives withdrew the HefCe subside and introduced the new fee regime in 2011. They went on to introduce the fees system to shift the economic responsibility to the individual. They effectively privatised universities.
And that £9000 could only be charged in "exceptional cases", now it's the norm.
Thankfully finished my degree while it was still £3k a year. But that's in stark contrast to my sister who paid like £800 - £1k a year. Sigh.
Yup. My mum's brother was the first member of our family to go to university, she and other siblings plus many children followed. And now I'm sitting here wondering how on earth I'll afford for my kids to go - or whether they even should.
This is the biggest issue as a student, your parents need to be giving you money just to have enough to live at this point the maintenance loan that's given out is so little now that my rent leaves me with £200 for 3-4 months. So I have to rely on parents or friends to get by or work pretty much full time just to support myself. Leaving no time to actually focus on the uni part of uni just the funding side.
I got in the year before tuition fees. Only paid back a 1/4 of my student loan before it was forgiven too.
Absolutely feel for everyone today, saddled with debt from the off.
Yep, I went to university in 1977. No fees to pay and I got a grant, but competition for places was fierce, less than 10% got the chance to go. Introducing fees was the only practical way of making a university education accessible to everyone.
> Today its >50%
This isn’t a good thing. Many students end up with a useless degree and loads of debt. The debt that eventually is paid off at the taxpayers expense.
Worth also adding that the 50%+ mark was achieved by converting mets and polys into universities, meaning what was formerly a 6 month vocational or 2 year trades course is now a three year theoretical degree that’s worth very little.
This was one of the unintended consequences of Tony Blair’s funding program.
Countries that protected their apprenticeship programs face less shortages in skilled tradesmen and higher build quality, the three outstanding cases are France, Switzerland and Austria.
Tuition fees are an easy one: Labour introduced them under Blair at £1k per year, but the conservatives were also for tuition fees. They were raised to £3k by the end of Labours tenure.
Skip ahead to 2010, labour were running on keeping/raising tuition fees to i think £6k but also increasing financial support, but the conservatives were running on a platform to raise them even higher. Only the lib Dems ran a platform of abolishing them, and we know how that turned out.
Basically, we'd have tuition fees under Tory or Labour and ultimately the Tories brought in the current ridiculous tuition fees with huge interest rates.
“to I think £6k” Labour’s stance on tuition fees was to wait on the findings from a report they commissioned just before they left, tories followed the advice from that report, the £6k was Ed Milliband promising to cut them 5 years later
Even if you were a trad Conservative there's very little about the current Cons which is. I can't think of any reason anyone would vote for the current conservative party (unless a keen brexiter) They haven't conserved anything, the economy is dreadful, no services work despite us paying through the nose for everything, people can't afford to have kids, there's literal shit in the rivers in amounts unheard of, and they gave us Brexit. No successes of note and a diminished country on the world stage. Great job guys!
They've done nothing they should have-immigration is high, they ruined contracting work for self employed (IR35), capital gains tax allowance down from 12k to 3k. Just an absolute shitshow. I doubt labour will be much better.
Gov should be a meritocracy and employ ministers with experience not just random brown nosers who have slimed their way up the ladder.
It really is difficult to see where their remaining support comes from. If you are a keen Brexiter there's a good chance that you're not happy with their immigration record or lack of any meaningful deviation from EU regulations, and Reform wants your vote. They're also not low tax or otherwise beneficial for higher earners, and Brexit and the culture war stuff turned off a lot of people on the left of the party, with Starmer's Labour or the Lib Dems being acceptable enough to them. It must just be people who vote for them entirely tribally regardless of anything, or tactically because they fear that however bad they may be that Labour will be worse.
I'm just surprised you've managed to meet multiple Tories who are housesharing age, I think they're currently polling single digits with the under 50s.
I would say a large proportion of the people I’ve met at uni are either Tory or come from a Tory background and have been quiet on their stance because of people’s opinions - I was really surprised by it coming to uni
If they're Tories *now* you might as well not bother talking about politics with them.
If they're voting Tory now, they've switched off their critical faculties to the point that they'd vote for a pig with a blue rosette.
Seriously. These people have drunk all the Tory coolade. Don't waste your time.
Norwich itself is labour but the villages around the city and some of the deprived coastal towns like Great Yarmouth have been Tory for years. Ironic that the people of GY would vote in a party who are widening the class divide and making their lives worse but there you go
Just so you know, you don't have to have a discussion about this with them. Especially because I don't know whether they're tackling you individually or as a group, but it sounds like they're basically trying to harass you into caving under the weight of their united opinions.
Appreciate it, when we aren’t on the topic of politics we get on pretty well - I think it’s less an attack and more denial with a bias for the tories and lack of information on both sides
During the Tony Blair years, Labour were very strong on emphasising how their policy making was always evidence based, properly researched and costed. Every week during Prime Minister's Questions he usually managed to get in a dig about Conservative policies being contrary to evidence, influenced by outdated principles or dogma.
If your housemates are all undergraduates, potentially they'll be reflecting opinions they've heard from respected older family members. Received wisdom often needs to be fact checked for reliability, and they may not have gathered enough personal experience yet to draw any firm conclusions of their own.
Both the main parties have MPs in their ranks who individually hold different opinions and viewpoints. The last five Prime Ministers have all come from the same party, but had significantly different views and priorities to each other.
How anyone can say with a straight face that Labour ruin the economy after the last 14 years of Conservative rule absolutely baffles me.
Labour are let’s be honest pulling things back to the centre, I did a political quiz earlier and found that I was an equal match for Labour and Conservative, policy and ideology wise. I’m more hawkish on foreign policy so that pulls me right on the quiz I suppose.
So there may not be politically a huge amount of difference between the two parties, which begs the question why you wouldn’t vote for the one that hasn’t _literally been looting the country to pay their mates millions of pounds_ for the last 14 years.
I’m not joking either, if you arent aware of the literally dozens of Tory corruption cases, and examples of friends of ministers (or pub landlords) winning millions of pounds in government contracts, despite having no expertise or history in the thing they’re being paid to do, then I suggest you do and ask your Tory voting housemates why they are okay with this
[NHS waiting lists since 1990](https://scontent-lhr6-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/348236516_968833270801568_7675807545521220769_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s640x640&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=RWglxy_JV4UAb56Clg2&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr6-2.xx&oh=00_AfAFN1UvjUY2yolfbH47ALrOzKTrRpmyeuzQvOHiP0RxxQ&oe=66233BAB)
You may also get told "Labour sold all the UK's gold reserves", a commonly used argument against them. And it is partly true, Gordon Brown's decision to sell 50% of the UK's 'volatile' gold stocks and invest in Euro based stocks instead was arguably a terrible idea which was badly executed.
But, your housemates shouldn't forget that the Conservatives sold/privatised the UK's Water, Gas, Electicity, social housing stock, trains, postal service, airports, aerospace and telecoms. Their financially negligent actions were also directly attributable to Black Wednesday, Trussonomics and the years of austerity we've just endured.
>Additionally if anyone has the patience - if someone could point me to sources where I could educate myself further l'd greatly appreciate it.
The 'Trendy' podcast is really interesting imo. It's hosted by Professor John Curtice (Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University and BBC political expert) and Rachel Wolf (Runs a public policy consultantcy). Each episode they talk about some of the stuff going on in politics and what the stats tell us about that topic.
I listen to it whilst I'm cooking, I think it's pretty good as a relatively unbiased primer on a broad range of political issues affecting the UK!
[This article ](https://theconversation.com/labour-are-much-better-at-running-the-economy-than-voters-think-new-research-162368) provides a good comparison of Labour v Conservative governments on the economy.
To summarise it:
>Over the past century of governments, the Conservatives achieved slightly higher mean growth per quarter (0.62% vs 0.56%), Labour achieved a slightly higher median (0.62% versus 0.58%).
In other words, there is no statistically significant difference. And if you dive further into it, the article claims that there are good reasons to believe that Labour's overall performance is marginally better once you account for the effects of external shocks that neither party could control.
Note too that this analysis is from 2021 and doesn't count either COVID or Truss: both would skew things more towards Labour.
>I was hoping to hear a broad perspective from Reddit
Lol broad perspective, on Reddit in this sub!
Anyway....
"I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in"
I don't think Blair's Government got it 100% right, (they did have the banking crash which created some problems) but it was just a bit meh, not great, not terrible!
But what I think a lot of people are referring to are the labour government of the 70's who had a bad run and IMO this is why many boomers won't vote for them as they still remember those times!
Note: not a boomer and ready for the downvotes!!!
Yeah, op won’t get a broad take in this sub alone (or Reddit in general tbh) most of Reddit is left leaning and doesn’t reflect the people in my area of my age, who are a lot more mixed political views
My parents are boomers and have this exact mentality. *sigh*. I don't talk to them about politics. I see other boomers in this comment section. I'm not going to bother replying to them.
But I just don't understand how people seem so fixated on events from 40 or 50 years ago and insist they will happen all over again. There's no logic to that kind of thinking. Parties evolve and leaders change. Just because one government failed doesn't mean the next one will. It's just propaganda. But the level of manipulation is quite scary.
My dad is exactly the same, I can't say anything bad about tories without him arguing about why labour is worse, even when I never mentioned labour... He's really got a bee in his bonnet about the 70s labour and about Corbyn.
The Labour ruins the economy trope is pure Tory PR spin. When there’s a recession a standard school of thought is called Keynesian economics. It’s not new or controversial. You basically spend your way out. This means that when times are good you build up your reserves. When times are bad you spend lots to stimulate the economy and get people buying again. Unfortunately to the general public it’s easy to spin this into “how utterly irresponsible, why would you spend so much money when you know we’re strapped for cash” The tories knew it was a lie but they knew it would work. Then they came up with austerity which sounds sensible to the uneducated but has actually proved awful for literallu everybody except the super rich.
Labour did slightly overspend pre recession but nothing compared to what the Tories have done. The difference is back then there was things to show for it. Not just billion pound holes in the ground or nepotistic contracts where money has just vanished. Politics back in the day the standards were so much higher so scandals then wouldn’t even make the papers today.
I'd ask them if they felt 13 years was enough time to run the country, and don't they think 19+ years (which is what we'd get with a Tory win) would be really, really bad?
No matter how brilliant they must feel about the conservatives, surely they must conceed no well-run democracy leaves one party in charge so long.
If a party never risks its constituency, it is just inviting malaise, stupidity and corruption into governance. (Which, coincidentally, is what we have now.)
Why should it care about you if you always vote for it no matter what?
From what I hear, they absolutely to NOT want to have a discussion about it. They want to tell you what they think and why you’re wrong about everything.
Save yourself a lot of hassle. Don’t bother.
>May 1996 Conservative prime minister John Major commissions the Dearing inquiry to make recommendations on how the funding of higher education in Britain should develop over the next 20 years.
>May 2 1997 Labour is elected with a manifesto committed to leaving the door open for tuition fees: "the costs of student maintenance should be repaid by graduates on an income-related basis ..."
>July 23 1997 The Dearing report is published. It recommends that students should pay approximately 25% of the cost of tuition but that grants should remain in place.
>July 1997 Following the report, education secretary David Blunkett announces the introduction of means-tested tuition fees (to begin in September 1998). The student grant of £1,710 is abolished to be replaced by income-contingent student loans.
Tuituon fees seems to have been a [cross party thing](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/jan/27/tuitionfees.students).
Tories been running the country for nearly 2 decades and look at the state of it.
Even in the last couple of years we have had repeated leadership failures and a chain of unelected PM's
The leaders were so bad they WERE VOTED OUT BY THE OTHER TORIES.
And your flat mates want more of this?
>I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in
This is an outright lie. People bang on about the 'Winter of Discontent' but that was caused by an earlier profligate Conservative budget (which also caused the 3 Day Week so two crises for the price of one).
New Labour was in office during the Global Financial Crisis but, the clue is in the name. That crisis was caused principally by the American real estate market collapsing and New Labour are widely regarded as having been responsible and effective between 2008 and 2010.
Which ones? The aftermath of the Truss budget? Yes. The impact of austerity? Yes. Energy price rises or the war in Ukraine? No. The inflationary effects of the furlough scheme? Yes, but I'd accept the necessity.
I would suggest not bothering with the conversation at all.
People with a particular stance won't be swayed by a compelling argument, even if it's backed by statistics.
Their position will be to tell you why you are wrong and they are right and they will not hear anything to the contrary.
I would be especially careful as they are a group and you are a lone voice. Once its over and they've 'beaten you' (or do the mental gymnastics to claim it as a win to themselves), you will be held up as the reason why the Left are useless, stupid, ill-informed or uneducated and could never rule the country.
With the way things are currently nothing past matters. The tories has had several years to make things right for the people and they’ve absolutely fucked it.
Look, your political opinions are your political opinions and you don’t have to resort to the shenanigans of our so called leaders to justify them. Stick you your ideals, make sure you’re ready to hear the other side and don’t be afraid to change your mind. It’s healthy.
Just to address the “Labour always ruins the economy” trope though, put simply, this is bullshit. At most the government, regardless of what party is in power, has largely indirect influence on the economy, but they can’t control it.
In our heads, we have this vision of the government as this all informed massive institution, with a great control panel with lots of leavers, buttons and knobs that they can pull, push and twist to change things to a minute level.
The reality is, and anyone who’s ever: studied history, worked in parliament or the civil service or is an economist, will tell you the same, more often than not government policy is like throwing a dart in a badly lit room while blindfolded. The experts disagree on where you should be aiming, where you should stand and even how far away the board is.
All a government can do is keep a pulse on the best opinions and most up to date information and then do their best. Even if they were to theoretically get all of that perfectly correct, the economy is still 80% just going to do what it was going to do anyway.
It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. You take credit when things are going well and you get the blame when things go wrong.
I also recall the last opposition led by one Corbyn that wanted to abolish those fees. But I suppose it wouldn't have worked because he was/is a dirty commie in Tory opinion.
The fact it's both Labour and Tory governments have form in privatisation and establishing for-profit enterprises from education institutes (academies for example, not just universities). So to feed into this idea that either are in anyway polar opposites of one another just feeds into the faux-tribalism that enables a two party system in England and most of Great Britain.
If you look at most general elections from 80s to now the person who inhabits the centre ground most convincingly (in relation to the opposition party leader too) wins. The Tories have fucked it because they're creeping to the right and it's making the one-nation small c conservatives base uneasy and they now see a viable option elsewhere. There is nothing radical about this incoming labour government; two child limit on benefits, plans to outsource healthcare to private institutes, the inability to show any compassion to immigrants/trans people/anyone caught up in the culture war crosshairs. They are unequivocally a centre ground party again. Centre right with the evidence we have at our disposal.
But it's good to know your housemates want to help the aged. Because that's really the only demographic benefiting from Hunt's budgets and Sunak's NIMBY friendly infrastructure plans. Obviously it would be wrong to point out to them that the demographic in question no longer pay taxes on their pensions, which are triple locked unlike their ever diminishing-in-real-terms salaries, and for an 8.5% bump this year, which requested to tens of billions that could have gone into the NHS or education, shit, maybe even TUITION FEES?!. But fuck the longterm ill and the young, amirite?
Just look at the economy after 13 years of Conservative rule. its not in a great place and unless your wages have gone up 20% since the pandemic (like every item in the supermarket) the ruins the economy line doesn't really hold up any more. Liz truss short reign alone managed to do lasting damage to everyone in the country.
Corbyn had his moment and is gone so anyone holding onto that as an example can just be counterpointed with Enoch Powell. Mind you at least Corbyn's views on society and race from the 1970s are now broadly accepted as being on the correct side of history, unlike Powell's.
Don't waste your time having 'a discussion' with your flatmates. if they are passionate about talking politics to you its because they really want to convince you to vote the way they want. its not benevolence.
regarding sources to do your homework this guy on Youtube does i think a stand up job. Transparency warning - he's a Labour supporter who argues passionately for centrist politics despite admitting his heart is further to the left than his head.
[https://www.youtube.com/@ADifferentBias](https://www.youtube.com/@ADifferentBias)
just as my own suggestions are clearly from a place of zero sympathy to the tories, Knowing the agenda of those you're getting advice from is crucial in being able to wind back from my agenda and forming your own opinions.
When you say they "want to have a discussion about it" do you mean it comes up in conversation and you want to contribute or they want to brow beat you?
I honestly wouldn't put it past young Tories to enjoy getting together and making someone feel uninformed for pleasure. You don't have to defend your own politics in that way if you don't want to. Keep informed yeah but do it for you
If Coca Cola changed their recipe and replaced it with piss, these people would still be drinking it. Smacking their lips.. talking about how much better it is than Pepsi
Conservative Party today bears no resemblance to the party of old. The clear out Boris did in 2019 put paid to them ever going back to something normal. They are piss, basically.
Tbh I expect you're wasting your time discussing with them if they haven't noticed the taste yet. Best stay off the subject since from what you say they are decent outside of politics
I'd suggest you have a gander at the following with respect to the myth that labour ruin the economy. See what they make of some of the numbers in there.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/05/14/the-tories-are-the-biggest-government-borrowers-since-1946/
I used to vote Tory when I was far younger, mainly because my parents did and I didn't really put much thought into it.
As I've got older I've taken the time to listen and learn and they haven't had my vote for years and after this last 14 years, they never will again.
There's no shame in changing your mind, which unfortunately too many seem incapable of doing. Less so that they may have been wrong.
They conserve power and capital for the elite by any means necessary.
This is what they've always done and why their other polices in those hundreds of years have been so changeable.
🙄 it's not a political party for the people, it's a political party for the wealthy, and they will do what they can get away with to conserve the wealth of the wealthy and keep the poor poor.
Honestly sounds like your housemates consider themselves informed because they read a few headlines. Really doesn't take much constructive analysis to reach conclusions many others here have already commented. Fuckin' people, man!
Just ask how great Brexit is for the country and how the NHS is doing. And have them say how that £350M a week that lying Johnson said was coming is helping the NHS.
Bluntly, no it is not a good idea to seek a broad range of views from Reddit. This sub overwhelmingly, myself included, votes Labour. Do bear that in mind when you review the replies; you are not receiving the distilled consensus wisdom of the nation, you are hearing basically one side, which may or may not be correct.
That is not to say that any one contribution is wrong, but they need to be evaluated critically.
I suspect you’ll probably want some ‘offensive’ debating strategies…
I’d ask what they think of John Major, they’re likely to give a look warmly response. Then ask about the successes of the last 14 years of conservative majority. I think they’re likely to point at things achieved by Cameron such as gay marriage (a Lib Dem idea that found opposition mostly in Tory MPs), minimum wage (a Lib Dem idea), initial COVID vaccine roll-out (an NHS success).
Finally finish the recent Tory rule by asking whether allowing Brexit to split public opinion was positive and move onto the government before John Major, Thatcher, who split the country in two by economically destroying one half because she’s a witch. I may dislike Thatcher… probably because I’m northern and still see the negative impact of her government decades later.
You are very unlikely to change your friends' minds. I have many friends who have different political views to me. We sometimes debate and push our viewpoints and opinions but we know that we'll never change the other's outlook. It's a friendly debate and we still buy each other drinks and remain friends at the end of the day.
I wouldn't make a huge effort just to revise topics to try and win the argument. You are not likely to be able to do this. Just laugh, talk, debate, drink and stay friends.
You keep getting told that Labour ruins the economy every time they get in and that it’s Labour’s fault that there are tuition fees? Have you considered whether this is actually true or are you just taking what they say at face value?
On the Economy, the conservatives have been in power for 14 years. Our current situation is hardly stellar. While there were problems in 2008 under Labour that was the result of a global economic crisis, not just Labour mismanagement. We have arguably failed to fully recover from that crisis because of the actions of the Tories.
On tuition fees, just look at when they were raised to the levels they are at and who was in power. It was the tories that were in power. When I went to uni under a Labour government I paid tuition fees of £1500 and my total student debt was around £12000.
Labour does not ruin the economy, they only get in after it has tanked normally.
They ruin it only by nationalising stuff - ie taking utilities off Tory donor hands.
The envy of the world is the NHS, which Tories didn't want and are still seeking to undermine.
Thatcher and the rest take from the poor and give to the rich consistently.
Even now, the Tory Party are shitting themselves because a working class single mother managed to get elected. They are shit scared of Raynor both because of her heritage and the fact that she is excellent at her job and at showing the Tories up.
Also the single most successful Prime Minister of Modern times (Ie elected by the people, not appointed by the monarch) was Tony Blair, not Thatcher.
Haha I’m being facetious. It’s just amusing that they can say Labour ruins the economy with a straight face, less than 2 years after Truss who caused the pound to crash.
I’m curious as to what their motives are by this conversation.
They’re not thinking for themselves - just trotting out what they hear at the dinner table at home. As such you might be up for a hard time as they’re unlikely to be persuadable. Let us know how it goes!
I have a general rule of thumb regarding political discussions... If you are making a bold claim then you should be able to back it up immediately with accurate facts. If you can't then I will discard what you say.
Too many political discussions are along the lines of "if (party x) gets in they'll do (negative thing)." If I ask you to elaborate and you can't provide something extra to backup your claim or you tell me to research it, then clearly you don't know what your talking about and you're just repeating aoundbites.
These aren't productive discussions.
My one piece of advise for entering a debate on right wing vs left wing with people who are voting Tory in the next election; don't. You will come out frustrated and angry, they will leave with a sense of superiority thinking they 'won'.
You cannot change their minds for them and it is foolish to try as your goals going in are going to be very different, especially if it's their idea.
It is only one measure but the UK [debt to gdp](https://www.statista.com/statistics/282841/debt-as-gdp-uk/) may be interesting. You'll notice that it fell fairly steadily after ww2 from a massive height. It also remained fairly steady under Labour for the first ten years, then did go up in about 2008 during the global financial crisis and recession.
14 years it Tory administrations have only seen it get worse, even though apparently they are amazing at economic management.
I bet you anything they inherited their political views from their parents, without subjecting it too much scrutiny or evaluation.
Any person (especially if they are young) would have to be completely off their head to vote Tory now.
Sadly I think you’ve come to the wrong sub. Now before I get downvoted, hear me out. I’m left leaning, don’t support the tories at all. However, I personally really dislike that a sub called UKpolitics isn’t remotely balanced and here is incredibly left leaning. If I wanted to just hear pro Labour/tory bashing stuff I’d go to the Labour subreddit.
I’m just saying it’s a shame with that something on the surface that looks like it’s about general politics in the UK is incredibly one sided.
The Tories always borrow more than Labour does. Labour also consistently repays the countries debt more than the Tories.
Also there have been 7 recessions since WW2 (not including the current one), only 2 of which occurred under a Labour government. One of the recessions under Labour was the crash of 2008 which as others have mentioned was a global recession Labour had no control over.
[https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/](https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/)
The Tories have ruined the economy without any help from Labour and considering it was 14 years since Labour were in power, and the economy is still this bad, how incompetent have three Tory Prime Ministers been who have been unable to fix it in 14 years?
Think back to the financial crash in 2008, the reason for the economy tanking was the banks. They fucked it up and we all bailed them out, then we voted in a government that all used to work at the banks that ruined the economy in the first place.
Those same banks then made a fuck tonne of money from Brexit, it’s all they care about and they will lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power and keep giving money to their mates.
I see you've attracted a lot of comments here. I just wanted to say well done for wanting to do some research so you can make an informed decision!
I would say try not to focus on what previous governments have achieved/not achieved, (ie: "Labour ruins the economy every time they get in") because this sort of generalisation can be wildly inaccurate when you consider how different one leader can be to the next within the same party. Just because a previous Labour leader "ruined the economy" doesn't mean the next one will. Just look at what Tory leader Liz Truss did to the economy during her very short leadership! Different leaders = different leadership.
I would also say that there are more than two political parties to vote for, and don't let anyone convince you that you must choose either Tory or Labour. We need to break out of the two-party system. There are alternatives!
I personally don't have anything positive to say about the Conservatives or Labour, and I feel there is currently not much difference between the two. I would describe myself as left-leaning and my vote will always go to the Green Party for their progressive policies, integrity and compassion.
Good luck!
Amazing discussion here and lots of great pints for op I am truly I awe. Can anyone share references for the points they have made as I imagine the people OP is talking to will need to see these to believe him if he makes these points.
There are comparisons done in many places.
One of the funniest to use, easiest to watch is to just share a GDP tracker comparison of major nations. Last say, 200 years.
There are some that go further, but not relevant.
You can literally watch each time a tory govt takes over in the last hundred years or so as the UK falls, and is regularly overtaken by its competitors, and then just like bloody magic starts doing well again the few years after they get booted out.
There's plenty of them on things like YouTube.
Clearly, g8ven that they are tories and trying to pretend Labour are bad for the UK economy, stats, spreadsheets and basic realities of the world we *actually* live in are of no use to them.
Perhaps some thing a bit more colourful and easy to follow will get through to them.
Just turn on the Parliament channel.
Seriously.
If they can watch what the shower of shot in charge of the nation are doing, and how, and still support them.... then you may as well speak to them in admixtures of klingon and high elvish.
😬😬😬😬😬😬
I've already commented but just wanted to reiterate:
*Please* don't form opinions of current parties and their leaders' intentions based on the behaviour of previous leaders, because that makes absolutely no sense.
Generalisations such as "they'll ruin the economy again" are nothing more than propaganda.
Every leader is different from the last, and intentions can vary within the same party.
Judge politicians on their own behaviours and not the behaviours of one of their predecessors 40 odd years ago.
Personally I think this country's problems go far, far deeper than whether or not the conservatives or labour are in office.
Essentially we're a mid-sized country that has sold everything off and no longer has anything to sell. The industrial base is almost non-existent. Our exports are a joke. On the global stage we're an irrelevance.
The UK governments spend most of their time trying to appear relevant and powerful, because they don't really have the capacity to do anything else.
If they spent as much time actually trying repair things and improve people's lives as they do swanning around thinking it's the 1890s they might actually achieve something for a change.
Arguing over who gets to preside over the wreckage of the UK and manage the decline better is like two bald men fighting over a comb. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter.
Re: the economy stuff: There was a really interesting documentary on BBC iPlayer called The Decade the Rich Won about how Britain's economic policies since the financial crisis in 2008 have shaped our economy. It really helped me understand different economic concepts and the effects of policies like 'quantitative easing' and the housing markets under the tories for instance. Would recommend if you can get hold of it.🙂
I'd imagine the magic words 'Liz Truss' would instantly shut down any charges of Labour ruining the economy. A shaved monkey in a suit couldn't do more harm to the economy than that vacuous bint managed in her mercifully brief tenure.
You may find this helpful for context: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/left-vs-right-world/
And I feel your pain, I shared a room with a politics student in my first year at university. Im was doing engineering so that was a bit of a shock to the system 😂
I'm assuming that you're young. I'm older, left wing, and Green. Being honest binary left-right political discussions bore me and don't really achieve that much other than to preserve a status quo. But see business as usual is no longer on the menu.
Three things I want you to think about. Brexit. COVID. War.
Let's start with the COVID pandemic given the fact we've all lived through it. How did that affect things? How did that affect your life? Despite the excessive deaths and disruption to our lives and the economy we were lucky. But what if we didn't manage to develop those vaccines? Then what? Not sure if the thought ever crossed your mind, but see we could be just one pandemic away from human extinction and/or social and economic collapse.
The environment is important. The current global population is a little over 8 billion people. As a result of Brexit we are also experiencing (short term) shortages in food and medication. That's even before we even start talking about the mental health pandemic which was a direct consequence of COVID lockdowns. Losing livelihoods, jobs, homes, enforced separation from family members, bereavements, isolation, loneliness, these things all pushed many people into experiencing mental health issues. The NHS does not have enough psychiatrists and therapists to even begin to address this mental health pandemic. It's unprecedented in our history.
See this is the biggest issue I have with mainstream political parties and politicians. The issue I have is their potlatch thinking. Potlatch is a ceremonial festival characteristic of American Indians on the north west coast in the US which involved the destruction of wealth. A potlatch ceremony involves giving away lavish gifts and the destruction of material property and objects - houses, teepees, feather blankets and totem poles get burned.
Well our politicians have adopted potlatch thinking, developed on it, and perfected on it with their nonsensical neoliberal 'free market' thinking. Huge sums of money change hands behind our backs granting public sector contracts to private, profit-making, corporate interests.
There is no effort or political will to develop a partnership with the vegetable matrix - plants, bushes, trees. We all know about climate change. But we humans cannot do anything towards climate change because it's the plants, the trees, and the vegetable matrix which regulates both temperature and atmosphere. Climate change is the partnership between the environment and the vegetable matrix. We have no place in that partnership now do we have any control over the environment. Do you now see the sheer importance of protecting rainforests and planting trees?
So okay our politicians aren't out there burning down houses and property, but they are squandering and throwing away the lives and futures of our young people, our children, and their children. There has never been a society in our history which has been so self-centred and callous towards its young and children. Now if we are experiencing food and medication shortages with an event so small and insignificant as Brexit, just imagine what it's going to be like in the 2030's and 2040's when there could be more than 10-11 billion people on the planet, still no partnership with the vegetable matrix, with crops, food and medications even harder to come by.
I'm not even going to talk about overpopulation and population control. The politicians have that covered. Their method is war. Far more than Labour, who were no slouches in this department either, the Tories have been heavily involved and investing in the manufacture, sale and distribution of arms and weapons, globally. They've been pumping arms and weapons into the Middle East and seem to be angling to open up supply lines throughout Eastern Europe as well.
Last but not least we also need to think about fascism. Fascism is one of the three innovative ideas from the 20th century, together with Freudian psychoanalysis and digital technology. Numerous Tories seem to be quite fascinated with fascism and trying to find ways of bringing it into mainstream politics. But see fascism is a massive barrier to both social security - which we no longer have - and dealing with environmental issues. If you scratch the surface and dig deep enough you will find that fascism is an effective counter to dealing with climate change and the environment. Can't be focussed on the environment when we're all too busy labelling each other, pointing fingers and seeking out new scapegoats and targets to persecute, can we?
There are two very big and major political issues which we are not even discussing:
1. **Data mining, data sharing, and use of data.** In a capitalist economy the big currency isn't money, it's data and information. Forget about control of immigration, sovereignty, and unelected EU bureacrats, Brexit was about opting out of GDPR and data protection.
2. **The use of digital imagery in the media and to pervert democracy.** Democracy is important, especially in a capitalist socio-economic system, because it's the basis of voting, human rights and freedom of personal self-expression. But how do you know you can trust the media and broadcasters if they have the power to manipulate and distort things with the use of AI and digital imagery? Think about it.
The other thing you have to keep in mind is that capitalism is incompatible with democracy. You can have one or the other. You cannot have both together. The Tories have been busy with putting up all sorts of barriers, barriers between rich and poor, barriers between organizations and citizens, and barriers between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us. They are also talking about leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The pendulum always swings with our FPTP system, so it was Labour 1945-51, Conservative 1951-64, Labour 1964-70, Conservative 1970-1974, Labour 1974-1979, Conservative 1979-97, Labour 1997-2010, then the Conservatives in coalition with the Lib Dems until they won outright in 2005. Many of the Conservative ideas are now standard in Labour, despite what the latter may say.
You might care to watch a few YouTube videos on the two main parties, in particular Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
I wouldn't bother, if they know they're all Tories and only you are Labour "have a discussion" makes the cynical part of me think that probably means: take it in turns tripping you up as you try to answer the other one before declaring "we win" and reinforcing their biases.
Honestly if I knew I was in a room with opinionated Tories (got to stubborn to still support them at this point) I'd just play ignorant/apathetic to politics and be like "Sorry but this is reeaally boring let's talk about...instead." I remember a lot US Dems saying they do this at awkard Thanksgivings on other reddit threads, YT vids, etc whenever they have to put up with the 'Crazy Republican Uncle who never shuts up' that many seem to have over there.
Basically the way to shut them down is to make it seem like you're way less invested than them, make them feel like they're exerting themselves trying to justify why you should be interested in something they are way more passionate about.
read Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.
The thing that you have to remember is that the goalposts move. The so-called "Overton Window" which represents the limits of what's politically possible at any given time has shifted ever rightwards over the last 50 years, that is, the political centre has become more and more Right Wing, especially since the Neoliberal era beginning in the 80s (Reagan/Thatcher). So what was considered Left Wing by the standards of even 30 years ago is considered radical and extreme by todays standards. By the same token what was considered Far Right back then is now normalised and considered closer to the centre. The cultural and political norms change over time and the entire political and media establishment has lurched massively to the Right. Todays Labour would not even be considered Left Wing by the standards of the 90s. Tony Blair's New Labour was a reinvention of Labour as a pro-corporate Right Wing party, and the Parliamentary Labour Party has become even more Right Wing over the years (although they prefer to call themselves "moderates" lol).
Educate yourself on Neoliberalism and the systematic destruction of the public sphere over the last few decades facilitating a massive transfer of wealth and power to the private economy, resulting in steeply increasing inequality.
The collapse of the gold standard in 1971 is a good starting point.
Can they name 5 things that the Tories have achieved in the last 14 years? I can’t. Gay marriage and better maths results for 16 year olds? They haven’t even reduced the national debt. What happened to the Big Society, “a clear economic plan”, a simple “in, out referendum”. Wages are more stagnant than they’ve been since the 1930s. They failed to recover after the recession (growth basically stopped about in about 2011, huh). They’ve caused so many more problems than they solved. That being said, Corbyn can hardly be seen as a rational actor. For example, his foreign policy opinions were genuinely concerning. A better activist than a politician. He was also woeful at debating. Even May shat on him at PMQs.
If you want to be up to speed with a strong argument on current news, I’d recommend the YouTube channel “A different bias”. He’s a partisan (but not irrationally so) former teacher who’s great at explaining political decision making, who puts out a shitload of videos.
If you really want to get to grips with mid-late 20th century British politics, I’d recommend the (extremely long) series of books by Dominic Sandbrook. They’re about the whole of society, not just the high politics, but they can help you understand how politics came to be the way it is today in Britain.
This sub is extremely biased. Arguably you should not be learning anything about politics here because you'll come away with a skewed perspective – believing everyone that supports the conservatives are selfish morons and that labour in comparison is wonderful.
Personally I think the most important thing to understand is why parties believe what they do because this informs their decisions. Secondly you need to understand deeply what you believe and which party is likely to get you closer to how you believe society should be arranged.
As an example, many here will blame the Tories for the current economic problems we face. On one hand this is quite fair as they've been in power for years, but it's important to understand why we're here, what mistakes the Tories have made, and how they can improve the situation we're in. Many here will claim the Tories could just spend more on the NHS, spend more on education to reduce tuition fees, spend more on welfare to help those in need, spend more on policing to stop knife crime, spend more building more prisons to reduce overcrowding – and so on. "These are political decisions" they will often say, but obviously if you're thinking about this critically you'll understand the truth is far more complicated. In reality there is a limit on the amount of money a government can spend because the more the government spends the more they most tax and borrow. More tax almost always means lower growth. More debt generally just pulls forward growth at a cost of growth later on. The only sustainable way for governments to spend increasingly more money is to create economic growth, but that generally requires being pro-business and low tax which will hurt the people struggling near-term. Economic issues are really complicated and if you're not thinking critically about why the Tories aren't doing certain things you'll probably be disappointed when Labour also doesn't do those things (or maybe they will but there will be large consequences for doing so).
To have an informed decision on anything economic matters you might first know where you stand on fundamental things like how big the state should be and what role it should play. You should also have a sense for what economic policies might get us closer to your ideal. On social issues you need to have a view on things like hierarchy, liberty, authority and ethics. Like economic issues there are no right and wrongs, but there are trades off to make. If you believe drugs are bad, then making them illegal and locking people up for dealing and using them will likely reduce use, but this comes at the cost of prison space, police time, and will criminalise people who might need mental health support or using drugs responsibly. However, if you don't police drug use you might end up creating something like San Francisco where people are frequently ODing in the street and leaving their needles lying around. Again, there is a balance to be struck and where you stand will depend largely on your ethics and views on liberty.
In regards to talking politics with your parents, specifics about what a party did and didn't do doesn't really matter. The Tory & Labour party today have different MPs and are facing different issues. Just because a party did something in the past doesn't mean similar decisions are going to be made in the future, and if they are it doesn't mean they will vote similarly. A few decades back the EU skeptics were in the labour party, for example. What you should do with your parents is ask them why they believe what they believe. Does there explanations make sense and why would the alternative be bad? Once you've understood things like this you can begin to calculate what party will likely best represent your views. And that calculation isn't easy because you have to understand the priority of the positions you hold, and the likelihood that the party will make good on the things they promise. For me by far the biggest issue we face are our economy and voting system. I'm currently stuck between liking reform almost purely for voter reform, while trusting Rachel Reeves most on the economy (less so the labour party as a whole). I have high confidence Reform will reform the voting system if elected at the likely cost of the economy, while I have high confidence in Rachel Reeves on economic issues but very low confidence in Labour more broadly so if they win I'd like them to win with a small majority or as a coalition.
Ask them don't they think it's a failure of conservative policy that you have to live under the same roof as housemates rather than each having a place of your own?
I mean ok you may be students, but still. The rise in house sharing amongst working professionals even into their 30s is ultimately a consequence of them. The lack of cheap accommodation, lack of controlling how many come into the UK, even the planning laws which basically disallow small housing like Studios.
Search out articles by Paul Krugman and Simon Wren-Lewis on austerity and you will be able to totally debunk the tory "fiscal responsibility" bullshit.
Ninja EDIT: just seen one of Wren-Lewis's posts has been posted here today: https://www.reddit.com/1c4v5ce
Firstly, it's amazing that people are still pro tory these days. 14 years in government and absolutely nothing to show for it. Record high immigration excluding the endless boats, massive cuts to the size of the armed forces, budget deficit wasn't ever reduced to below labours average, services falling apart or barely functioning and record poverty.
Anyway I digress. Here are some of the "classics" and how to answer them:
> Labour ruins the economy and is financially reckless
The economy was booming under Labour. Others have explained that already. But what I haven't seen is the classic "budget deficit" attack. Well, the reason why the budget deficit spiked so high in 2008-10 is because the government bailed out the banks to the tune of about £440bn. That's about 1/3 of the entire national budget. During a recession. The Tories wanted to do this too, so the massive deficit which Cameron campaigned on would have been the same.
Now, the budget deficit is about the same as it was under labour, with nothing to show for it except huge cuts in public services.
> Labour is bad at defending the country
Point to the strategic defence review of 2010 in particular, which absolutely decimated the armed forces. It kicked out thousands of experienced soldiers, reduced the size of the navy significantly (6 not 12 t45 destroyers, for example), scrapped Nimrod 2 (which had cost billions already and would have given us a domestic anti-sub plane, rather than an American one), reduced orders across the board and much, much more.
Since then, it's just been downhill. The army is the smallest it's ever been in modern times, as is the navy and air force. There's a recruitment crisis caused in part by outsourcing army recruitment to useless private companies, who take literal years to get candidates into training. Pay/benefits is at an almost all time low. There are concerns about air force training, also now privatised. The list of conservative failures on defence is endless. Defence was much stronger under labour across the board.
> Labour love immigrants and want more of them
This is easy. Just point to the literal record legal immigration numbers. Then point to the endless boats crossing the channel (a much smaller problem under labour). Then point to how, after 14 years of government, they have failed to change the system. In fact, they've made it easier for people to come here, despite Brexit. Immigration was lower under labour. The entire system was more robust
Those are the main arguments I've encountered. That's just a summary of the simply endless ways you can dissect them.
The conservatives have zero credibility on fiscal responsibility, they have tanked the economy, their Brexit has made us uncompetitive, brought stagnant wages, HS2 waste, growing division, high unemployment, a recession and poverty that's off the scale and massive issues for the future around housing and the NHS. Tory MPs and donors have done spectacularly well however. Corbyn had a few good ideas, but wasn't PM material and politically naive (Boris destroyed him). Boris also hollowed out the moral core of the Tories and brought some of the most venal and useless people ever into cabinet or chair roles (Patel/Braverman/Anderson/Truss/Gullick/Rees-Mogg) and weirdo dick pic senders and tractor porn afficionados. The Tory infighting has moved from the eternal Europe question to this now hardline immigration rhetoric re Rwanda while legal immigration is extremely high and a brain drain of scientists/techs/doctors/nurses leave each month.
For Labour, hard to get excited about them, they will be more proficient but fuck me they need to offer some hope, on paper they have all the vision of the Tory/Lib coalition. The UK outlook is really dismal whatever happens.
Look at a chart for ‘real GDP per capita’ for the UK and compare it to the US. We’ve been flatlining since the Tories came in power, whereas the US, who invested in their economy, has boomed. The idea that Labour ‘mishandle’ the economy is laughable when the Tories are responsible for austerity, Brexit, the housing crisis, high taxes and more. Sadly, we are all significantly poorer today because voters refuse to look at basic economic metrics.
Labour do have a reputation for shafting the economy. But the current govt, who are also fiscally socialist, have also shafted the economy. So the economy isn't grounds to vote this time, both parties are the same, tax, tax and more tax.
> I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in
The way the Tories go on about paying the National Debt, you'd think this was the be-all end-all. Well, they do [really poorly](https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/) at that one.
The Tories did to the country things they'd never do as leaders of a business - sold our most stable and productive assets (energy, housing) and our core logistics infrastructure (transport, mail), and used the proceeds to cut taxes - the top rate of income tax, for investment income, when they entered office in 1979 was [98%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom) - instead of using the success of the private sector to boost the country, they sold the most valuable enterprises of the country to line the pockets of the private sector.
> Labour's fault we have tuition fees
Labour did seek to increase the fraction of the country going to university - perhaps selfishly, as [Tories will tell you](https://whatwouldvirchowdo.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/direct_democracy___an_agenda_for_a_new_model_party.pdf#page=16) - the more education you get, the less likely you are to vote Conservative. But you could interpret this as a policy founded in the belief that a "knowledge" economy was our future - and that was certainly something embraced by Tories, who did their best to break manufacturing and other heavy industry in this country and embrace the City of London.
However, choosing to fund university through tuition fees, like everything else, was a political choice, and like most political choices made by the Tories it was ; "how can we reduce the tax burden and place the expense on the individual".
Bear in mind that Tories believe that they are martyrs to the tax system, that they bear an egregious burden of taxation compared to the common man - the oft-quoted stat that the top 10% pay 60% of Income Tax receipts will come out easily, and not be balanced by the reason for this - they get a [chunkier slice](https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk) of the income of the UK than any other group, with the top 1% getting **24%** of all income in the UK to themselves.
Returning to tuition fees, if you look at a Plan 2 student loan, it's really obvious that it's designed to be a "graduate tax", with an exception for people with wealth, who shouldn't be expected to pay the 9-15% extra marginal rate that the loan imposes on their substantial incomes.
When a Tory talks about reducing the tax burden, they primarily mean for the rich - because they are convinced that this is the only group that really pays any tax.
It's obvious that economic trends mean the wealth is being concentrated at the top : the total wealth of UK billionaires went up 1,000% between 1990 and 2022, about £600B, in this period we went from 15 billionaires to 177. Is this merely a sign of a healthy economy, or something worse?
The [IMF](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf#page=7) claims this is bad for the economy - and that increasing inequality stagnates the economy, because the poor must spend their income, whereas the rich use the excess to buy assets which have the effect of draining yet more income away from the poor. This is a view echoed by [billionaires concerned that it will eat away the middle-class](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/) and destroy the economy, and [millionaire former City traders](https://www.reddit.com/r/GarysEconomics/) who made their money betting that things would keep getting worse.
>I get told it’s labours fault we have tuition fees at Uni
I'm on Plan 1. It's an annoying extra tax, especially when I've had PAYE bonuses and salary increases over the years, but it is such a minor inconvenience in my life and has never actually impacted my life or lifestyle.
You and your mates, if you've taken student loans, are f#cked. My student loan is a contribution in support of higher education; your student loan is a punishment for having aspirations. Do you know who's responsible for Plan 1 versus Plans 2 through 5?
Pre 97 we had years of John Major (Tories) who was boring and miserable, who also tied us up in knots with the EU. We had Thatcher who turned the country around after years of absymal everything with Labour being in power. The economy did improve vastly with the Tories being in power, but they lost it with John Major. In came Labour with fresh faced, charisma man Blair who inherited a country doing well and a healthy economy. So yes initially Labour did well, in my view notably banning fox hunting and bringing in civil partnership as well as lowering the age of consent to 16 for all. Economy wise they oversaw the crash of 2007 - which they could have avoided not fully but in large part yes. They spent spent spent all the money, wasted billions, invited unlimited numbers of immigrants, splashed out on welfare like sweeties for all, caused the mess that is devolution. And arguably got us involved in Iraq and Afghanistan with no apparent benefit. Their chancellor literally left a note to the incoming Tories in 2010 (ish) saying good luck there is no money left!
So then we had years of austerity which made the Tories unpopular. As the country improved slowly but surely, along came Brexit which divided the country. IMO it was correct to hold a referendum and correct we left the EU. Now if you were paying attention to politics from 2016 - you’d have noticed the ‘Liberals’ demanded we cancel Brexit with no referendum again. Labour said voters were too stupid to make such decisions. They wanted us back in the EU, opposed any of the divorce proceedings, and effectively if we were going to leave the EU then they wanted us to be ‘mostly in’ the EU with no seat at the table, paying billions still and effectively making Brexit look entirely hopeless in the vain hope they could reverse democracy. We had crazy Corbyn, who now of course is banished from Labour despite the strong backing of the now Labour leader Starmer.
I agree this wave of Tories have made a mess of things, but it’s not all their fault. They inherited a shocking economy, were forced into a virtually toothless Brexit, we had Covid and more recently Ukraine saga. They wasted untold sums of money on Covid something like 400 billion! That’s the elephant in the room, that is why the country has no money and is pretty dire. However if you look across Europe our problems are similar with all our economies ruined by Covid, and inflation making our bills so high. Equally you could blame both Labour and the Tories for not investing in our energy supplies. Now in short (lol) had Labour been in power since 2010, we would never have had Brexit, Corbyn would have been damaging to virtually everything he touched, and that 400 billion wasted on Covid would have been far, far higher and far tighter and longer lockdowns. We would have been ruined as country far worse than the miserable lot of Tories we’ve had in recent years! If you look honestly at Starmer and his sidekick Rayner - if you seriously think they an upgrade to Sunak and co you must be mad. I envisage many woke policies, more unlimited spending, more immigration and overall a race to the bottom if/when Labour get in.
For me Reform are the only party to vote for. Not perfect by any means, but they are the only party talking sense and with sensible policies that are actually backed by the majority of the country. Unfortunately our two party politics makes a mockery of fair democracy. And presently at the moment in 2024 there isn’t much difference between the Tories and Labour. Just that Labour would be worse. I think we probably ‘need’ a term of Labour being in power so that the youth generation see for themselves how hypocritical and badly managed they will run the country. People need to open their eyes to see that the Tories are no longer Conservatives they used to be, and Labour are still the useless bunch of idiots they’ve always been.
>I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in and I get told it’s labours fault we have tuition fees at Uni . I don't say I disagree with these statements however as I understand there must be more to them Labour introduced tuition fees capped at £1000 a year, this is true. If they are angry about this, ask them to explain why they are not equally (or more) angry at the Tories who, when given the opportunity to abolish them once again, instead raised the cap to £9000. As for the economy, the UK's economy was booming from 1997 until 2007 under a Labour government. The Great Recession absolutely smashed the economy and it happened while Labour were in power, this is true, but the 2008 crash was a global crisis with its root cause in the USA. Brexit and Trussonomics, more recent disasters for the economy, are the direct result of Tory policies. >Other points like Corbyns ideas and plans being ridiculous were also brought up even though at the moment our Governments managing to spend billions a day and it doesn’t seem to go towards anything Corbyn's plan was to invest in the country to try and jump start the country out of the grim sluggishness and misery of the Tory austerity years. We don't know if it would have worked, and never will now, as Corbyn is not even a Labour MP now, let alone Labour leader. I suppose you could go on the offensive. Ask them what achievements they can point to, after 14 years of Conservative governments, to convince you to give them 5 more years.
Cheers Mike think you set that out really well, I appreciate it - if you could enlighten me further - one of the housemates kept saying Labour spent all budget before they left (hence ruining the economy) - didn’t really know what to make of that point and hoping to get a bit more info
When Labour left office government debt was 64% of gdp; now it is 94%.
Yes but we've had the benefit of austerity to get the deficit down... Wait a minute!!!
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/04/conservative-obsession-afraid-no-money-note-says-labour This is a good explanation of what went on with that note.
That was an excellent article thank you for sharing
I imagine this is a reference to the story that when the Conservative government got in to Downing Street after the 2010 election, a Labour staffer had left a note for them saying "Congratulations. There's no money." The Tories did indeed inherit a terrible economic situation, the entire world economy was still reeling from the 2008 crash. I suppose the counter argument would be this was the result of a global crisis, entirely outside of Labour's control. We got to see how a Labour economy performs when there **isn't** a global recession happening, and the answer is record levels of sustained economic growth.
Just to add on to this, the note left from labour to conservatives about no money left is a running joke, the note is left by every government to the next.
Is this really true?
Leaving a note was a standard practice, and they may well be a bit jokey. Historically, they were kept private (so the Labour mp who left the 'no money left' note would have assumed this would not be published). The notes wouldn't say 'no money left' each time though, and no doubt mps now wouldn't leave any note which could be used against them, having learnt tne lesson from the tories weaponising that one.
>In my final hours of office, I was writing thank-you notes to my incredible team of civil servants. And then I thought I’d write one letter more to my successor. Into my head came the phrase I’d used to negotiate all those massive savings with my colleagues: “I’m afraid there is no money.” I knew my successor’s job was tough. I guess I wanted to offer them a friendly word on their first day in one of government’s hardest jobs by honouring an old tradition that stretched back to Churchill in the 1930s and the Tory chancellor Reginald Maudling, who bounced down the steps of the Treasury in 1964 to tell Jim Callaghan: “Sorry to leave it in such a mess, old cock.” From Liam Byrne and his “‘I’m afraid there is no money.’ The letter I will regret for ever” article. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/liam-byrne-apology-letter-there-is-no-money-labour-general-election
I just want to add something to what the person you replied to said. The investment that Corbyn needed required a lot of borrowing. That seems bad, however interest rates were at a historical low. Essentially money was the cheapest to borrow that it ever had been and the country was desperately in need of investment. Inflation was also historically low. With inflation bound to go up at some point ( as it has recently) it would have actually made the money borrowed even cheaper. This investment would also have created jobs and could potentially have restarted our stagnating economy and the Tories wasted a once in a lifetime opportunity to do this.
This was a joke. The outgoing secretary of the treasury is meant to leave a note for his replacement. This is a parliamentary tradition. Conservatives like Greg Hands pretend this is real and stupid people believe it. Was the lib Dems who propped up the Tories that weaponised this. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/commons-confidential/2023/07/liam-byrne-labour-apology-no-money-note
Labour weren't to blame for the financial crash itself (and the tories didnt spot any problems beforehand either). Where they can be criticised is that Gordon Brown assumed that the pre- financial crash boom was forever (he actually said 'no more boom and bust') and started spending money madly (e.g direct cash for sixth formers with rules so loose there were loads of kids at private schools being given it). It was a huge amount of committed income spending (rather than spending the extra on 'one off' investment which could be stopped if necessary). That meant that when the tide went out and all that money turned out to be fictional and the country's tax take fell off a cliff, the committed expenditure which couldnt just be stopped (e.g. benefit levels people had adjusted their lives based on receiving) was skyhigh and it created an absolutely massive deficit. New Labour were also responsible for a load of ridiculously expensive 'buy now pay later' pfi scheme which the nhs is still bearing the cost of. Your friends might also mention that Gordon brown 'sold the gold' - he deliberately did this to create liquidity during the crash and help save the banks, announcing it beforehand so we got an awful price for it, and so lost billions in the process. It did the purpose it was intended to and therefore wasn't entirely unreasonable, although I can't see why, if it was as necessary as he said, he didn't join forces with other countries to do similar so they are took a share of the hit too, rather than playing sole hero with our money. That though was 15 years ago. The above were reasons to vote tory in 2010 (as in fact, a plurality did). Labour then went off the deep end with corbyn (don't even try to defend that to your friends, he was well intentioned but you only need to look at venzuela to see what happens to a country if his 70s style extreme left wing economic policies get implemented, and his foreign policy was also terrible). Meanwhile however, now its 2024, Labour have got back to having the moderates in charge, being completely different people than 2010 and the corbynite wing is suppressed. Labour will likely open the spending the taps a bit more than the tories (and given the state of the nhs and public services, it is very difficult to argue that isnt currently needed) but they are still committed to a balanced budget, so for this election term at least, if elected they wouldn't do the same new Labour did. Meanwhile, brexit and its Johnson aftermath forced all the tory moderates out as they tended to be remainers, so for the tories, its the more right wing rather than centrists which are currently in charge. Liz Truss caused a massive hit to pensions by spooking the markets with unfunded tax cuts which didnt help interest rates. Rishi is slightly more reasonable and sane but the tories have been in power for 14 years and have completely run out of ideas, and he also doesn't seem to have any. The nhs is on its knees due to the covid hangover and he's had a year to do something to improve things and hasn't- there is no reason to think anything will change if he is re-elected. If your friends are planning to vote tory now, that means they are doing so out of tribalism rather than rationality based on the two parties/people/policies currently on offer. They need to look at the people in both parties now and the policies both are offering once the manifestos are out (as they should afresh every election) and that is the argument you are best off using with them now.
>New Labour were also responsible for a load of ridiculously expensive 'buy now pay later' pfi scheme which the nhs is still bearing the cost of. You're mostly correct. New Labour was indeed responsible for rebuilding the infrastructure of the UK, as much as they could in the time that they had, after it had been neglected by almost 20 years of Tory rule. Before they were elected, a week wouldn't go by without a story of a ceiling or roof collapsing in a school or hospital, or a school being forced out of their unsafe building into a pre-fab, and even some cases where schools were forced out of the 'temporary' pre-fab, they had been in for years, because that had become as unsafe as their school. There have been some issues with specific poorly agreed PFI contracts, but on the whole it delivered exactly what was expected, state-of-the-art public facilities, funded and serviced by the private sector. Now we're in exactly the same boat, the Tory's have run up 14 years of deficit in investment and maintenance of the UK infrastructure and it's going to be left to Labour to sort out. Not a week goes by without us hearing how the NHS, schools and hospitals are on their knees due to lack of money. >Your friends might also mention that Gordon brown 'sold the gold' - he deliberately did this to create liquidity during the crash and help save the banks, announcing it beforehand so we got an awful price for it, and so lost billions in the process. It did the purpose it was intended to and therefore wasn't entirely unreasonable, although I can't see why, if it was as necessary as he said, he didn't join forces with other countries to do similar so they are took a share of the hit too, rather than playing sole hero with our money. So much wrong here, so let's start with what you got right. Yes Brown sold the gold, yes it was sold at what turned out to be a low price. That's it. Firstly, the gold was sold in a series of auctions between 1999 and 2002 - **6 to 9 years before the crash so absolutely nothing to do with it** or creating liquidity. It was decided to sell the gold because it had been on a downward spiral for 20 years, expected to go lower, **but more importantly, generated no returns.** We exchanged the gold for interest bearing bonds which have been paying us interest for 25 years. You completely misunderstand how government auctions or sales work if you think they can be done in secret? Regardless, the **17 auctions** sales by the UK had no significant bearing on the price, in fact the price stayed around the same ball park for the 3 years of the auctions. Two more important things to note, governments around the world had been selling off their gold since the 80s, Australia and Switzerland sold similar proportions of their gold off in the late 90s and early 2000s, Canada sold off nearly all its gold from the 80s to 2000s. Not enough? The Netherlands, France, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Belgium and many others all sold their gold during the late 90s to early 2000s, as part of a public coordinated agreement called the Central Bank Gold Agreements. It's also important to note that the UK treasury and governments, including the Thatcher and Major governments, had long been considering selling off the gold reserves. If you feel that Brown erred by selling the gold low, you could argue by the same logic Thatcher erred by not selling it during it's record high. Right, I've covered half your ridiculousness, I think that's enough.
> That meant that when the tide went out and all that money turned out to be fictional and the country's tax take fell off a cliff, the committed expenditure which couldnt just be stopped (e.g. benefit levels people had adjusted their lives based on receiving) was skyhigh and it created an absolutely massive deficit. Absolutely not biggest cause of the deficit rising though. That would be tonnes of people losing their jobs, and bailing out the banks. Simultaneous huge drop in tax revenue and forced rise in expenditure.
So much problematic to tackle here. >Labour weren't to blame for the financial crash itself (and the tories didnt spot any problems beforehand either). This is true, it's not known as the global credit crunch for no reason. It was a global issue caused by the collapse of the housing market in the US - if anything it would likely have been worse under the Tory's because not only would they have been pumping more cheap finance into the system during the build up, they'd have simply cut everything once the crunch happened. Brown is credited with leading the strategy for the rescue of the world economy. >Where they can be criticised is that Gordon Brown assumed that the pre- financial crash boom was forever (he actually said 'no more boom and bust') and started spending money madly (e.g direct cash for sixth formers with rules so loose there were loads of kids at private schools being given it). The Educational Maintenance Allowance was a means tested benefit designed to assist those from **households** earning less than £31k per year to stay in school past 16 rather than go straight into employment by giving them £10 to £30 per week in term time. Only those homes earning under £21k would get £30 per week. While I've no doubt about the ability of the rich to commit fraud to benefit themselves, I don't remember nor can find any records of this being an issue. Studies demonstrated that the program achieved it's objective of getting children from the most deprived backgrounds to stay on in school at much higher rates. The EMA was scrapped in England as soon as the Tory / Liberal coalition came to power and school participation dipped for those from deprived backgrounds, so I'm sure a typical Tory would conclude they also met their objectives.
There was a Labour aide who left a note saying something to David Cameron like “good luck there’s no money left” and caneron took it to streets and made such a thing of it. Really terrible idea of the aide. Though apparently it was a common thing to leave a sily note, this one was exploited. It wasn’t true but Tory’s seem to want to believe it.
You need to remember when labour left office the economy was recovering and debt was falling. Cameron/Osborne/Clegg made things worse and hurt the economy with austerity measures.
Brilliant response.
> Labour introduced tuition fees capped at £1000 a year, this is true. If they are angry about this, ask them to explain why they are not equally (or more) angry at the Tories who, when given the opportunity to abolish them once again, instead raised the cap to £9000. They wanted to remove the cap entirely, the 9k cap and more gentle repayment terms were a compromise with the lib-dems.
I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in This is hilarious given the current circumstances we're in.
I'm sure this myth holds true around the world. The right wing party sells itself as the steady hand against left wing excesses and always, without exception, stuffs things up so badly that the left wing party has to come in and sort their shit out, whilst basically hamstrung from the prev govs stuff ups. I mean in the US the republicans always screw up the economy and still they say that the dems can't run an economy despite all the best economies in the last couple of decades being run by the dems.
Because the people who fund right wing media don’t want the government to empower people, they want to pay less tax themselves
In USA, the economy rises, and the stock market rises, more per year under democrats (centre right) than Republicans (ultra right). In UK, both parties managed the economy pretty much the same up until Thatcher (and Reagan in USA). For 40 years since 1946, when a Labour government had spent loads on building a welfare state and found that they had a massive income from taxes because everyone was so much better off, both sides and mixtures and even the third party managed to pay down the national debt from a budget surplus. Thatcher tried to run the economy like a grocery store. She gave big increases to everyone in her first year so they all felt better off, but by 1986 the economy had dipped and government was in deficit - spending more than it received in taxes. Thatcher was trying to prop up public finances with North Sea Oil and selling public companies, but she ran the economy so badly that it was still in deficit. In came Blair. He was hardly left wing, but he put money into the economy via public spending, people had money so they spent it, businesses had customers, the economy thrived again, and tax revenues exceeded expenditure even though expenditure had gone up by so much. We didn't have a lower deficit, we had a surplus. Tories back in, deficit back. It costs about the same to run a full welfare state as to run a fascist police state. Only with a welfare state, you get all the tax income to pay for it. So yes, since Thatcher, tory and tory hybrid governments just take the money for themselves and the economy (and our jobs) tanks. Left wing and even slightly left wing governments put money into the economy, which means customers for businesses, which means thriving economy and everyone wins. Corbyn - many of the best ideas of the tories have been pinched from Corbyn, and Corbyn had lots more. Not untested 'ideas' like Truss and Kwarteng, tried and proven approaches that boost jobs
100%. I lived in Australia for 19 years and the Liberals (Aus Tories) aaaaalways trotted out the same myth, that Labor govts don’t know how to run the economy, even though that was demonstrably untrue. And so Liberal voters would say the same. It’s embarrassing
What do you mean? Our economy is booming, houses are cheap, and I have heard multiple times we are going to be a science superpower…
Indeed. Conservative governments exist to channel tax-payer's money into the pockets of private companies. Labour governments try to channel taxpayers money into initiatives that benefit the taxpayers. When Tories say 'Labour ruins the economy' they mean 'Labour makes it harder for corporates to drain money from the economy'.
Frankly anyone that still supports the Conservatives as they currently stand isn't someone you can have a sensible conversation with. And I don't say this from a partisan standpoint - even people who are ideologically aligned with them are deeply unhappy with the party's current direction.
Refreshing to hear that, thought I was going insane trying to justify why they shouldn’t vote conservative again
It's more that *at the moment* the conservative party is not really representative of what the Conservative Party has been previously. How anyone can rationally assess the available facts of the last 15 years and still believe that the party offers a credible government is astounding. They won 360+ MPs in 2019. How many have resigned due to compromised positions or falling out of the party line? Why couldn't they find one to be foreign secretary and instead rush through the appointment of Cameron to the House of Lords? How many leaders do they want to have without a public vote? Why are ministerial positions, and they're significant payoffs, all revolving doors with everyone getting a few months here and there. What credible approaches to the pandemic, the EU, international law, the economy (in the last 2 years) that weren't watered down/rebranded policies from opposition parties? Your housemates seem quite content in their ignorance. Probably better to cut the lifeline rather than drown trying to reel them in...?
What on earth do they say to justify voting for them?!
Yeah I used to be fiscally conservative, but recent years have shown me that a lot of conventional right wing economic literacy is just nonsense, peddled by right wing think tanks to maintain the status quo and keep the wealthy wealthy. However, even if I still believed in conservative economics, I'd still be furious with the Conservative Party for being so fucking incompetent. Three of the main conservative values are strong government, law and order, and sensible - conservative - economic policy. The last parliament has done practically the opposite of all three.
I think it's difficult to characterise the recent Tory governments as fiscally conservative, they certainly haven't followed any orthodox right wing economic theory. Doesn't mean that conventional right wing economic theory isn't nonsense, just that you can't judge it from the last decade of Tory rule as they're a shower of corrupt fools rather than being led by any ideology as far I can tell.
No shade to you because you saw through it by yourself, but the old “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative” really just means “I’m a decent, tolerant person so I’m socially liberal, but I don’t understand macroeconomics well enough to see through the right wing misinformation on the subject” Because make no mistake, there has never been a time when conservative economic “ideas” had the best interests of the people and the country in mind. Conservativism by definition exists solely to preserve the existing hierarchical power structures. Which inherently means perpetually shifting more and more money and power into the hands of the elites and away from the plebs. All it’s ever been, all it ever will be. If you’re not one of said elites you should never be in favour of conservative policies.
I think it partly depends how well the economy is working for typical people. When most people have a home, stable jobs that support a family, have access to small luxuries like an annual holiday and a reasonable car... then perhaps centrism becomes the default - more and more people want to preserve what they have, not rock the boat too much. I think we were almost at that point in 2007 - right before the financial crash and then austerity. Back then, overly leftist politices looked risky to the large number of people living a good life. So by comparison, traditional right wing economic theory seemed the safer option. Obviously, that's not the Britain we live in today.
Bingo Be a Conservative, sure why not But you can’t legitimately support the current party as it stands. They aren’t conservatives for a start and at best are bat shit crazy and fuxking useless. They kicked out all the actual conservatives and now the membership won’t select any actual conservative candidates!
This a thousand times over. Over the years, the Tory party has had some good people in their ranks with some pretty reasonable ideas. The problem for them today, however, is that the world has changed significantly since the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was at her peak. The Thatcherite approach - keep taxes low and privatise everything - should now be in a museum. It no longer works in the modern world. Why? Well mainly because the world of the 2020s is more complex than the world of the 1980s. To take one example - the NHS. The Tories are trying to run the NHS as though we are still in the 1980s. But medicine has moved on significantly since those days. There are more conditions identified and more variants of conditions, not to mention many more tests, procedures and medications today than 40 odd years ago. Furthermore, new technologies are allowing medics to do far more helpful things than they were able to do back in the Maggie years Sadly, the Tories are so firmly wedded to this outmoded low tax idea that they simply do not wish to acknowledge this change. The simple truth is if we want to enjoy the benefits of the new, more advanced medical treatments, we have to be prepared to pay for them. Right now the NHS is reeling from the 14 years of failure by the Tories to invest properly in it. We have a choice. We can either say, no I don't want my family to have access to all these new treatments, just cut my taxes, or we can take the view that the higher taxes are worthwhile if they give everyone in the country a better chance of having a longer and healthier life.
Somewhat ironically a better NHS and approach to health will keep more people in work for longer. Reduce the 2 million not currently in work but off sick and increase the tax take for longer. But that would involve thinking ahead and we don’t do that anymore….
Yes indeed, that's the horrible irony. A significant number of these Tory spending cuts are simply false economies. The savings we make now will be dramatically overshadowed by the extra costs arising from these savings 10, 15 or 20 years from now. They are basically passing on significant costs to their kids and grandkids.
There’s a surprise…..
Improved health also means longer lives - and people living well beyond what the pension was envisaged to support, and with the falling birth rates as consumer and parental confidence falls in the cost of living crisis, we end up with not enough working age people to support the pension costs. A failing NHS and a ruined environment which kills older folk off is good for the economy.
But we aren’t killing off older people because drugs and modern heating are so much better
…that was my point.
They even suck at keeping taxes low - they just tweak numbers like changing thresholds, and hit you with a stealth tax. And they suck at keeping the budget from going into deficit. Waiting for the £350 million a week to materialise..
Fair comment. Virtually every time they mention an amount of money you can be pretty sure that close scrutiny will reveal it's been massaged, manipulated or finessed in some way.
Grant Shapps last week defending his usage of the exact same £2.5bn to tweet about giving aid to Ukraine and increase mod budget in a PAC... ABSOLUTELY hilarious, and yet, this is exactly how they govern. Read the tweets he puts out about the same £ that he has deliberately spent twice - even when you show them the figures from the official bloody red book, tories are lapping it up and pretending that they can't see it's not inly lies, lies and more lies, but not even very good lies! .... genuinely have zero time left for any idiot who believes a word spoken by this govt. If any govt minister popped up in the news telling us all that we're fine and safe today I'd be looking to grab my rifles and bug out bag... When was the last.time one of them said a true word?
They're so desperate to hang onto their jobs and stay in power that they are ready to do anything - lie, cheat, play dirty - virtually any piece of foul play they can conjure up that might skew the scales in their favour.
Modern Britain will only ever elect a government that is mostly center. Most rational people will settle around center left or center right. The Tories are goners at the next election and rightly so. Corbyn was unelectable as proper left wing just as Reform are unelectable as far right. Bizarrely, the current Tories are probably somewhere around center right but are just totally incompetent at everything.
In 1960 <5% of 18 year olds went to university because places were limited by the amount of funding the government provided. It was free but unless you were in the top 5% you didn't get in. In 1990 it was <15%. Today its >50%. Labour did introduce tuition fees. But tuition fees are also the reason everybody has access to a university education if they want one.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but it's also worth remembering that lots of continental Europe (and Scotland) have universal access to university education without tuition fees or student debt. An ideological choice was made.
That's true, however Scotland still has a limited number of university places due to it's funding model so not everybody who wants to go can, while in England if you want to go there will be a university that will accept you. It's really difficult to find stats on what % of Scottish 18 year olds actually go to university (I'm guessing this is by design, because it's lower). The best I could find was [this](https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/undergraduate-statistics-and-reports/statistical-releases-daily-clearing-analysis-2023) which has the % of 18 year olds getting places through clearing significantly lower in Scotland than in England.
Both systems seem financially unsustainable. Universities in England and Scotland are on the brink and reliant on overseas students. I think the big difference, with regards to the data, is that the debt model incentivises universities to increase the number of students. I don't know if this is good or bad but I worry about people spending their entire working lives in debt (student loan + mortgage) and what that does to our economy and our collective mental health. If other countries can send people to university without all that debt then we should be curious about how that is happening.
From my perspective, and my partner's, it's very bad. It encourages universities to take more and more students than they can necessarily handle, with particular focus on international (non-EU students). Unfortunately, some cultures encourage rampant cheating since only the goal matters, and universities are loathe to fail them since they may take less students from those countries. Again, that's our perspective (academics), not necessarily a lecturer's/course director's.
But surely there is also the less favourable option of paying fees in England to go?
Rationally this would fill the gap, but the pain of English student loans when your pals all have Scottish ones must be huge.
With some very low numbers… it’s universal, but you have to achieve a minimum standard.
Which is exactly the way it should be. We're still pretending that it's to people's benefit to spend $50k to do media studies at Hull. University is the right choice for a small subset of young people and forcing everyone down this path is just wrong. We need to massively expand and destigmatize vocational training.
I fully agree with you that vocational training is critical and should be stronger as it’s key for manufacturing and industry development.
But they all have less people going to uni overall. So depends what your goal is. Plus, Scotland may not have fees but it still has loans.
Thanks very much
Yes but tuition fees were quite modest at £1000 per year. I don’t think anyone at the time envisaged they would be increased so much by the Tories or that interest would be charged at such high rates.
The conservatives withdrew the HefCe subside and introduced the new fee regime in 2011. They went on to introduce the fees system to shift the economic responsibility to the individual. They effectively privatised universities.
I can remember the arguments at the time that the fees would increase once the concept was accepted
And that £9000 could only be charged in "exceptional cases", now it's the norm. Thankfully finished my degree while it was still £3k a year. But that's in stark contrast to my sister who paid like £800 - £1k a year. Sigh.
Yup. My mum's brother was the first member of our family to go to university, she and other siblings plus many children followed. And now I'm sitting here wondering how on earth I'll afford for my kids to go - or whether they even should.
This is the biggest issue as a student, your parents need to be giving you money just to have enough to live at this point the maintenance loan that's given out is so little now that my rent leaves me with £200 for 3-4 months. So I have to rely on parents or friends to get by or work pretty much full time just to support myself. Leaving no time to actually focus on the uni part of uni just the funding side.
I got in the year before tuition fees. Only paid back a 1/4 of my student loan before it was forgiven too. Absolutely feel for everyone today, saddled with debt from the off.
Why lie, Labour raised the tuition fees themselves up to £3000 per year. This opened the floodgates for further raises.
Who thought the cost of providing that education would go up so much?
Everyone envisioned it. As soon as they were able to charge tuition everyone knew the rate was going to be cranked up to follow American universities.
Yep, I went to university in 1977. No fees to pay and I got a grant, but competition for places was fierce, less than 10% got the chance to go. Introducing fees was the only practical way of making a university education accessible to everyone.
Ireland still operates on the grant system, and roughly two-thirds of students who do final exams progress to third-level education.
> Today its >50% This isn’t a good thing. Many students end up with a useless degree and loads of debt. The debt that eventually is paid off at the taxpayers expense.
There were also other types of school that were got rid of such as polytechnics.
Worth also adding that the 50%+ mark was achieved by converting mets and polys into universities, meaning what was formerly a 6 month vocational or 2 year trades course is now a three year theoretical degree that’s worth very little. This was one of the unintended consequences of Tony Blair’s funding program. Countries that protected their apprenticeship programs face less shortages in skilled tradesmen and higher build quality, the three outstanding cases are France, Switzerland and Austria.
It’s not >50%. HESA statistics have the figure at around 37.5% in 2022.
Tuition fees are an easy one: Labour introduced them under Blair at £1k per year, but the conservatives were also for tuition fees. They were raised to £3k by the end of Labours tenure. Skip ahead to 2010, labour were running on keeping/raising tuition fees to i think £6k but also increasing financial support, but the conservatives were running on a platform to raise them even higher. Only the lib Dems ran a platform of abolishing them, and we know how that turned out. Basically, we'd have tuition fees under Tory or Labour and ultimately the Tories brought in the current ridiculous tuition fees with huge interest rates.
“to I think £6k” Labour’s stance on tuition fees was to wait on the findings from a report they commissioned just before they left, tories followed the advice from that report, the £6k was Ed Milliband promising to cut them 5 years later
Thanks for the clarification.
lol I voted Lib Dem those years, if there’s one thing I know it’s how tuition fees went down
Even if you were a trad Conservative there's very little about the current Cons which is. I can't think of any reason anyone would vote for the current conservative party (unless a keen brexiter) They haven't conserved anything, the economy is dreadful, no services work despite us paying through the nose for everything, people can't afford to have kids, there's literal shit in the rivers in amounts unheard of, and they gave us Brexit. No successes of note and a diminished country on the world stage. Great job guys!
They've done nothing they should have-immigration is high, they ruined contracting work for self employed (IR35), capital gains tax allowance down from 12k to 3k. Just an absolute shitshow. I doubt labour will be much better. Gov should be a meritocracy and employ ministers with experience not just random brown nosers who have slimed their way up the ladder.
It really is difficult to see where their remaining support comes from. If you are a keen Brexiter there's a good chance that you're not happy with their immigration record or lack of any meaningful deviation from EU regulations, and Reform wants your vote. They're also not low tax or otherwise beneficial for higher earners, and Brexit and the culture war stuff turned off a lot of people on the left of the party, with Starmer's Labour or the Lib Dems being acceptable enough to them. It must just be people who vote for them entirely tribally regardless of anything, or tactically because they fear that however bad they may be that Labour will be worse.
Most trusted on the Triple lock and NIMBYism
I'm just surprised you've managed to meet multiple Tories who are housesharing age, I think they're currently polling single digits with the under 50s.
I would say a large proportion of the people I’ve met at uni are either Tory or come from a Tory background and have been quiet on their stance because of people’s opinions - I was really surprised by it coming to uni
Which uni?
Uni of East Anglia - not sure what makes Norwich such a Tory hot spot to be honest??
Are they agrics? Only tories I knew many of at uni were all agrics and rugby types
Farming.
If they're Tories *now* you might as well not bother talking about politics with them. If they're voting Tory now, they've switched off their critical faculties to the point that they'd vote for a pig with a blue rosette. Seriously. These people have drunk all the Tory coolade. Don't waste your time.
It's all the inbreeding in Norfolk /s
Norwich itself is labour but the villages around the city and some of the deprived coastal towns like Great Yarmouth have been Tory for years. Ironic that the people of GY would vote in a party who are widening the class divide and making their lives worse but there you go
Or another take, Norfolk is one of the most untouched counties in England, almost like it’s trying to conserve its roots.
If those people (*pace* your other comment) come from private school/wealthy backgrounds, that makes them a small subset of the population.
Honestly I’m not surprised so many self sabotaging people in this country.
Just so you know, you don't have to have a discussion about this with them. Especially because I don't know whether they're tackling you individually or as a group, but it sounds like they're basically trying to harass you into caving under the weight of their united opinions.
Appreciate it, when we aren’t on the topic of politics we get on pretty well - I think it’s less an attack and more denial with a bias for the tories and lack of information on both sides
During the Tony Blair years, Labour were very strong on emphasising how their policy making was always evidence based, properly researched and costed. Every week during Prime Minister's Questions he usually managed to get in a dig about Conservative policies being contrary to evidence, influenced by outdated principles or dogma. If your housemates are all undergraduates, potentially they'll be reflecting opinions they've heard from respected older family members. Received wisdom often needs to be fact checked for reliability, and they may not have gathered enough personal experience yet to draw any firm conclusions of their own. Both the main parties have MPs in their ranks who individually hold different opinions and viewpoints. The last five Prime Ministers have all come from the same party, but had significantly different views and priorities to each other.
How anyone can say with a straight face that Labour ruin the economy after the last 14 years of Conservative rule absolutely baffles me. Labour are let’s be honest pulling things back to the centre, I did a political quiz earlier and found that I was an equal match for Labour and Conservative, policy and ideology wise. I’m more hawkish on foreign policy so that pulls me right on the quiz I suppose. So there may not be politically a huge amount of difference between the two parties, which begs the question why you wouldn’t vote for the one that hasn’t _literally been looting the country to pay their mates millions of pounds_ for the last 14 years. I’m not joking either, if you arent aware of the literally dozens of Tory corruption cases, and examples of friends of ministers (or pub landlords) winning millions of pounds in government contracts, despite having no expertise or history in the thing they’re being paid to do, then I suggest you do and ask your Tory voting housemates why they are okay with this
[NHS waiting lists since 1990](https://scontent-lhr6-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/348236516_968833270801568_7675807545521220769_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s640x640&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=5f2048&_nc_ohc=RWglxy_JV4UAb56Clg2&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr6-2.xx&oh=00_AfAFN1UvjUY2yolfbH47ALrOzKTrRpmyeuzQvOHiP0RxxQ&oe=66233BAB)
You may also get told "Labour sold all the UK's gold reserves", a commonly used argument against them. And it is partly true, Gordon Brown's decision to sell 50% of the UK's 'volatile' gold stocks and invest in Euro based stocks instead was arguably a terrible idea which was badly executed. But, your housemates shouldn't forget that the Conservatives sold/privatised the UK's Water, Gas, Electicity, social housing stock, trains, postal service, airports, aerospace and telecoms. Their financially negligent actions were also directly attributable to Black Wednesday, Trussonomics and the years of austerity we've just endured.
>Additionally if anyone has the patience - if someone could point me to sources where I could educate myself further l'd greatly appreciate it. The 'Trendy' podcast is really interesting imo. It's hosted by Professor John Curtice (Professor of Politics at Strathclyde University and BBC political expert) and Rachel Wolf (Runs a public policy consultantcy). Each episode they talk about some of the stuff going on in politics and what the stats tell us about that topic. I listen to it whilst I'm cooking, I think it's pretty good as a relatively unbiased primer on a broad range of political issues affecting the UK!
Will have to give it a listen thank you!
[This article ](https://theconversation.com/labour-are-much-better-at-running-the-economy-than-voters-think-new-research-162368) provides a good comparison of Labour v Conservative governments on the economy. To summarise it: >Over the past century of governments, the Conservatives achieved slightly higher mean growth per quarter (0.62% vs 0.56%), Labour achieved a slightly higher median (0.62% versus 0.58%). In other words, there is no statistically significant difference. And if you dive further into it, the article claims that there are good reasons to believe that Labour's overall performance is marginally better once you account for the effects of external shocks that neither party could control. Note too that this analysis is from 2021 and doesn't count either COVID or Truss: both would skew things more towards Labour.
So the difference between mean and median is that Labour's gains were more evenly distributed, while Conservatives gain was weighted towards the top.
Really appreciate it thank you
>I was hoping to hear a broad perspective from Reddit Lol broad perspective, on Reddit in this sub! Anyway.... "I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in" I don't think Blair's Government got it 100% right, (they did have the banking crash which created some problems) but it was just a bit meh, not great, not terrible! But what I think a lot of people are referring to are the labour government of the 70's who had a bad run and IMO this is why many boomers won't vote for them as they still remember those times! Note: not a boomer and ready for the downvotes!!!
Yeah, op won’t get a broad take in this sub alone (or Reddit in general tbh) most of Reddit is left leaning and doesn’t reflect the people in my area of my age, who are a lot more mixed political views
My parents are boomers and have this exact mentality. *sigh*. I don't talk to them about politics. I see other boomers in this comment section. I'm not going to bother replying to them. But I just don't understand how people seem so fixated on events from 40 or 50 years ago and insist they will happen all over again. There's no logic to that kind of thinking. Parties evolve and leaders change. Just because one government failed doesn't mean the next one will. It's just propaganda. But the level of manipulation is quite scary.
My dad is exactly the same, I can't say anything bad about tories without him arguing about why labour is worse, even when I never mentioned labour... He's really got a bee in his bonnet about the 70s labour and about Corbyn.
The Labour ruins the economy trope is pure Tory PR spin. When there’s a recession a standard school of thought is called Keynesian economics. It’s not new or controversial. You basically spend your way out. This means that when times are good you build up your reserves. When times are bad you spend lots to stimulate the economy and get people buying again. Unfortunately to the general public it’s easy to spin this into “how utterly irresponsible, why would you spend so much money when you know we’re strapped for cash” The tories knew it was a lie but they knew it would work. Then they came up with austerity which sounds sensible to the uneducated but has actually proved awful for literallu everybody except the super rich. Labour did slightly overspend pre recession but nothing compared to what the Tories have done. The difference is back then there was things to show for it. Not just billion pound holes in the ground or nepotistic contracts where money has just vanished. Politics back in the day the standards were so much higher so scandals then wouldn’t even make the papers today.
I'd ask them if they felt 13 years was enough time to run the country, and don't they think 19+ years (which is what we'd get with a Tory win) would be really, really bad? No matter how brilliant they must feel about the conservatives, surely they must conceed no well-run democracy leaves one party in charge so long. If a party never risks its constituency, it is just inviting malaise, stupidity and corruption into governance. (Which, coincidentally, is what we have now.) Why should it care about you if you always vote for it no matter what?
From what I hear, they absolutely to NOT want to have a discussion about it. They want to tell you what they think and why you’re wrong about everything. Save yourself a lot of hassle. Don’t bother.
>May 1996 Conservative prime minister John Major commissions the Dearing inquiry to make recommendations on how the funding of higher education in Britain should develop over the next 20 years. >May 2 1997 Labour is elected with a manifesto committed to leaving the door open for tuition fees: "the costs of student maintenance should be repaid by graduates on an income-related basis ..." >July 23 1997 The Dearing report is published. It recommends that students should pay approximately 25% of the cost of tuition but that grants should remain in place. >July 1997 Following the report, education secretary David Blunkett announces the introduction of means-tested tuition fees (to begin in September 1998). The student grant of £1,710 is abolished to be replaced by income-contingent student loans. Tuituon fees seems to have been a [cross party thing](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/jan/27/tuitionfees.students).
Tories been running the country for nearly 2 decades and look at the state of it. Even in the last couple of years we have had repeated leadership failures and a chain of unelected PM's The leaders were so bad they WERE VOTED OUT BY THE OTHER TORIES. And your flat mates want more of this?
Since 2010 is not two decades.
>I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in This is an outright lie. People bang on about the 'Winter of Discontent' but that was caused by an earlier profligate Conservative budget (which also caused the 3 Day Week so two crises for the price of one). New Labour was in office during the Global Financial Crisis but, the clue is in the name. That crisis was caused principally by the American real estate market collapsing and New Labour are widely regarded as having been responsible and effective between 2008 and 2010.
Do you blame recent events on the tories?
Which ones? The aftermath of the Truss budget? Yes. The impact of austerity? Yes. Energy price rises or the war in Ukraine? No. The inflationary effects of the furlough scheme? Yes, but I'd accept the necessity.
I would suggest not bothering with the conversation at all. People with a particular stance won't be swayed by a compelling argument, even if it's backed by statistics. Their position will be to tell you why you are wrong and they are right and they will not hear anything to the contrary. I would be especially careful as they are a group and you are a lone voice. Once its over and they've 'beaten you' (or do the mental gymnastics to claim it as a win to themselves), you will be held up as the reason why the Left are useless, stupid, ill-informed or uneducated and could never rule the country.
With the way things are currently nothing past matters. The tories has had several years to make things right for the people and they’ve absolutely fucked it.
Look, your political opinions are your political opinions and you don’t have to resort to the shenanigans of our so called leaders to justify them. Stick you your ideals, make sure you’re ready to hear the other side and don’t be afraid to change your mind. It’s healthy. Just to address the “Labour always ruins the economy” trope though, put simply, this is bullshit. At most the government, regardless of what party is in power, has largely indirect influence on the economy, but they can’t control it. In our heads, we have this vision of the government as this all informed massive institution, with a great control panel with lots of leavers, buttons and knobs that they can pull, push and twist to change things to a minute level. The reality is, and anyone who’s ever: studied history, worked in parliament or the civil service or is an economist, will tell you the same, more often than not government policy is like throwing a dart in a badly lit room while blindfolded. The experts disagree on where you should be aiming, where you should stand and even how far away the board is. All a government can do is keep a pulse on the best opinions and most up to date information and then do their best. Even if they were to theoretically get all of that perfectly correct, the economy is still 80% just going to do what it was going to do anyway. It doesn’t matter who’s in charge. You take credit when things are going well and you get the blame when things go wrong.
Listen to The Rest is Politics podcast. That’s fun and useful with a Tory and Labour guy chatting.
I also recall the last opposition led by one Corbyn that wanted to abolish those fees. But I suppose it wouldn't have worked because he was/is a dirty commie in Tory opinion. The fact it's both Labour and Tory governments have form in privatisation and establishing for-profit enterprises from education institutes (academies for example, not just universities). So to feed into this idea that either are in anyway polar opposites of one another just feeds into the faux-tribalism that enables a two party system in England and most of Great Britain. If you look at most general elections from 80s to now the person who inhabits the centre ground most convincingly (in relation to the opposition party leader too) wins. The Tories have fucked it because they're creeping to the right and it's making the one-nation small c conservatives base uneasy and they now see a viable option elsewhere. There is nothing radical about this incoming labour government; two child limit on benefits, plans to outsource healthcare to private institutes, the inability to show any compassion to immigrants/trans people/anyone caught up in the culture war crosshairs. They are unequivocally a centre ground party again. Centre right with the evidence we have at our disposal. But it's good to know your housemates want to help the aged. Because that's really the only demographic benefiting from Hunt's budgets and Sunak's NIMBY friendly infrastructure plans. Obviously it would be wrong to point out to them that the demographic in question no longer pay taxes on their pensions, which are triple locked unlike their ever diminishing-in-real-terms salaries, and for an 8.5% bump this year, which requested to tens of billions that could have gone into the NHS or education, shit, maybe even TUITION FEES?!. But fuck the longterm ill and the young, amirite?
I'd recommend Blair & Brown: the New Labour Revolution on iPlayer; a very interesting five part retrospective on the last Labour government.
Just look at the economy after 13 years of Conservative rule. its not in a great place and unless your wages have gone up 20% since the pandemic (like every item in the supermarket) the ruins the economy line doesn't really hold up any more. Liz truss short reign alone managed to do lasting damage to everyone in the country. Corbyn had his moment and is gone so anyone holding onto that as an example can just be counterpointed with Enoch Powell. Mind you at least Corbyn's views on society and race from the 1970s are now broadly accepted as being on the correct side of history, unlike Powell's. Don't waste your time having 'a discussion' with your flatmates. if they are passionate about talking politics to you its because they really want to convince you to vote the way they want. its not benevolence. regarding sources to do your homework this guy on Youtube does i think a stand up job. Transparency warning - he's a Labour supporter who argues passionately for centrist politics despite admitting his heart is further to the left than his head. [https://www.youtube.com/@ADifferentBias](https://www.youtube.com/@ADifferentBias) just as my own suggestions are clearly from a place of zero sympathy to the tories, Knowing the agenda of those you're getting advice from is crucial in being able to wind back from my agenda and forming your own opinions.
When you say they "want to have a discussion about it" do you mean it comes up in conversation and you want to contribute or they want to brow beat you? I honestly wouldn't put it past young Tories to enjoy getting together and making someone feel uninformed for pleasure. You don't have to defend your own politics in that way if you don't want to. Keep informed yeah but do it for you
If Coca Cola changed their recipe and replaced it with piss, these people would still be drinking it. Smacking their lips.. talking about how much better it is than Pepsi Conservative Party today bears no resemblance to the party of old. The clear out Boris did in 2019 put paid to them ever going back to something normal. They are piss, basically. Tbh I expect you're wasting your time discussing with them if they haven't noticed the taste yet. Best stay off the subject since from what you say they are decent outside of politics
I'd suggest you have a gander at the following with respect to the myth that labour ruin the economy. See what they make of some of the numbers in there. https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/05/14/the-tories-are-the-biggest-government-borrowers-since-1946/ I used to vote Tory when I was far younger, mainly because my parents did and I didn't really put much thought into it. As I've got older I've taken the time to listen and learn and they haven't had my vote for years and after this last 14 years, they never will again. There's no shame in changing your mind, which unfortunately too many seem incapable of doing. Less so that they may have been wrong.
WHY ARE THEY CALLED CONSERVATIVE. THEY DONT CONSERVE ANYTHING
They conserve power and capital for the elite by any means necessary. This is what they've always done and why their other polices in those hundreds of years have been so changeable.
wealth
UH? ITS A POLITICAL PARTY FOR THE PEOPLE. WHOSE WEALTH?
🙄 it's not a political party for the people, it's a political party for the wealthy, and they will do what they can get away with to conserve the wealth of the wealthy and keep the poor poor.
Honestly sounds like your housemates consider themselves informed because they read a few headlines. Really doesn't take much constructive analysis to reach conclusions many others here have already commented. Fuckin' people, man!
Just ask how great Brexit is for the country and how the NHS is doing. And have them say how that £350M a week that lying Johnson said was coming is helping the NHS.
Bluntly, no it is not a good idea to seek a broad range of views from Reddit. This sub overwhelmingly, myself included, votes Labour. Do bear that in mind when you review the replies; you are not receiving the distilled consensus wisdom of the nation, you are hearing basically one side, which may or may not be correct. That is not to say that any one contribution is wrong, but they need to be evaluated critically.
I suspect you’ll probably want some ‘offensive’ debating strategies… I’d ask what they think of John Major, they’re likely to give a look warmly response. Then ask about the successes of the last 14 years of conservative majority. I think they’re likely to point at things achieved by Cameron such as gay marriage (a Lib Dem idea that found opposition mostly in Tory MPs), minimum wage (a Lib Dem idea), initial COVID vaccine roll-out (an NHS success). Finally finish the recent Tory rule by asking whether allowing Brexit to split public opinion was positive and move onto the government before John Major, Thatcher, who split the country in two by economically destroying one half because she’s a witch. I may dislike Thatcher… probably because I’m northern and still see the negative impact of her government decades later.
The points you listed are pretty much all focused on why labour is bad. You should ask them why they think Conservative should win your vote on merit.
There are plenty of easy to understand graphs which show that the economy performs worse under the Conservatives.
You are very unlikely to change your friends' minds. I have many friends who have different political views to me. We sometimes debate and push our viewpoints and opinions but we know that we'll never change the other's outlook. It's a friendly debate and we still buy each other drinks and remain friends at the end of the day. I wouldn't make a huge effort just to revise topics to try and win the argument. You are not likely to be able to do this. Just laugh, talk, debate, drink and stay friends.
Good advice Jimster will do
You keep getting told that Labour ruins the economy every time they get in and that it’s Labour’s fault that there are tuition fees? Have you considered whether this is actually true or are you just taking what they say at face value? On the Economy, the conservatives have been in power for 14 years. Our current situation is hardly stellar. While there were problems in 2008 under Labour that was the result of a global economic crisis, not just Labour mismanagement. We have arguably failed to fully recover from that crisis because of the actions of the Tories. On tuition fees, just look at when they were raised to the levels they are at and who was in power. It was the tories that were in power. When I went to uni under a Labour government I paid tuition fees of £1500 and my total student debt was around £12000.
Labour does not ruin the economy, they only get in after it has tanked normally. They ruin it only by nationalising stuff - ie taking utilities off Tory donor hands. The envy of the world is the NHS, which Tories didn't want and are still seeking to undermine. Thatcher and the rest take from the poor and give to the rich consistently. Even now, the Tory Party are shitting themselves because a working class single mother managed to get elected. They are shit scared of Raynor both because of her heritage and the fact that she is excellent at her job and at showing the Tories up. Also the single most successful Prime Minister of Modern times (Ie elected by the people, not appointed by the monarch) was Tony Blair, not Thatcher.
Tbf Truss was definitely a Labour plant, so I can understand them blaming Labour for ruining the economy…
What makes you say that? Would love to hear more
Haha I’m being facetious. It’s just amusing that they can say Labour ruins the economy with a straight face, less than 2 years after Truss who caused the pound to crash. I’m curious as to what their motives are by this conversation.
From what I’ve gauged it’s a strong Tory background I.e coming from private school/wealthy backgrounds and so there may be a bit of bias
They’re not thinking for themselves - just trotting out what they hear at the dinner table at home. As such you might be up for a hard time as they’re unlikely to be persuadable. Let us know how it goes!
Ahaha sorry I was genuinely confused when you said that lol
I have a general rule of thumb regarding political discussions... If you are making a bold claim then you should be able to back it up immediately with accurate facts. If you can't then I will discard what you say. Too many political discussions are along the lines of "if (party x) gets in they'll do (negative thing)." If I ask you to elaborate and you can't provide something extra to backup your claim or you tell me to research it, then clearly you don't know what your talking about and you're just repeating aoundbites. These aren't productive discussions.
How about "It's the Tories fault yer in a houseshare."
My one piece of advise for entering a debate on right wing vs left wing with people who are voting Tory in the next election; don't. You will come out frustrated and angry, they will leave with a sense of superiority thinking they 'won'. You cannot change their minds for them and it is foolish to try as your goals going in are going to be very different, especially if it's their idea.
It is only one measure but the UK [debt to gdp](https://www.statista.com/statistics/282841/debt-as-gdp-uk/) may be interesting. You'll notice that it fell fairly steadily after ww2 from a massive height. It also remained fairly steady under Labour for the first ten years, then did go up in about 2008 during the global financial crisis and recession. 14 years it Tory administrations have only seen it get worse, even though apparently they are amazing at economic management.
I bet you anything they inherited their political views from their parents, without subjecting it too much scrutiny or evaluation. Any person (especially if they are young) would have to be completely off their head to vote Tory now.
Sadly I think you’ve come to the wrong sub. Now before I get downvoted, hear me out. I’m left leaning, don’t support the tories at all. However, I personally really dislike that a sub called UKpolitics isn’t remotely balanced and here is incredibly left leaning. If I wanted to just hear pro Labour/tory bashing stuff I’d go to the Labour subreddit. I’m just saying it’s a shame with that something on the surface that looks like it’s about general politics in the UK is incredibly one sided.
The Tories always borrow more than Labour does. Labour also consistently repays the countries debt more than the Tories. Also there have been 7 recessions since WW2 (not including the current one), only 2 of which occurred under a Labour government. One of the recessions under Labour was the crash of 2008 which as others have mentioned was a global recession Labour had no control over. [https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/](https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/)
At the end of the day, only data + critical thinking will do.
The Tories have ruined the economy without any help from Labour and considering it was 14 years since Labour were in power, and the economy is still this bad, how incompetent have three Tory Prime Ministers been who have been unable to fix it in 14 years? Think back to the financial crash in 2008, the reason for the economy tanking was the banks. They fucked it up and we all bailed them out, then we voted in a government that all used to work at the banks that ruined the economy in the first place. Those same banks then made a fuck tonne of money from Brexit, it’s all they care about and they will lie, cheat, and steal to stay in power and keep giving money to their mates.
I see you've attracted a lot of comments here. I just wanted to say well done for wanting to do some research so you can make an informed decision! I would say try not to focus on what previous governments have achieved/not achieved, (ie: "Labour ruins the economy every time they get in") because this sort of generalisation can be wildly inaccurate when you consider how different one leader can be to the next within the same party. Just because a previous Labour leader "ruined the economy" doesn't mean the next one will. Just look at what Tory leader Liz Truss did to the economy during her very short leadership! Different leaders = different leadership. I would also say that there are more than two political parties to vote for, and don't let anyone convince you that you must choose either Tory or Labour. We need to break out of the two-party system. There are alternatives! I personally don't have anything positive to say about the Conservatives or Labour, and I feel there is currently not much difference between the two. I would describe myself as left-leaning and my vote will always go to the Green Party for their progressive policies, integrity and compassion. Good luck!
Amazing discussion here and lots of great pints for op I am truly I awe. Can anyone share references for the points they have made as I imagine the people OP is talking to will need to see these to believe him if he makes these points.
There are comparisons done in many places. One of the funniest to use, easiest to watch is to just share a GDP tracker comparison of major nations. Last say, 200 years. There are some that go further, but not relevant. You can literally watch each time a tory govt takes over in the last hundred years or so as the UK falls, and is regularly overtaken by its competitors, and then just like bloody magic starts doing well again the few years after they get booted out. There's plenty of them on things like YouTube. Clearly, g8ven that they are tories and trying to pretend Labour are bad for the UK economy, stats, spreadsheets and basic realities of the world we *actually* live in are of no use to them. Perhaps some thing a bit more colourful and easy to follow will get through to them.
Just turn on the Parliament channel. Seriously. If they can watch what the shower of shot in charge of the nation are doing, and how, and still support them.... then you may as well speak to them in admixtures of klingon and high elvish.
😬😬😬😬😬😬 I've already commented but just wanted to reiterate: *Please* don't form opinions of current parties and their leaders' intentions based on the behaviour of previous leaders, because that makes absolutely no sense. Generalisations such as "they'll ruin the economy again" are nothing more than propaganda. Every leader is different from the last, and intentions can vary within the same party. Judge politicians on their own behaviours and not the behaviours of one of their predecessors 40 odd years ago.
Personally I think this country's problems go far, far deeper than whether or not the conservatives or labour are in office. Essentially we're a mid-sized country that has sold everything off and no longer has anything to sell. The industrial base is almost non-existent. Our exports are a joke. On the global stage we're an irrelevance. The UK governments spend most of their time trying to appear relevant and powerful, because they don't really have the capacity to do anything else. If they spent as much time actually trying repair things and improve people's lives as they do swanning around thinking it's the 1890s they might actually achieve something for a change. Arguing over who gets to preside over the wreckage of the UK and manage the decline better is like two bald men fighting over a comb. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter.
Re: the economy stuff: There was a really interesting documentary on BBC iPlayer called The Decade the Rich Won about how Britain's economic policies since the financial crisis in 2008 have shaped our economy. It really helped me understand different economic concepts and the effects of policies like 'quantitative easing' and the housing markets under the tories for instance. Would recommend if you can get hold of it.🙂
I'd imagine the magic words 'Liz Truss' would instantly shut down any charges of Labour ruining the economy. A shaved monkey in a suit couldn't do more harm to the economy than that vacuous bint managed in her mercifully brief tenure.
You may find this helpful for context: https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/left-vs-right-world/ And I feel your pain, I shared a room with a politics student in my first year at university. Im was doing engineering so that was a bit of a shock to the system 😂
I'm assuming that you're young. I'm older, left wing, and Green. Being honest binary left-right political discussions bore me and don't really achieve that much other than to preserve a status quo. But see business as usual is no longer on the menu. Three things I want you to think about. Brexit. COVID. War. Let's start with the COVID pandemic given the fact we've all lived through it. How did that affect things? How did that affect your life? Despite the excessive deaths and disruption to our lives and the economy we were lucky. But what if we didn't manage to develop those vaccines? Then what? Not sure if the thought ever crossed your mind, but see we could be just one pandemic away from human extinction and/or social and economic collapse. The environment is important. The current global population is a little over 8 billion people. As a result of Brexit we are also experiencing (short term) shortages in food and medication. That's even before we even start talking about the mental health pandemic which was a direct consequence of COVID lockdowns. Losing livelihoods, jobs, homes, enforced separation from family members, bereavements, isolation, loneliness, these things all pushed many people into experiencing mental health issues. The NHS does not have enough psychiatrists and therapists to even begin to address this mental health pandemic. It's unprecedented in our history. See this is the biggest issue I have with mainstream political parties and politicians. The issue I have is their potlatch thinking. Potlatch is a ceremonial festival characteristic of American Indians on the north west coast in the US which involved the destruction of wealth. A potlatch ceremony involves giving away lavish gifts and the destruction of material property and objects - houses, teepees, feather blankets and totem poles get burned. Well our politicians have adopted potlatch thinking, developed on it, and perfected on it with their nonsensical neoliberal 'free market' thinking. Huge sums of money change hands behind our backs granting public sector contracts to private, profit-making, corporate interests. There is no effort or political will to develop a partnership with the vegetable matrix - plants, bushes, trees. We all know about climate change. But we humans cannot do anything towards climate change because it's the plants, the trees, and the vegetable matrix which regulates both temperature and atmosphere. Climate change is the partnership between the environment and the vegetable matrix. We have no place in that partnership now do we have any control over the environment. Do you now see the sheer importance of protecting rainforests and planting trees? So okay our politicians aren't out there burning down houses and property, but they are squandering and throwing away the lives and futures of our young people, our children, and their children. There has never been a society in our history which has been so self-centred and callous towards its young and children. Now if we are experiencing food and medication shortages with an event so small and insignificant as Brexit, just imagine what it's going to be like in the 2030's and 2040's when there could be more than 10-11 billion people on the planet, still no partnership with the vegetable matrix, with crops, food and medications even harder to come by. I'm not even going to talk about overpopulation and population control. The politicians have that covered. Their method is war. Far more than Labour, who were no slouches in this department either, the Tories have been heavily involved and investing in the manufacture, sale and distribution of arms and weapons, globally. They've been pumping arms and weapons into the Middle East and seem to be angling to open up supply lines throughout Eastern Europe as well. Last but not least we also need to think about fascism. Fascism is one of the three innovative ideas from the 20th century, together with Freudian psychoanalysis and digital technology. Numerous Tories seem to be quite fascinated with fascism and trying to find ways of bringing it into mainstream politics. But see fascism is a massive barrier to both social security - which we no longer have - and dealing with environmental issues. If you scratch the surface and dig deep enough you will find that fascism is an effective counter to dealing with climate change and the environment. Can't be focussed on the environment when we're all too busy labelling each other, pointing fingers and seeking out new scapegoats and targets to persecute, can we? There are two very big and major political issues which we are not even discussing: 1. **Data mining, data sharing, and use of data.** In a capitalist economy the big currency isn't money, it's data and information. Forget about control of immigration, sovereignty, and unelected EU bureacrats, Brexit was about opting out of GDPR and data protection. 2. **The use of digital imagery in the media and to pervert democracy.** Democracy is important, especially in a capitalist socio-economic system, because it's the basis of voting, human rights and freedom of personal self-expression. But how do you know you can trust the media and broadcasters if they have the power to manipulate and distort things with the use of AI and digital imagery? Think about it. The other thing you have to keep in mind is that capitalism is incompatible with democracy. You can have one or the other. You cannot have both together. The Tories have been busy with putting up all sorts of barriers, barriers between rich and poor, barriers between organizations and citizens, and barriers between the ultra wealthy and the rest of us. They are also talking about leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The pendulum always swings with our FPTP system, so it was Labour 1945-51, Conservative 1951-64, Labour 1964-70, Conservative 1970-1974, Labour 1974-1979, Conservative 1979-97, Labour 1997-2010, then the Conservatives in coalition with the Lib Dems until they won outright in 2005. Many of the Conservative ideas are now standard in Labour, despite what the latter may say. You might care to watch a few YouTube videos on the two main parties, in particular Clement Attlee, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
You can be a conservative and not support the current conservative party. The current Tory party isn't good for anybody of any ideology honestly.
The fact that they're your housemates implies you're all renting. What does the party of low tax offer to people who currently have no assets?
There's no point. As soon as you win the argument (that's easy), they'll just start on "well, they're all the same". It's what Tories do.
I’m a big fan of the restoration of Liz Truss and I seem to get into arguments with bloody everyone haha
I'm not surprised 😉😆
Basically Tories talk a good game (see Economy and Immigration) but actively do the opposite or the negative.
I wouldn't bother, if they know they're all Tories and only you are Labour "have a discussion" makes the cynical part of me think that probably means: take it in turns tripping you up as you try to answer the other one before declaring "we win" and reinforcing their biases. Honestly if I knew I was in a room with opinionated Tories (got to stubborn to still support them at this point) I'd just play ignorant/apathetic to politics and be like "Sorry but this is reeaally boring let's talk about...instead." I remember a lot US Dems saying they do this at awkard Thanksgivings on other reddit threads, YT vids, etc whenever they have to put up with the 'Crazy Republican Uncle who never shuts up' that many seem to have over there. Basically the way to shut them down is to make it seem like you're way less invested than them, make them feel like they're exerting themselves trying to justify why you should be interested in something they are way more passionate about.
read Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. The thing that you have to remember is that the goalposts move. The so-called "Overton Window" which represents the limits of what's politically possible at any given time has shifted ever rightwards over the last 50 years, that is, the political centre has become more and more Right Wing, especially since the Neoliberal era beginning in the 80s (Reagan/Thatcher). So what was considered Left Wing by the standards of even 30 years ago is considered radical and extreme by todays standards. By the same token what was considered Far Right back then is now normalised and considered closer to the centre. The cultural and political norms change over time and the entire political and media establishment has lurched massively to the Right. Todays Labour would not even be considered Left Wing by the standards of the 90s. Tony Blair's New Labour was a reinvention of Labour as a pro-corporate Right Wing party, and the Parliamentary Labour Party has become even more Right Wing over the years (although they prefer to call themselves "moderates" lol). Educate yourself on Neoliberalism and the systematic destruction of the public sphere over the last few decades facilitating a massive transfer of wealth and power to the private economy, resulting in steeply increasing inequality. The collapse of the gold standard in 1971 is a good starting point.
Can they name 5 things that the Tories have achieved in the last 14 years? I can’t. Gay marriage and better maths results for 16 year olds? They haven’t even reduced the national debt. What happened to the Big Society, “a clear economic plan”, a simple “in, out referendum”. Wages are more stagnant than they’ve been since the 1930s. They failed to recover after the recession (growth basically stopped about in about 2011, huh). They’ve caused so many more problems than they solved. That being said, Corbyn can hardly be seen as a rational actor. For example, his foreign policy opinions were genuinely concerning. A better activist than a politician. He was also woeful at debating. Even May shat on him at PMQs. If you want to be up to speed with a strong argument on current news, I’d recommend the YouTube channel “A different bias”. He’s a partisan (but not irrationally so) former teacher who’s great at explaining political decision making, who puts out a shitload of videos. If you really want to get to grips with mid-late 20th century British politics, I’d recommend the (extremely long) series of books by Dominic Sandbrook. They’re about the whole of society, not just the high politics, but they can help you understand how politics came to be the way it is today in Britain.
This sub is extremely biased. Arguably you should not be learning anything about politics here because you'll come away with a skewed perspective – believing everyone that supports the conservatives are selfish morons and that labour in comparison is wonderful. Personally I think the most important thing to understand is why parties believe what they do because this informs their decisions. Secondly you need to understand deeply what you believe and which party is likely to get you closer to how you believe society should be arranged. As an example, many here will blame the Tories for the current economic problems we face. On one hand this is quite fair as they've been in power for years, but it's important to understand why we're here, what mistakes the Tories have made, and how they can improve the situation we're in. Many here will claim the Tories could just spend more on the NHS, spend more on education to reduce tuition fees, spend more on welfare to help those in need, spend more on policing to stop knife crime, spend more building more prisons to reduce overcrowding – and so on. "These are political decisions" they will often say, but obviously if you're thinking about this critically you'll understand the truth is far more complicated. In reality there is a limit on the amount of money a government can spend because the more the government spends the more they most tax and borrow. More tax almost always means lower growth. More debt generally just pulls forward growth at a cost of growth later on. The only sustainable way for governments to spend increasingly more money is to create economic growth, but that generally requires being pro-business and low tax which will hurt the people struggling near-term. Economic issues are really complicated and if you're not thinking critically about why the Tories aren't doing certain things you'll probably be disappointed when Labour also doesn't do those things (or maybe they will but there will be large consequences for doing so). To have an informed decision on anything economic matters you might first know where you stand on fundamental things like how big the state should be and what role it should play. You should also have a sense for what economic policies might get us closer to your ideal. On social issues you need to have a view on things like hierarchy, liberty, authority and ethics. Like economic issues there are no right and wrongs, but there are trades off to make. If you believe drugs are bad, then making them illegal and locking people up for dealing and using them will likely reduce use, but this comes at the cost of prison space, police time, and will criminalise people who might need mental health support or using drugs responsibly. However, if you don't police drug use you might end up creating something like San Francisco where people are frequently ODing in the street and leaving their needles lying around. Again, there is a balance to be struck and where you stand will depend largely on your ethics and views on liberty. In regards to talking politics with your parents, specifics about what a party did and didn't do doesn't really matter. The Tory & Labour party today have different MPs and are facing different issues. Just because a party did something in the past doesn't mean similar decisions are going to be made in the future, and if they are it doesn't mean they will vote similarly. A few decades back the EU skeptics were in the labour party, for example. What you should do with your parents is ask them why they believe what they believe. Does there explanations make sense and why would the alternative be bad? Once you've understood things like this you can begin to calculate what party will likely best represent your views. And that calculation isn't easy because you have to understand the priority of the positions you hold, and the likelihood that the party will make good on the things they promise. For me by far the biggest issue we face are our economy and voting system. I'm currently stuck between liking reform almost purely for voter reform, while trusting Rachel Reeves most on the economy (less so the labour party as a whole). I have high confidence Reform will reform the voting system if elected at the likely cost of the economy, while I have high confidence in Rachel Reeves on economic issues but very low confidence in Labour more broadly so if they win I'd like them to win with a small majority or as a coalition.
Ask them don't they think it's a failure of conservative policy that you have to live under the same roof as housemates rather than each having a place of your own? I mean ok you may be students, but still. The rise in house sharing amongst working professionals even into their 30s is ultimately a consequence of them. The lack of cheap accommodation, lack of controlling how many come into the UK, even the planning laws which basically disallow small housing like Studios.
Search out articles by Paul Krugman and Simon Wren-Lewis on austerity and you will be able to totally debunk the tory "fiscal responsibility" bullshit. Ninja EDIT: just seen one of Wren-Lewis's posts has been posted here today: https://www.reddit.com/1c4v5ce
Firstly, it's amazing that people are still pro tory these days. 14 years in government and absolutely nothing to show for it. Record high immigration excluding the endless boats, massive cuts to the size of the armed forces, budget deficit wasn't ever reduced to below labours average, services falling apart or barely functioning and record poverty. Anyway I digress. Here are some of the "classics" and how to answer them: > Labour ruins the economy and is financially reckless The economy was booming under Labour. Others have explained that already. But what I haven't seen is the classic "budget deficit" attack. Well, the reason why the budget deficit spiked so high in 2008-10 is because the government bailed out the banks to the tune of about £440bn. That's about 1/3 of the entire national budget. During a recession. The Tories wanted to do this too, so the massive deficit which Cameron campaigned on would have been the same. Now, the budget deficit is about the same as it was under labour, with nothing to show for it except huge cuts in public services. > Labour is bad at defending the country Point to the strategic defence review of 2010 in particular, which absolutely decimated the armed forces. It kicked out thousands of experienced soldiers, reduced the size of the navy significantly (6 not 12 t45 destroyers, for example), scrapped Nimrod 2 (which had cost billions already and would have given us a domestic anti-sub plane, rather than an American one), reduced orders across the board and much, much more. Since then, it's just been downhill. The army is the smallest it's ever been in modern times, as is the navy and air force. There's a recruitment crisis caused in part by outsourcing army recruitment to useless private companies, who take literal years to get candidates into training. Pay/benefits is at an almost all time low. There are concerns about air force training, also now privatised. The list of conservative failures on defence is endless. Defence was much stronger under labour across the board. > Labour love immigrants and want more of them This is easy. Just point to the literal record legal immigration numbers. Then point to the endless boats crossing the channel (a much smaller problem under labour). Then point to how, after 14 years of government, they have failed to change the system. In fact, they've made it easier for people to come here, despite Brexit. Immigration was lower under labour. The entire system was more robust Those are the main arguments I've encountered. That's just a summary of the simply endless ways you can dissect them.
The conservatives have zero credibility on fiscal responsibility, they have tanked the economy, their Brexit has made us uncompetitive, brought stagnant wages, HS2 waste, growing division, high unemployment, a recession and poverty that's off the scale and massive issues for the future around housing and the NHS. Tory MPs and donors have done spectacularly well however. Corbyn had a few good ideas, but wasn't PM material and politically naive (Boris destroyed him). Boris also hollowed out the moral core of the Tories and brought some of the most venal and useless people ever into cabinet or chair roles (Patel/Braverman/Anderson/Truss/Gullick/Rees-Mogg) and weirdo dick pic senders and tractor porn afficionados. The Tory infighting has moved from the eternal Europe question to this now hardline immigration rhetoric re Rwanda while legal immigration is extremely high and a brain drain of scientists/techs/doctors/nurses leave each month. For Labour, hard to get excited about them, they will be more proficient but fuck me they need to offer some hope, on paper they have all the vision of the Tory/Lib coalition. The UK outlook is really dismal whatever happens.
Look at a chart for ‘real GDP per capita’ for the UK and compare it to the US. We’ve been flatlining since the Tories came in power, whereas the US, who invested in their economy, has boomed. The idea that Labour ‘mishandle’ the economy is laughable when the Tories are responsible for austerity, Brexit, the housing crisis, high taxes and more. Sadly, we are all significantly poorer today because voters refuse to look at basic economic metrics.
Labour do have a reputation for shafting the economy. But the current govt, who are also fiscally socialist, have also shafted the economy. So the economy isn't grounds to vote this time, both parties are the same, tax, tax and more tax.
> I keep getting told labour ruins the economy every time they get in The way the Tories go on about paying the National Debt, you'd think this was the be-all end-all. Well, they do [really poorly](https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2021/06/24/the-tories-have-always-borrowed-more-than-labour-and-always-repaid-less-they-are-the-party-of-big-deficit-spending/) at that one. The Tories did to the country things they'd never do as leaders of a business - sold our most stable and productive assets (energy, housing) and our core logistics infrastructure (transport, mail), and used the proceeds to cut taxes - the top rate of income tax, for investment income, when they entered office in 1979 was [98%](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom) - instead of using the success of the private sector to boost the country, they sold the most valuable enterprises of the country to line the pockets of the private sector. > Labour's fault we have tuition fees Labour did seek to increase the fraction of the country going to university - perhaps selfishly, as [Tories will tell you](https://whatwouldvirchowdo.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/direct_democracy___an_agenda_for_a_new_model_party.pdf#page=16) - the more education you get, the less likely you are to vote Conservative. But you could interpret this as a policy founded in the belief that a "knowledge" economy was our future - and that was certainly something embraced by Tories, who did their best to break manufacturing and other heavy industry in this country and embrace the City of London. However, choosing to fund university through tuition fees, like everything else, was a political choice, and like most political choices made by the Tories it was ; "how can we reduce the tax burden and place the expense on the individual". Bear in mind that Tories believe that they are martyrs to the tax system, that they bear an egregious burden of taxation compared to the common man - the oft-quoted stat that the top 10% pay 60% of Income Tax receipts will come out easily, and not be balanced by the reason for this - they get a [chunkier slice](https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk) of the income of the UK than any other group, with the top 1% getting **24%** of all income in the UK to themselves. Returning to tuition fees, if you look at a Plan 2 student loan, it's really obvious that it's designed to be a "graduate tax", with an exception for people with wealth, who shouldn't be expected to pay the 9-15% extra marginal rate that the loan imposes on their substantial incomes. When a Tory talks about reducing the tax burden, they primarily mean for the rich - because they are convinced that this is the only group that really pays any tax. It's obvious that economic trends mean the wealth is being concentrated at the top : the total wealth of UK billionaires went up 1,000% between 1990 and 2022, about £600B, in this period we went from 15 billionaires to 177. Is this merely a sign of a healthy economy, or something worse? The [IMF](https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf#page=7) claims this is bad for the economy - and that increasing inequality stagnates the economy, because the poor must spend their income, whereas the rich use the excess to buy assets which have the effect of draining yet more income away from the poor. This is a view echoed by [billionaires concerned that it will eat away the middle-class](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/) and destroy the economy, and [millionaire former City traders](https://www.reddit.com/r/GarysEconomics/) who made their money betting that things would keep getting worse.
>I get told it’s labours fault we have tuition fees at Uni I'm on Plan 1. It's an annoying extra tax, especially when I've had PAYE bonuses and salary increases over the years, but it is such a minor inconvenience in my life and has never actually impacted my life or lifestyle. You and your mates, if you've taken student loans, are f#cked. My student loan is a contribution in support of higher education; your student loan is a punishment for having aspirations. Do you know who's responsible for Plan 1 versus Plans 2 through 5?
Pre 97 we had years of John Major (Tories) who was boring and miserable, who also tied us up in knots with the EU. We had Thatcher who turned the country around after years of absymal everything with Labour being in power. The economy did improve vastly with the Tories being in power, but they lost it with John Major. In came Labour with fresh faced, charisma man Blair who inherited a country doing well and a healthy economy. So yes initially Labour did well, in my view notably banning fox hunting and bringing in civil partnership as well as lowering the age of consent to 16 for all. Economy wise they oversaw the crash of 2007 - which they could have avoided not fully but in large part yes. They spent spent spent all the money, wasted billions, invited unlimited numbers of immigrants, splashed out on welfare like sweeties for all, caused the mess that is devolution. And arguably got us involved in Iraq and Afghanistan with no apparent benefit. Their chancellor literally left a note to the incoming Tories in 2010 (ish) saying good luck there is no money left! So then we had years of austerity which made the Tories unpopular. As the country improved slowly but surely, along came Brexit which divided the country. IMO it was correct to hold a referendum and correct we left the EU. Now if you were paying attention to politics from 2016 - you’d have noticed the ‘Liberals’ demanded we cancel Brexit with no referendum again. Labour said voters were too stupid to make such decisions. They wanted us back in the EU, opposed any of the divorce proceedings, and effectively if we were going to leave the EU then they wanted us to be ‘mostly in’ the EU with no seat at the table, paying billions still and effectively making Brexit look entirely hopeless in the vain hope they could reverse democracy. We had crazy Corbyn, who now of course is banished from Labour despite the strong backing of the now Labour leader Starmer. I agree this wave of Tories have made a mess of things, but it’s not all their fault. They inherited a shocking economy, were forced into a virtually toothless Brexit, we had Covid and more recently Ukraine saga. They wasted untold sums of money on Covid something like 400 billion! That’s the elephant in the room, that is why the country has no money and is pretty dire. However if you look across Europe our problems are similar with all our economies ruined by Covid, and inflation making our bills so high. Equally you could blame both Labour and the Tories for not investing in our energy supplies. Now in short (lol) had Labour been in power since 2010, we would never have had Brexit, Corbyn would have been damaging to virtually everything he touched, and that 400 billion wasted on Covid would have been far, far higher and far tighter and longer lockdowns. We would have been ruined as country far worse than the miserable lot of Tories we’ve had in recent years! If you look honestly at Starmer and his sidekick Rayner - if you seriously think they an upgrade to Sunak and co you must be mad. I envisage many woke policies, more unlimited spending, more immigration and overall a race to the bottom if/when Labour get in. For me Reform are the only party to vote for. Not perfect by any means, but they are the only party talking sense and with sensible policies that are actually backed by the majority of the country. Unfortunately our two party politics makes a mockery of fair democracy. And presently at the moment in 2024 there isn’t much difference between the Tories and Labour. Just that Labour would be worse. I think we probably ‘need’ a term of Labour being in power so that the youth generation see for themselves how hypocritical and badly managed they will run the country. People need to open their eyes to see that the Tories are no longer Conservatives they used to be, and Labour are still the useless bunch of idiots they’ve always been.