Quote Originally Posted by DryCleaning View Post
undoubtedly we would have seen less austerity, but whether that impacts the economy overall is debatable. All you are doing is shifting who has the money to spend.

In respect of your latter point, whilst at a party level I would agree, I think its a bit more complicated vis a vis the electorate. The collapse of the red wall across the north of England is down to Brexit. Lifelong Labour voters switching party alignment simply because they did not really understand what Labour's position was.
I’m not arguing either from a party political point of view. Johnson won in 2019 with a promise of more Government spending, so there was a recognition at that time that the era of austerity had to end - opposition parties had been advocating this for a few years before that and I think it’s reasonable to believe that, for better or worse, the economic condition of the country would have pretty different if, say, a Labour/Lib Dem coalition had been in power from 2015.

As for Brexit, I agree that the bandwagon for some sort of realignment of our relationship with the EU might have become hard to resist if UKIP had been able to repeat their results of around a decade ago, but I think a non Conservative Government would have pursued a negotiated compromise as opposed to a yes/no vote.