Quote Originally Posted by dml1954 View Post
10 years of Tory austerity that came about as a result of Labour almost bankrupting the Country. People are not stupid, they have longer memories that Corbyn and Starmer gave them credit for. They also realised that in spite of all the hardship caused by the austerity measures, the alternative is a Labour Government who ridiculously wanted to go on a reckless spending spree by borrowing hundreds of billions more.
Blaming Labour solely for what happened in 2008 is just as bonkers as blaming the what's in it for me party for the origin of the pandemic. If the Labour party was responsible for 2008 in any way it was for following deregulatory policies even more enthusiastically than the Thatcher/Major Governments did - the financial crash was down to failures of capitalism and libertarianism as bankers took advantage of freedoms caused by a worldwide roll back of regulation.

Both Conservatives and Labour were united on what to do following the financial crash and I've never heard any tories saying that the y would have not brought in the policies Brown followed that caused the crash because they were were too left wing - they were right of centre policies which caused what happened in 2008.

Coming up to date, goats said I would be upset today because of what's happening so far in the elections because Labour are doing poorly. While I'd say it's disappointing because I've nearly always voted Labour in my life, the truth is that, increasingly, my politics are first and foremost anti Conservative and I haven't voted Labour with any enthusiasm in ages.

In the so called Tory landslide of 2019, there were, rounding down, 47 million people eligible to vote, 14 million, rounding up, of which voted Conservative. Therefore, out of eligible voters, more than two thirds did not vote Conservative. Of course, many of them would have been apathetic tories who were sure their party was going to win and there would have been Conservatives who would not have been able to vote for whatever reason. However, it's clearly true that far more people who had the right to vote did not feel they could vote Conservative than those who did.

With our voting system, that always happens no matter who wins, but, as has been remarked already, with the main opposition party falling into the normal left v right infighting which some in it appear to think is the main reason for its existence, I believe there are an awful lot of people like me, who long for an electable and coherent alternative to the Conservatives that has a realistic chance of winning.

The Labour party became an irrelevance in Scotland and still don't seem to have realised it yet and it's heading towards the same situation in the UK unless it realises that the real enemy are the lot who have formed the Government for almost thirty of the last forty years - if they cannot do that and prefer to continue rowing amongst themselves, then they're not worth saying.