Quote:
Originally Posted by Osem
Yeah, forgive me for being harsh on Labour but I've been around long enough to know what they're like and that they haven't improved one iota. Nasty, inept and a disgrace to the people they say they represent.
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You don't have to convince me about Corbyn, I was banging that drum back when people thought his candidacy was a joke. Now he is a lot closer to No 10 than most of us expected.
But his ascendency is at least in part down the Tories own ineptitude. They played games that came back to haunt them. Drastically cutting benefits for some, freezing public sector pay and doing little to address the cost of living crisis. A lot of the economic growth we did get, which remained sluggish for the last 7 years, has been fuelled by consumer debt as opposed to any great gains to productivity.
And yet despite all that they kept missing their own targets for eliminating the deficit because they weren't able to get the gains in the economy they wanted and weren't actually beyond spending on benefits so long as it was for 'their' voters.
Tuition frees tripled, young people were priced out of the housing market and/or went into less secure work than their parents, people in the public sector effectively saw their pay cut accounting for inflation whereas others struggled.
Corbyn may not have the solution for these, the housing charity Shelter disapprove of rent controls for example, but the Tories didn't offer any for years. Theresa May actually did spot this weakness, even co-opting some of Ed Miliband's ideas about predatory capitalism, but it was too late. That last point also highlights why I think the obsession over party can be unhealthy since she offered ideas deemed insane just twos years before...