The Tories have nothing to show for 12 years in power except low growth and misery. Instead of talking about the government’s failure to fix any of the myriad problems this country has faced, we’re all talking about partygate.

35 comments

  1. Article:

    In the run-up to the 2010 election, this country was in a mess. GDP, both absolute and in per capita terms, had fallen in the wake of the financial crisis. Average wages, too, had taken a hit. Outside the realm of dry economic statistics, in what politicians like to refer to as the “real economy”, an unnerving number of crises were looming into view: an underfunded social care system, in which people could lose everything they had and still end up without good care in old age; a slight but definite decline in the rate of home ownership, as a growing number of people found themselves priced out; the near collapse in decent pension provision.

    Worst of all, so far as the people running the opposition Conservatives’ campaign seemed to think, the deficit — the measure of the gap between the amount coming into the Treasury and the amount then spent — had exploded as tax revenues from the financial sector collapsed. What the Tories wanted us to think about all this was clear from their campaign slogan: “We can’t go on like this.”

    You can probably see the punchline to this one coming a mile off, although to be fair we’ve had 12 years to think about it, in between bouts of hysterical crying, but: we did go on like this. And if the list of problems I just ran through sounds remarkably familiar, that’s because the Tories have failed to solve any of them. GDP has grown, but mostly because the population has, and neither GDP per capita nor real wages have risen in the consistent manner history might lead you to expect. Even before the current cost of living crisis — even before Covid — we were barely better off than we were when the Tories came to power, a break with the last two centuries of economic history so weird that economists have given it a name: the “productivity puzzle”.

    Actually, that isn’t fair. It’s not that we’re barely better off. It’s that we’re much, much worse off. Social care is still under-funded but the demographic crisis is much closer, and the lack of safe and decent provision for the elderly is swallowing up more and more beds and budget in the NHS. The government has introduced automatic saving towards pensions, but the gap between the amount actuaries tell us we need to save and the amount that we’re actually capable of saving is so vast that the problem hasn’t been solved after all. The housing crisis, of course, has become a lot, lot worse, with home ownership rates down, prices and mortgage debt up and rents increasingly silly.

    I doubt all this would have felt worth it even if the various Conservative governments had succeeded in getting the deficit down, but they didn’t. After gutting large chunks of the British state in the name of deficit reduction, leaving local government in penury and the public realm increasingly, visibly shabby, the public finances are not strikingly better than they were in 2010. It turns out that growing revenues matter as much as shrinking spending; that crises and budget shocks can happen to any government; that you can’t cut your way out of crisis after all.

    All of which raises a question: what the hell have the Tories been doing while in power for the past 12 years? Look at any long-running government from history and you can see plenty of missteps and broken crockery, but also achievements that are pretty hard to deny. New Labour improved public services and massively reduced poverty; the Tory governments of the 1950s and ’60s tackled the post-war housing shortage. Even the Thatcher and Major governments, well, they may have gutted the economy of large chunks of the country, but they undeniably changed things, moving us to an entirely different economic model. You may not like the results but you can’t deny that it happened.

    This lot, though: what the hell have they done? Michael Gove’s school reforms; tripling tuition fees, so that nearly half of 21-year-olds begin their adult lives loaded up with debt and effectively pay vastly higher marginal tax rates than those who came before them; making landlords much, much richer — hardly enough to justify a dozen years in power.

    The biggest thing, loathe it though I do, must be something that those shiny PR men who dominated the party back in 2010 never actually meant to do at all: Brexit. But both the endless talk of Article 16 and the increasingly hard-to-ignore queues of lorries on the M20 must suggest that there is at least some chance that, while Britain will surely never rejoin the European Union, Brexit is not truly done after all.

    As much as I’d like to blame all this on the Tory party, in good conscience I cannot, because we let them do it. The country has voted them into office. The media has been repeatedly distracted by Westminster soap opera nonsense. It’s half a decade or more since the government did anything substantive to address any of the myriad problems we face, but none of us are talking about that.

    Now we’re all distracted by partygate, and while the Prime Minister clearly should resign, when his allies say there are more important things we could be talking about, it’s hard to entirely disagree. But they shouldn’t imagine that talking about those things would improve their party’s lot in life. If we did, all we’d really be talking about is all the many ways in which they’ve failed.

  2. The thing that’s shocking is after 12 years in power they still blame the last labour government.

    I feel like there’s very few things that can’t be fixed over a 12 year period.

  3. That’s the thing so many who don’t like the conservatives have made such a big deal out of everything people are bored now and have lost interest.

  4. Partygate **is** about the economic/social situation. It’s what happens when the media refuse to hold the Conservatives to account, the public will find a way.

    I am confident that Boris Johnsons successor will really struggle unless he/she pursues a social-democratic reform program. Seems a tad unlikely…

  5. Well if corbyn and soros hadn’t been trying everything in their power to destroy this nation, we would the greatest nation in the world by now

  6. Golly, nothing to show for 12 years except utter misery.

    I guess that’s bad, but imagine being the opposition party that can only muster a 2% lead in the polls after 12 years of this so called misery.

  7. You’d think that after 9 years we would have realised. But we wanted 3 more of it and here we are. Bring on another decade!

  8. I have good qualifications and enough money to start again fresh somewhere else. At this point im just so fucking done with this country. I’ll just sip wine in Europe while watching the UK fucking burn because for some reason we keep voting in these fuckwits.

  9. They have achieved the only thing they are there to do – enriching themselves and their donors. The people of the UK and the well-being of the country itself are next to irrelevant. They can go live abroad (see our chancellor for proof of this) when they are finally found out, most of us have no choice but to live here while they tear down and sell off our institutions,assets and services around us.

  12. I object to that summary.

    Many of us have talked about every mistake, every corrupt move, every frankly vicious policy, since they were elected. But most of us have found that our neighbors don’t care or even vote Tory.

    We’re talking about Partygate (and refusing to drop it when the government tries to change the topic) because too many of us have neighbors and associates who can tolerate killing the NHS, but PM Johnson attending a party during lockdown really annoys them.

    So we’re going to run with that story as long as it runs.

    It’s also the principle. People can debate most topics, but few (who aren’t predisposed to favour the Tories) will defend someone who says something and does something else. Even a toddler knows that it’s wrong to be duplicitous. It’s a nice, simple issue that even those who dislike politics can grasp.

  13. We’re talking about partygate, because partying while people’s loved ones died alone is the thing which currently may actually unseat a duplicitous law breaker.

  15. If it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back then I’m absolutely thrilled that we all won’t shut up about Partygate!

  17. Precisely! What exactly have the tories given us these past 12 years other than Brexit and further financial instability?

    Any tory care to retort?

  20. The bug issues here are not talked about because they have won elections since. People still voted tory, Labour need a reason for people to not do that.

  21. It’s incredibly unambiguous, can’t simply be brushed off as part of a broken system that voters believe they can benefit from somehow, and something the general public can feel immensely betrayed over regardless of their political affiliations.

  23. Yes because we already know everything is shit and miserable and that’s not done anything to get these dirty Tory cunts out of office. This might.

  24. Because this is the one issue where the tories and their supporters can’t deflect with “well it would have been worse under labour” which is the argument they’ve been dining out on for 12 fucking years.

  25. Unpopular opinion but UK and the developed world in general has been in a silent depression since 2008 and there really isn’t anything any government can do about it except redistribute an even smaller pie. Not saying they’ve done any fair redistribution though.

  26. The same problem would exist whether we had Tory, Lib Dem, Labour or Monster Raving Loony governments; our two biggest budget items as of 2016, (38.5% in total) are pensions and NHS costs, the vast majority of which goes to the old. We have too few people of working age, and too many people who are elderly, who tend to vote Tory. Because they vote Tory, the Tories spend more money (not theirs, naturally – our taxes, plus plenty of debt) on them.

    I don’t know how that problem is to be fixed, but we can’t indefinitely impoverish working-age people out of getting homes and starting families to buy grey voters.

    EDIT: I’m being downvoted because I’m pointing out demographic reality?

  27. Actually, this statement is totally incorrect. They have millions/billions of tax payers money in their back pockets to show for their 12 years.

    It’s a joke that a third of the country will vote them back in no matter what

  28. We’re talking about partygate because before any consideration is given about a party’s administrative acumen, we want them to respect the rule of law.

    Then, yes, we can also talk about how they’re terrible at the economy too.

  30. Yeah but you could also say labour failed too for not giving viable alternatives in debate so, it’s just incompetence all around

  34. I dont think the economy is crap because of the Tories. It wasnt stellar under Gordon Brown and economies are bad all over the world. Whenever I go to other country subs like Canada etc they are complaining about the exact same things. Also 2010-2015 the economy wasnt that bad.

  35. If your life hasn’t changed much over the last 12 years, why would you vote any differently.

    I have not and will never vote tory. If i had and my life is just cruising along like “normal” why would I vote any different .

    Most people don’t give a shit about other people and therein lies the problem.

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