I'm doing a little film project about Labour's greatest failures over the last ten years. In case there are any I might have missed which you think I ought to include, do feel free to fill the Comments section.UPDATE: Here's one of the Comments, which I thought deserved a wider audience. It's from Brumbrino...
My father had to have open heart surgery last year. For a car
park I have already paid for in contributions, my brother, mother and I spent
around £80 for parking a week. The communal telly on the recovery ward was
removed and patients had to pay a fiver a day to watch television and listen to
radio. These tv stations on each bed were fitted with a IP telephone which we
had to call rather that the ward telephone number (we were told that the ward
phone number was not to be used unless an emergency). The calls to this IP
telephone number per minute were around 50% more than calling Australia
peak-time. The wing of the hospital dad was recovering in was PFI. The bathroom
and lavatory facilities were disgusting and cleaned by the PFI-appointed
cleaning staff once a day. Local medical and ancillary stagg were not allowed to
clean the facilities due to the PFI contract. The same staff had to bring their
own tea and coffee in as they were not allowed to use that that was given to the
ward and in turn served to patients. No in the press we hear that a hospital
(sorry - can't remember which one) is taking out every other light bulb to save
money. The NHS is failing under Labour!
The Congestion Charge - Poll Tax on Wheels which criminalised a whole generation
ReplyDeleteHow Flash Gordon has ruined one of the best occupational pension systems in the world.
ReplyDeleteHow much time have you got, Iain?
ReplyDeleteThe best pension funds in Europe eviscerated.
Integrity of government information services fatally undermined.
Judiciary dragged into the political arena.
Parliament sidelined.
etc., etc.
Sorry Iain, I've just turned 60. I don't have time to list all New Labour's disasters.
ReplyDeleteMethinks we have to be a tad careful how many stones we throw at Labour on this one-glass houses etc!
ReplyDeleteMy father had to have open heart surgery last year. For a car park I have already paid for in contributions, my brother, mother and I spent around £80 for parking a week. The communal telly on the recovery ward was removed and patients had to pay a fiver a day to watch television and listen to radio. These tv stations on each bed were fitted with a IP telephone which we had to call rather that the ward telephone number (we were told that the ward phone number was not to be used unless an emergency). The calls to this IP telephone number per minute were around 50% more than calling Australia peak-time. The wing of the hospital dad was recovering in was PFI. The bathroom and lavatory facilities were disgusting and cleaned by the PFI-appointed cleaning staff once a day. Local medical and ancillary stagg were not allowed to clean the facilities due to the PFI contract. The same staff had to bring their own tea and coffee in as they were not allowed to use that that was given to the ward and in turn served to patients. No in the press we hear that a hospital (sorry - can't remember which one) is taking out every other light bulb to save money. The NHS is failing under Labour!
ReplyDeleteFailed to lose a general election?
ReplyDeleteIain,
ReplyDeleteTo me there can be no greater failure for any Governent, but particularly for a Labour Government, than a reduction in social mobility or a widening of the gap between the richest and poorest in society.
This Government has managed to achieve both.
Bring democracy to Iraq AND peace between Israel and Palestine
ReplyDeleteUhm, this is going to be hard. Let me think...
ReplyDelete1. Education
2. Health
3. Foreign policy
4. Defence
5. Justice
6. Policing
7. The Economy
8. Agriculture and Fishing
9. Industry
10. Ethics
11. Science
12. Transport
13. Good Governance
14. Child welfare
15. Social mobility
16. Post and Telecommunications
17. Energy
18. Culture
19. The Union (erm the Realm not the other thing..)
20. The Commonwealth
On the rest I'd give them a B-.
Excellent post brumbino. A rare outing on Iain's blog for the side of politics that real people actually care about.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest failure for the Labour party was in choosing Tony Blair as leader.
ReplyDeleteThen there is throwing the countires hat into the ring with America at the expense of this countries interests.
Hi Bob....
ReplyDeleteThere's always the next election? Hopefully......
Iain
Failure - where do we begin, so let's start with a biggie.
What about eduction. Blair got in on "Education, Education, Education" and now after 10 years of NuLab and epic levels of spending we still have less than 50% of pupils achieving GCSE grades A-C (if you include maths and english), even with dumbed down exams. Or how about Cleaning Up politics...Loans for Lordships, Bernie Ecclestone, Cheriegate(s), Secret party financing etc puts a couple of Tory MPs receiveing cash in brown envelopes for parlimentary questions into some perspective...
The only mistake the Thatcher government made in 12 years of government was not privatising the BBC back in 79. The rest is history.
ReplyDeleteLabours ten years would take a 3 hour hollywood epic with 5 sequals to cover. And they ant finished yet.
"Failed to lose a general election?"
ReplyDeleteI don't believe for a second you can't come up with a serious failure. Or does your tribal loyalty prevent from you admitting to it?
Am I the only one who can't get Doughty Street to play at the moment?
ReplyDeleteThe Hunting Act. 700 hours of Parliamentary time to produce an unworkable, contradictory abortion that, in terms of wildlife welfare, has done the opposite of what was ostensibly intended.
ReplyDeleteStill the third highest number of signatories on the No 10 petitions list
Brumbrino
ReplyDeleteHow is your father? What was the standard of care he received?
Allowing the Sea Harrier to be scrapped (including those with new airframes) - leaving the Royal Navy with virtually no fighter cover for up to ten years. And the Falklands dependant on one military airfield just at the time the Argentine air forces has been re-equipped.
ReplyDeleteIt's hard to think of a bigger mess than transport.
ReplyDeleteThe roads are clogging up by the day. I remember commuting daily from Hertfordshire to Leicester in 2002 - it took me around an hour and ten minutes straight up the M1. That same journey in 2007 takes an hour and a half.
I love the way Labour trumpets how train punctuality has improved *slightly*. It's hardly proportionate to the extra cash they're throwing at it in subsidies. Or the thousands of shareholders who had their investments robbed. Or the ridiculous fare hikes. Bottom line is trains are horribly crowded, dirty and hot - and frequently cancelled (cancellations, of course, actually improving punctuality statistics - if it doesn't run, it can't run late). Oh, and train companies 're timing' services - a 30 minute journey is now timetabled for 35. Amazing what plate tectonics can do to a land mass.
It's the one thing I can think of that affects absolutely everybody that has genuinely got many, many times worse in the past ten years. I'm not sure why it doesn't get more exposure.
Search for
ReplyDeleteList of organisations associated with the British Labour Party.
This is the electorate that Gordon Brown and his faction are insisting should choose the next prime minister of the United Kingdom.
How many of these do you belong to? How many would you want to?
I don't think the Millenium Dome is a wise choice of picture, Iain.
ReplyDeleteYes, the Labour party have screwed up the entire project, but the original idea and the initial funding both came from the Conservative Party - Blair just kept the ball rolling.
I wouldn't want to dampen your enthusiasm for some Labour-bashing, but please choose a different target!
cPlenty of ideas here (if you'll excuse the link-tarting).
ReplyDeleteBoth the Dome and the current approach to privatisation in hospitals are surely Tory ideas?
ReplyDeleteIs your correspondent or Dave/id Cameron saying that they would wish tax to increase so that carparks at hospitals can go back to being free and so that hospitals were not minded to sign up to rip off deals for TV, tel etc?
Dentistry within NHS from bad (1997) to much worse (2007, and it's costing taxpayers more - of course.
ReplyDeleteDitto dental education in the UK
"Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime". When do we get to see the results?
ReplyDeleteOn liberty: We have a Civil Contingencies Act that, once an emergency has been declared, gives the government the power to cancel existing laws. We have a succession of Terrorism Acts that give police officers enormous arbitrary authority they never had before, a power they have already begun to abuse. Meanwhile a measure passed in 1986 to curb hooliganism at football matches, the Public Order Act, is increasingly being used to prosecute people whose public statements are thought by police officers to be likely to cause “offence.” Other measures include the 2006 Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill allowing governments to bypass Parliament altogether and to make and change many laws at will, without even the excuse of an emergency; in short, to act like a dictatorship.
ReplyDeleteOn crime and culture: Whilst these changes proceed, actual crime is out of control, though citizens are legally prevented from many actions of self-defence. That is why New Labour won’t address the real problem – “fear” – that so concerns the respectable working-class in this country, who have been abandoned by the police and cannot afford to buy their way out of the boarded-up, burned-out estates, with the pounding noise and yobbish harassment, the drug-dealers and needle-littered parks, the strewn garbage and broken glass, the shops with armoured doors and steel bars over their windows, the feral children, savage dogs and violent boozers. It is now clear, with the failure of ASBOS, that none of New Labour’s extravagant initiatives have worked. A new generation, of inner-city lumpen proletariat, look downtrodden and stripped of culture. Manners are appalling, the language sounds coarse and debased to the older generation.
Labour has failed to uphold a central tenet of democracy, by shutting down free speech and freedom of expression.
ReplyDeleteno longer anonymous... I can think of loads of things Labour has done that I don't like (and by the way, we seriously failed to win a general election) and one of them is excellently highlighted by Brumbino. The PFI and all of its vile manifestations were introduced by the last Conservative Government as an attempt by Major to reduce public sector borrowing in order to get us into firing line for the Euro. Continuing with this nonsensical Tory policy has most certainly been a big failure in my book, as demonstrated by Brumbino's experiences... but hardly one the Conservatives can start wetting themselves over.
ReplyDeleteThat's it, I'm off. This blog used to be fun; it was always right-leaning but it did it with a sense of humour, style and wickedness. It was scurrilous, opinionated, light-hearted - and not afraid to have a pop at the Tories if warranted.
ReplyDeleteNow it's just become another robotic, humourless, on-message exercise in partisan raspberry blowing. CCHQ have obviously got to you, Iain. Ta ra.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteSorry Iain, I've just turned 60. I don't have time to list all New Labour's disasters.
6:03 PM
I'm just 58 I've got the time but not the stamina.
1. Failure to match defence spending with increased military commitments - whether or not people agree with the deployment surely they agree forces should be properly equipped to do the job once sent.
ReplyDelete2. Failure to build more prisons, thus allowing criminals, including paedophiles, to roam the streets.
3. Failure to restore discipline in schools, thus ruining education even for those who still want to learn.
4. Failure to spend taxpayers' money on frontline services, instead wasting eyewatering amounts of cash on "five a day co-ordinators" and other made up jobs while hospitals close.
5. Failure to reduce police bureaucracy, meaning that officers are in the station filling in pointless forms instead of patrolling the streets and deterring and solving crimes.
That's the top 5, the global internet does not have enough storage space for the complete list.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteNever mind Labour. I can't be bothered to watch "Question Time" any more. I have been a loyal fan since the days of Robin Day. I have seen it become a festival of political correctness, where the audience claps wildly when the speaker says the "right thing", and hisses at the vacuous politicians who may as well be mute for all the substance they consist of.
ReplyDeleteNo one is daring, nobody speaks outside of the bubble and nobody creates embarrassment or awkwardness.
Question Time has, in the last ten years of a Labour government become a reflection of the paucity of thought and intellectual rigour in that same government.
Question Time is no longer a drawn sword parting the darkness of ignorance. It is a confederacy of dunces.
Corrupted the Magistrates' Courts by encouraging them to become members of speed camera partnerships and get paid by those partnerships. Bye bye fair trial, the courts are in hock to the prosecution.
ReplyDeleteThe greatest failure/success of NuLabour has been to show the lunacy of political correctness and the victim culture that stands at the the very heart of socialist thinking.
ReplyDeleteIraq. Anyone with any idea about anything could see how it was going to work out. I'm all for military intervention, but Iraq was a fatal mistake that stemmed directly from Labours huge majority and propagandistic tendencies.
ReplyDeleteFor a Labour Government, it has to be the failure to reduce inequality. That's what Labour Governments are supposed to be for, aren't they?
ReplyDeleteCor, tough one!
ReplyDeleteI think this hasn't been mentioned: flogging off our gold reserves at ridiculously low prices.
"Brumbino lists the saving of the 'wrong pound' in the NHS. An easy target."
ReplyDeleteResponse to David Kendrick:
David, at the risk of sounding like a screaming socialist or worse a Old-Labourite- trust me I'm neither - it's not as easy target if you have very little money in the first place.
Both of my parents are proud 'old-school' people who have plodded on for years without complaint paying into a system that now stabs them in the back.
My father's condition was life-threatening. (Fantastic) Medical care aside, the NHS's response?
Legal extortion on a massive scale. I was once employed by a private organisation who was involved in PFI as well as taking over contracts for the running of services on behalf of the public sector. The money we paid out probably didn't even go into the NHS - they went into the private Car Park company and private multi-media company. These companies are already probably making a profit for being paid to run these services by the NHS.
I cannot see how this situation can improve the lot of the NHS and it's primary reason for existing, us the Great British Public.
once blair and bush are out hopefully things will become better.
ReplyDeleteIan, I appreciate you asked for Labour's Failures, but I think their one Big Success needs highlighting.
ReplyDeleteIt took the Old Conservative party at least 18 years to become something we didn't like and be found out accordingly.
Labour have been found out far sooner. Well done them I say...