Good scam? Create a series of increasingly bitter & contentious leadership battles. Charge more and more to vote.

Easy money.

I think you guys are looking at this Blair thing wrong. Before new labour the minimum wage was something Tories wouldn't touch. Devolution, tax-credits, and EMA too. I'm not saying he's Clement Atlee, but he's very distinguishable from your garden variety Tory. Perhaps the fact that Cameron is very socially liberal for a Tory skewers it even more.

They're pretty busto atm with this trade union bill so they're looking to maximise value obviously. At least the public won't be able to question their economic credentials anymore, they're exploiting a captive market.

blair also had a hand in cameron turning up of course. the tories were like ****in hell people seem to quite like all this civil partnerships and tree hugging envirobollocks stuff, we better not try to shove liam fox down their throats or we'll get ballot****ed again

i dont think he is very distinguishable from rando tory these days, but thats because rando tory 2016 is a lot less mental than rando tory 1990. and a lot of that is down to blair

Fyp

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/poli...y-couples.html

You wanker limeys can't help but always live in the past. Get over it and move on. Given how much you have screwed yourselves in the last month and the on-going political imbroglio; I hope Merkel calls in the Luftwaffe and bombs the lot of you back into the stone age. You deserve it.

good 1 m8

Yea this, I know the Iraq war was an obvious pisser but that was an outlier of foreign affairs not something central to the New Labour project.

Tax credits is something that would have never happened under Tories. Also things like Sure start. Public sector was also pretty ****** generously funded. Cornwall which was basically a quangoocracy with everyone working for the council or public sector boomed under NL, not so much since 2008 tho.

You can bite the hand that feeds you but you can't rip it off completely. The Blair Gov't went pretty close to the bone though - union dis-affiliation was a real prospect, some smaller unions did I think. That would have created a crisis of the scale we are seeing now. So yes New Labour =/= Tory, but it is tory-lite. This is how the system works - some social reform has to be allowed.

Except, this is not the era of social reform. Neo-liberalism is the reversal of social reform. You can give out tax credits but you can take them back the day after; you can't rebuild post war social infrastructure once it has been dismantled and sold off.

Remember also that these so called progressive measures are not always what they're cracked up to be. You have to look at actual living standards, take home pay in real terms; benefits being off-set against rising rents, credit card re-payments, inflation, rising costs. Living standards for most people have been falling since the mid-70s. Every Government since then has dished out the same Thatcherite/neo-liberal medicine, re-shaping the economy to work for one group - the rich.

I did see that, thanks.

This thread is very illuminating to me. Cheers.

The problem for labour and the Blairites is that they have no ideas. In last years leadership, no one but Corbyn had anything to say. If you don't offer any hope or inspiration then why would anyone vote for you? Angela eagle has no ideas; surely there was a better candidate!

Sent the telecoms sector in recession after the 3g auction, and then went on a pre-election spending spree with the £23bn proceeds.

But yeah, the recession wasn't Labours fault.

this is truly genius. rigs it to return to the still unelectable bomb iraq side of the party, avoids the issue of leaving corbyn off the ballot, and sends an enormous **** you to everyone who probably should have joined the greens in the first place. wonder how many cancelled memberships they'll get this week?

lol.

What is this ****.

Would have avoided a global recession if handled 3G auction better.

Your arguments are as concise and pointless as ever.

The telecoms crash in 2001 and the Global Recession in 2008 were two separate events.

The big clue is they happened 7 years apart.

LOL OAFK as usual.

Labour leadership: Owen Smith intends to run in contest

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36780715

So...Eagle and Smith split their own vote and let Corbyn win?

GTFO, when people mention "the recession" they tend not to be talking about the 2001 telecoms crash.

Well, Google seems to understand "telecoms recession".

If you don't, that's not my problem.

love a bit of Frankie Boyle

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ainst-the-poor

They use AV for the Labour leadership so this should not really be a factor.

That's very good.

Assuming she lasts until the next GE, 3 years and 300 days away, Theresa May will be the UK's longest serving unelected PM since WW2.

Very funny. I wonder if a political campaign has ever been self-aware enough to deliberately choose this stategy. "Mention yourself as little as possible. In fact, use a fake name. Just savage the opposition. It doesn't matter if they know who you are, when they get to the voting booth they'll know which name they're not voting for. "

Vincent Hanna: (Fitting?) words from the Prince Regent. And now let's have a word from the Adder Party candidate, Mr. S. Baldrick, who so far has not (Baldrick enters with a turnip in his mouth, the leaves sticking out) commented on his policies in this campaign, but with him is his election agent, Mr. E.Blackadder.

Edmund Blackadder: Well, we in the Adder Party are going to fight this campaign on issues,not personalities.

Vincent Hanna: Why is that?

Edmund Blackadder: Because our candidate doesn't have a personality.

Having heard TMs speech am pretty sure Coma is confirmed.