Labour's Legacy and Dave's opportunity?

Labour: Don't fix it, spin it: NHS, Education, MoD, Boom & Bust, Policing, Immigration, WMDs. Welfare, House-building, the economy, the future. 

Just as "New Labour' was purely a marketing and communications trick to get them into power, everything they did was about presentation over substance. Spin over reality, looking good rather than doing good. After the state in which they left the economy, coupled with the fact that they don't seem to give a shit about working people, I am constantly amazed that they have any support at all, let alone leading in the polls - albeit not by as much as they should be at this stage in the cycle. 

Makes you wonder, sometimes about the intellect, thought-processes and blind loyalty of your fellow man and woman. I'm not saying the Tories are perfect in any way - they have many failings too, particularly in relation to surveillance and a mindless accedence to the EU (IMO), but they are tackling many of the failings of Labour, more slowly than I'd hoped, but progress does now seem to be being made. 

They should, in my opinion, be starting to move back towards smaller government, lower taxes and less of a nanny state but that is not really happening yet. Dave also has a big problem with vision and leadership, sticking to vision stuff like 'localsm', 'Aspiration nation' (more here), but he's slowly getting there with help from people like Gove and IDS. Positive signs on the economy (green shoots? nah) together with Ed's lack of any cohesive or coherent ideas and the looming communist threat of the dinosaur unions, do, I think, give Dave an opportunity to win at the next election. He'll probably figure out a way of blowing it, but I hope not.

The following are tweet-sized evaluations of Labour's legacy - I decided to put them in a blog rather than inflict them on my followers one by one. Tell me I'm wrong.

Labour legacy #NHS - spend more but don't check it's working. Ignore complaints & indicators of failure. Leave it for someone else to mend.

Labour legacy #Education - Don't improve standards just lower the bar. Get thousands of kids unsuitable for academia into University. And suffocating debt.

Labour legacy #MoD - Waste £billions on projects that don't work but send our troops into harm's way with 30 year old kit on a false promise to George W Bush.

Labour legacy #WMDs - Agree to go to war then retrofit the 'facts'. Sex-up the dossiers, shut up the media & dissenters. One way or another.

Labour legacy #Policing - have more people filling in forms (so we can spin the statistics), than solving crime or keeping the streets safe.

Labour legacy #Immigration - let anyone in - in fact encourage as many as possible but don't keep track of them: there's Labour votes in it.

Labour legacy #integration -let anyone in; to set up their own schools, communities, religious & ethnic groups. Call anyone who demurs 'racist'

Labour legacy #Housebuilding - Need to build more houses than ever & refresh the social housing stock. Put John Prescott in charge. Build nothing.

Labour legacy #economy - 'we've ended boom and bust'. Deregulate the banks; put all our eggs in the financial services basket. What could possibly go wrong?

Labour legacy #Welfare - create a client state where almost everyone is reliant on hand-outs even if they're working & the UK can't afford it.

Labour legacy #Welfare2 - Get Frank Field to come up with a major plan of much-needed reforms then ditch it because it'd be unpopular. Hide it  in the 'too difficult' drawer. Leave it for someone else to fix.

Labour legacy #trust - of course we trust the people, it's why we now have a CCTV camera for every 11 people in the country & gagging orders on whistle-blowers.

Labout legacy #Future - Sell most UK gold reserves at the bottom of the market; raid pension funds so this generation will be poorer than their parents.

Of course if more of this is what you want for our country in the future you know where to put your cross at the next election. Assuming you can find your way out of a room and where the polling station is.

Thanks for reading.