Greatest Labour ****

[Mon Ami Mate]

Who has been the Labour Party's most despicable piece of st?

So many to choose from:

Wilson
Callaghan
Foot
Kinnock
Livingstone
Prescott
Blair
Brown
Harman

Just for starters.

[JagLover]

Brown

For the personality and the damage he caused.

[Mon Ami Mate]

I'm leaning towards Wilson. It was he who presided over the sacrifice of British industry at the hands of the unions and set about dismantling the pride and dignity of the nation.

[Eric Mc]

I think the Conservatives could profer a few names as well - Duncan Sandys for a start - who singlehandedly set about destroying the British aircraft industry.

[smn159]

Thatcher

[Mon Ami Mate]

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim. In those days there wasn't the openness about the state of national finances that there is today. We still had pride and patriotism. The Government couldn't say "we can't do this because we are economically knackered". The truth is that this country has never recovered economically from WW2. Won the war, lost the peace. The wanton economic vandalism perpetrated by various Labour governments is the very last thing we have needed to rebuild our economy. It has gone too far now, it will never happen.

[eharding]

Mon Ami Mate said:

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim.

Point of order. It was Tony Benn who cancelled the TSR2.

[pacman1]

smn159 said:

Thatcher

Shame you put that smiley in, this thread could have proved well entertaining! Chicken you are!

[Mon Ami Mate]

eharding said:

Mon Ami Mate said:

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim.

Point of order. It was Tony Benn who cancelled the TSR2.

Eventually. Sandys did set the ball rolling.

[Pesty]

Straw

[AndrewW-G]

IMHO it would be the Blair, Brown, Mandelson triumvirate

Declared an unwarranted war, based on lies
Pissed about with red tape, to the point that it's damn near impossible to do anything innovative in the UK
Politicised & incentivised the Police forces
Destroyed the economy, yet spun a web of lies and deceit, leading the average bod on the street to blame one of the few industries to still bring massive amounts of money into the UK
Tied the governments procurement systems up in knots, to ensure that their chosen suppliers & the politicians pictured besides the new hospital / school etc benefited more, than the tax payers, who could if run properly, received far far greater improvements for the same cost.
Ran amok with PFI, the cost of which is going to cripple the country far more than people seem to realise.
Increased taxation to a level that now makes the UK uncompetitive
Allowed some of our industry to be sold off, rather than support it in the UK .


Etc Etc Etc

Yet there are still some rather challenged people who will try and blame everything on Baroness Thatcher!

[Somewhatfoolish]

Mon Ami Mate said:

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim. In those days there wasn't the openness about the state of national finances that there is today. We still had pride and patriotism. The Government couldn't say "we can't do this because we are economically knackered". The truth is that this country has never recovered economically from WW2. Won the war, lost the peace. The wanton economic vandalism perpetrated by various Labour governments is the very last thing we have needed to rebuild our economy. It has gone too far now, it will never happen.

I would argue until Thatcher the Conservative party was probably to the left of New Labour.

[Eric Mc]

Mon Ami Mate said:

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim. In those days there wasn't the openness about the state of national finances that there is today. We still had pride and patriotism. The Government couldn't say "we can't do this because we are economically knackered". The truth is that this country has never recovered economically from WW2. Won the war, lost the peace. The wanton economic vandalism perpetrated by various Labour governments is the very last thing we have needed to rebuild our economy. It has gone too far now, it will never happen.

Sandys' Defence White Paper was actually 1957 and led to the finalisation of the very ambitious setting of the specs for TSR2. So, indirectly, his White Paper did lead to the cancellation of TSR2, but in a fairly roundabout way - 8 years later

[Eric Mc]

Mon Ami Mate said:

eharding said:

Mon Ami Mate said:

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim.

Point of order. It was Tony Benn who cancelled the TSR2.

Eventually. Sandys did set the ball rolling.

Wasn't it Denis Healey, as Chancellor, who axed TSR32? I would have thought that Benn tried to support the TSR2 as a large number of workers in his constituency (Bristol) were involved in the project. He certainly was a staunch supporter of Concorde.

[cymtriks]

Willson and Callaghan.

Three day week, Red Robbo, Winter of discontent, Sitting in the dark by candle light because of yet another strike, the dead unburied and hasty plans for emergency burial at sea, inflation out of control...

These are beyond dispute.

You could arguably add Leyland cars, Grammar schools destroyed, TSR cancelled.

Brown and Blair hardly register compared to these two, if you disagree just think about the stuff above. Can you imagine living with batteries on standby and regularly living by candlelight? Can you imagine local authorities contemplating mass burial at sea due to a gravedigger's strike? Can you imagine great industries reduced to joke status by Red Robbo types?

Utter idiots.

[s2art]

It wasnt just the TSR2 that Wilsons government cancelled. The British space program, which was highly successful and done on a shoe string, had just achieved a low cost satellite launcher. So just before there was a huge market for launching comms satellites Labour scrapped the programme.

[motco]

Mon Ami Mate said:

eharding said:

Mon Ami Mate said:

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim.

Point of order. It was Tony Benn who cancelled the TSR2.

Eventually. Sandys did set the ball rolling.

I seem to recall Dennis Healey ordering the destruction of the prototypes, tooling, jigs, and fixtures. I visited Cranfield in the seventies and there was a surviving aircraft on the tarmac. They had hidden it from the inspector whose job was to ensure none survived the sledgehammer. It's now at Duxford I think. Eric will confirm or refute the claim that it was capable of flying at 50' altitude fully automatically - at some very unfeasible speed too. Apocryphal...

[Eric Mc]

motco said:

Mon Ami Mate said:

eharding said:

Mon Ami Mate said:

History repeating though isn't it Eric? Sandys had to balance the books and TSR2 was the victim.

Point of order. It was Tony Benn who cancelled the TSR2.

Eventually. Sandys did set the ball rolling.

I seem to recall Dennis Healey ordering the destruction of the prototypes, tooling, jigs, and fixtures. I visited Cranfield in the seventies and there was a surviving aircraft on the tarmac. They had hidden it from the inspector whose job was to ensure none survived the sledgehammer. It's now at Duxford I think. Eric will confirm or refute the claim that it was capable of flying at 50' altitude fully automatically - at some very unfeasible speed too. Apocryphal...

That was the planned flight regime - although at those low altitudes the speed would have been in the transonic zone. The Tornado GR4 of today has more or less the capabilities intended for the TSR2 - in 1966.

[Mon Ami Mate]

cymtriks said:

Willson and Callaghan.

Three day week, Red Robbo, Winter of discontent, Sitting in the dark by candle light because of yet another strike, the dead unburied and hasty plans for emergency burial at sea, inflation out of control...

These are beyond dispute.

You could arguably add Leyland cars, Grammar schools destroyed, TSR cancelled.

Brown and Blair hardly register compared to these two, if you disagree just think about the stuff above. Can you imagine living with batteries on standby and regularly living by candlelight? Can you imagine local authorities contemplating mass burial at sea due to a gravedigger's strike? Can you imagine great industries reduced to joke status by Red Robbo types?

Utter idiots.

Sums things up nicely.

However, for all that though, they didn't come close to succeeding in bankrupting the nation and declaring war on the middle classes and the history, pride and traditions of the nation in the way that Blair and Brown did.

[GarryA]

Bob Crow.