The UK has literally become one of those third-world countries where oligarchs buy yachts and fast cars while the population starves.
Who exactly has captured The Guardian, The Times, the Daily Mail, the Financial Times, the London Review of Books, and the BBC all at the same time?
> a non-representative electoral system
that can symmetrically benefit either side.
> feudal traditions of greed and contempt for the lower classes…extended to doctors and lawyers
You can just look these things up: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-.... Doctors and lawyers are still overrepresented. The class background of the new sort of Tory (Williamson, Dorries, Jenkyns) is hardly more aristocratic than the members of the professions that preceded them, even if some receive honours.
> The UK has literally become one of those third-world countries where oligarchs buy yachts and fast cars while the population starves.
This describes pretty much any moderately wealthy country in which hunger still exists. The situation might well be worse in the UK but to show that would require use of such difficult techniques as counting and research, rather than hackneyed repetition of old stereotypes.
This describes pretty much the whole world. I'm convinced at this point that the dystopia we are all headed for is not 1984 or Brave New World or Snow Crash but something more like Elysium where a tiny minority have everything and get to do whatever they want, physically isolated/insulated from the rest who have nothing and live as subjects.
(There is a huge backlog in the courts system and defence barristers are very under-funded, making the problem worse)
Which is another downside...
Edit: The bulk of the 2008 crisis was handled by the previous, Labour government and the conservatives inherited the debts to deal with. I'm not saying that handling of Covid was good, but looking at other countries it was certainly in the average (and the UK government decisively intervened to secure a domestic vaccine).
The thing is that they've been in government for very long so have run out of talents and are obviously being blamed for everything. Many young people have never known anything else so of course they are the bad guys (on top of young people being on average more to the left). This is an eternal cycle and the same will eventually happen to the next Labour majority.
Now, that's the issue Labour have: They have it easy at the moment, it's all the Tories' fault, the Tories are incompetent, etc. Fine, but at some point they will need an actual plan if only because, again, they'll most likely be in charge within months.
Even Brexit is not exclusively the Conservatives' "fault": The Labour party and electorate were also highly divided on the issue and it was the Labour government of the time that decided against all restrictions to East European immigration in 2004. And I remember how popular they were when they obediently followed the US in Iraq...
Labour even had a good shot as being elected earlier but made themselves unelectable by going far left, and they are still grappling with that.
Michelle Mone clearly wasn't the only one punting over-priced, poor quality PPE via the special Tory VIP system.
Cumulatively, how much have Tory VIPs taken out of the economy since they came to power?
Even Sunak seems to be in on it. Like the wink-wink "you outsource your IT services to Infosys and we give you new sweetheart oil contracts" deal that BP and Shell got.
I think we have a right to be angry about this. It's corruption.
UK government is outsourcing everything and it's not just Infosys. They set low salary levels and flooded the market with offshore devs in the last few years.
And she got a peerage out of it! Presumably by knowing the right people and paying them.
Neither the Labour govt of the time or the Conservative ones we've had since 2010 were immediately responsible. But the austerity policy pursued by the Tories since 2010 has put the country in an economic death spiral. Pre-gfc levels of education, health and social care, law and order, infrastructure and defence provision are now basically impossible for the country to sustain. I don't see any way back from this in a timescale that doesn't condem my children's generation to poverty and disadvantage.
(And if the gfc was caused by a failure of regulation then every uk government since 1979 bears some culpability for its failure to supervise a major financial market centre.)
For their mere existence? No. But they absolutely deserve blame them for how they handled these things, given they affected almost every nation on the planet, many of whom handled each rather better.
However it did factor in the amount of deaths caused by COVID.
There is plenty of blame on the current UK government for how they handled the COVID crisis. It even forced out a Prime Minister, albeit for reasons of clandestine office parties, not over casualty rates or PPE corruption scandals.
The UK doesn't look like it's going to rebound for many years, there are now significant structural issues, not least of them being poor infrastructure.
I found this analysis of the UK particularly interesting: https://www.sambowman.co/p/democracy-is-the-solution-to-veto...