Thatcher started dicking around with the NHS, but then Blair came in and dicked around with it some more. The fact that they didn’t manage to destory it is testament to Nye Bevan’s genius more than anything else.

Thatcher privatized things that shouldn’t have been privatized, and so did Major, but Blair actually privatized things that even the Tories knew better than to screw with.

During the Thatcher years there was a significant rise in unemployment, poverty, and illiteracy. Illitercy, especially, had not been a problem in decades. Blair has not actually done anything to restore most of the programs that had prevented these problems. Again, he’s messed around with trendy, “modern” ideas like “school choice” and such - things that do nothing to improve education but sound good on the stump. His clever idea of creating hospital “trusts” hasn’t worked out so well - most of them are close to bankruptcy, which is a brand-new problem for Britain. Hospitals that were not “modernized” are not having these problems.

And so on.

I’m also not sure how much good it does for poverty when Gordon Brown insists on stupid schemes like a National ID that’s expected to cost billions to the national treasury with an added something like eighty or ninety pounds that an individual will still have to pay to get one.

New Labour, I’m afraid, is a lot like New Democrats - they really aren’t on our side.

Why DID the righties through a fit when Gates’ foundation received Buffet’s billions? I never did figure that out, beyond that obvious but depressing conclusion that they’re just greedy and souless.