Whose been the best Prime Minister in your lifetime?

boltonbonce wrote:After calling half the Tory members crooks,he was asked to withdraw the remark by the Speaker.

"Ok,half the Tory members aren't crooks".

That's fantastic.

I'd not heard that one before.

Good old Den.

Two have voted for Bliar?  . This forum is truly for Nutters.

I'm going to get a lot of flak here but for me it's Blair. Among other things the working families tax credit was a stroke of genius that made my life a lot better and there was just a sense of optimism and hope about everything in almost everyone I knew especially around the turn of the millennium. I never liked Brown and I know a lot of things Blair wanted to do were blocked by the then chancellor and his cronies who circled like vultures. Whether or not you agree with the Iraq War (personally I think we should have done it right and booted Hussein back in 91 not left him in place for another 12 years) Blair accomplished quite a lot domestically and he both modernised and revitalised the Labour Party by building on the work the late great John Smith had started.

I suppose it's all down to a matter of perception and how each individual sees his/her life at the time but from 97 to 02 my life and that of my then wife and 2 sons improved dramatically both financially and in other ways. I'd have to say that those years were among the best days of my life and one of the very rare times when I wasn't worried about making ends meet. I still don't understand how the most popular Labour leader ever, a man who won 3 straight General Elections and by very big majorities is now so villified by so many. Yes he's opinionated and he didn't exactly cover himself in glory on the foreign stage but he was far from alone in that. Personally I think we won't see a Labour leader that effective at convincing the public to follow him again in my lifetime.

luckyPeterpiper wrote:I'm going to get a lot of flak here but for me it's Blair. Among other things the working families tax credit was a stroke of genius that made my life a lot better and there was just a sense of optimism and hope about everything in almost everyone I knew especially around the turn of the millennium. I never liked Brown and I know a lot of things Blair wanted to do were blocked by the then chancellor and his cronies who circled like vultures. Whether or not you agree with the Iraq War (personally I think we should have done it right and booted Hussein back in 91 not left him in place for another 12 years) Blair accomplished quite a lot domestically and he both modernised and revitalised the Labour Party by building on the work the late great John Smith had started.

I suppose it's all down to a matter of perception and how each individual sees his/her life at the time but from 97 to 02 my life and that of my then wife and 2 sons improved dramatically both financially and in other ways. I'd have to say that those years were among the best days of my life and one of the very rare times when I wasn't worried about making ends meet. I still don't understand how the most popular Labour leader ever, a man who won 3 straight General Elections and by very big majorities is now so villified by so many. Yes he's opinionated and he didn't exactly cover himself in glory on the foreign stage but he was far from alone in that. Personally I think we won't see a Labour leader that effective at convincing the public to follow him again in my lifetime.

If you read Broken Vows you will realise exactly why he is hated. The book is a hatchet job but Blair promised so much more than he delivered. He capitalised on public perceptions of Tory sleaze only to engage in the same kind of activity. He lied to lead us into a futile war in Iraq. He said his biggest regret was passing the Freedom of Information Act.

Having said all that I can understand why you picked Blair. The alternatives are all pretty grim.

I'll make a point of checking it out but to be honest I never thought he was a superman, just a lot better than many people give him credit for. I think in some ways he was also a victim of circumstance because we've stood by America for so long that to do anything else in '03 would have been unthinkable to a lot of the electorate. His reasons were stupid and lying was even more so but in all truth I think we were right to go there. Hussein was one of the most evil men alive and his regime was slaughtering thousands while the west stood by doing nothing because we need the oil and were afraid of offending Muslims by attacking a supposedly Islamic Regime. Frankly I would have been an avid supporter if Blair and Bush had said "enough is enough, we're going there to finish the job my dad and John Major started and stop this scumbag gassing his own people" but they didn't. They came up with a load of garbage about WMD's and 9/11 which even a two year old could see through. It was (for me) Blair's one great mistake and showed his weakness in Foreign Policy which he himself should have seen and left to his Foreign Secretary to sort. Domestically I still say he was the best Labour Prime Minister we've ever seen and a large part of the British public agreed with me on three separate occasions. Whether or not his legacy is positive or negative no one can ever deny that for a short while he united this country in a way no Prime Minister before or since in the post WW2 era ever did.

boltonbonce wrote:Who was the best Prime Minister we never had?

Brian Clough

Stanley Unwin

Lard Lad wrote:Stanley Unwin

He'd certainly make more sense than some.

i was extremely happy when Blair won the election as it meant the end of far too many years of Tory rule and for a while it was great, but he will forever be remembered for WMD's and leading us into deeply unpopular wars in the middle east.

I have no issue with Corbyn and his left wing views, he's an old fashioned socialist and Labour should be the other end of the spectrum than the Tories, but Blair and the party did end up morphing into Tory Lite by the end of the Blair/Brown era.

I do think though that Labour will never be elected with Corbyn in charge

Tony Blair goes down as one of the worst in my opinion, from the day he got in his social climbing slag of a wife was plotting how they could profit from it. And the biggest route to profit she could see was making millions in America once he was out.
Unfortunately to achieve that he had to be Americas puppet and bend down and take one when they told him to.
Whether you liked Maggie's policies or not a least she demanded respect not just here but all over the world, her handling of the Falklands crisis, the unions and also Reagan meant she was more of a leader than many of the plastic career politicians since.

Norpig wrote:i was extremely happy when Blair won the election as it meant the end of far too many years of Tory rule and for a while it was great, but he will forever be remembered for WMD's and leading us into deeply unpopular wars in the middle east.

I have no issue with Corbyn and his left wing views, he's an old fashioned socialist and Labour should be the other end of the spectrum than the Tories, but Blair and the party did end up morphing into Tory Lite by the end of the Blair/Brown era.

I do think though that Labour will never be elected with Corbyn in charge

It's perhaps an age thing but I notice Alex Douglas-Home and Clement Attlee aren't on the list and if they were I'd undoubtedly vote for Clement Attlee who dragged Britain out of the postwar depression kicking and screaming.
People forget that we were on the verge of collapse after WW2 - financially bankrupt, industry on the floor, food rationing and genuine hardship across the board but Attlee's government was the most progressive we've ever had and they turned our world around. 
In one Parliament they created the NHS by nationalising hospitals, they created the National Insurance scheme to give people a pension and look after the sick and disabled, they nationalised all the weak and struggling industries and created British Rail, the Bank of England, the Coal Board, Electricity Board, Gas Board, British Steel, Cable and Wireless, British Waterways and more. 
All our natural resources that were being pillaged by private owners were secured for the benefit of the nation. OK not all those organisations worked perfectly but they worked far better than they had done when they were in private hands - and the nation benefitted from the profits.

Many years later, when people had forgotten how all these industries were nationalised to save them from certain collapse we turned against some of them and that allowed Thatcher to get away with selling off our Oil and Gas fields to the Americans and our Railways to the private sector for peanuts and closing down our Coal industry - all of which would be good to have in a post-EU landscape but it's too late now.

Attlee was a quiet bloke and not at all the media-driven personality that we seem to need today but he and his Cabinet got things done and achieved more than the rest of the list put together. They dragged the working class out of poverty and gave Britons the standard of living that we take for granted today.

Even though I was a baby when Attlee's career ended he would get my vote.

Surprised Thatcher's winning this, the economy may have boomed under her but we're still paying the price for both hers and Reagan's neo-conservatist policies. 

By de-regulating the banks so heavily she essentially handed control over to the free market, which we've experienced first hand the problems of. Not to mention the selling off of many profitable government assets like the ICL just like the current government, assets have been sold off for short term gains to hit completely pointless targets they set themselves - basically a guise for shrinking the state for which we're all worse off in the long run.

She also instigated the dismantling of social housing in this country by instigating right to buy. Had she kept to the commitment of building a house for every one sold it wouldn't have been an issue but as we all know she got nowhere near it. All she did was plunge thousands more people in to long term mortgage payments they never had a hope of paying off. The debt culture in this country started as a direct result of Thatcher's policies and that's before we even get on to her attacks on miners.

She replaced free milk in Primary Schools with an all you can eat crayon buffet.

Which is where the remain voters developed their taste for the waxy snack