The British Prime Minister is one of the Stupidest People Alive

[LeftishBrit]

35. I agree that all our political party leaders are relatively liberal on social issues

And that's a good thing, when I compare them with the likes of Palin and Santorum in America; not to mention people like Nadine Dorries here. But there are big differences in economic issues. And in the end if a politician regards poor people as feckless people who need 'tough love' to force them to overcome their 'benefit dependency', then they are NOT really socially liberal. I have always thought that the recent tendency to separate social and economic progressivism is misguided, as you cannot really have either for all without the other; and it is especially misguided in a country like the UK with a traditional social class system.

I thought Brown was as good a Prime Minister as anyone we've had recently; and he did not 'spend like a drunken sailor'; that is propaganda from those who dislike the public sector as such. Blair did overspend on wars, projects like the Millennium Dome, and constant reorganizations of everything (though that is not the cause of the economic crisis, which is a global issue); but Brown really did work to improve health and education in this country. He was not perfect, far from it- I think our last good Prime Minister was Harold Wilson, and Callaghan was better than anyone who came after -but he was infinitely better than Cameron.

There have been times when there wasn't much of a difference between the parties, and certainly I consider Blair to have been a Tory; but I think there is a pretty huge difference in the fundamentals right now. The basic issue is: do you deal with the economic crisis mainly by using the government to combat it - through job creation, and through protecting the most vulnerable people; or do you deal with it predominantly by seeing government as the problem, and by cutting public services which inevitably leads at a time of recession to greater unemployment, and means that the most vulnerable suffer the most as they are the ones who are generally most dependent on public services?