this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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Absolutely agreed. I think the ability of the person, their morals and their impact are important but long term consequences have to play a major role.
Trusses' impacts were immediate and large but have mostly receded. She wasn't around long enough to do any real damage and she's still out there garnering support from the same crazy fuckheads in the first place so no real changes there. They'll just put up someone else instead.
Johnson was by far the worst individual but the damage was relatively small because of how incompetent he was and in fact, he highlighted a lot of issues that will hopefully change for the better now. If another evil politician turns up and makes use of those but is actually competent, they'll go number one with Bojo number 2. Anybody would've struggled with covid and although he made it worse, I think other institutions lessened the impact somewhat.
Blair has the Iraq war, impact on Middle East and the start of the British fall in international relations, which probably puts him pretty high but I think some of the other stuff (e.g. making the BoE independent) probably does just enough to and him.
Brown was in power for too little of a time really but was instrumental in Blair's got so takes some of that heat.
A lot of the country would argue Thatcher should be up there. Her policies continue to have much support in the Tories and some parts of other parties. Definitely a contender.
Brexit has had the worst impacts on every part of our lives and will continue to do so for quite some time. It's also messed up NI, Ireland and the EU itself has suffered from it too. Cameron caused it and then jumped ship because he couldn't help or wasn't willing to, and either way is pretty bad. He has my vote for sure. No other single politic move has caused such a large negative impact.
I am here to tell you that the economic effects of Truss are still being keenly felt by people who are still using food banks and unable to heat their homes.
I'd argue those same people were using food banks long before Lizz Truss wormed her way into power. She's obviously made the situation significantly worse, and it now encompasses a larger section of society...but Cameron's government is what got us into this mess in the first place.
That was my only point, disagreeing with @brewery that Truss's impact didn't cause much real damage. I absolutely agree that Cameron is at the root of all we see today.
Yeah that is a fair point counter to what I said about Truss and yeah, I also forgot to add austerity to the Cameron list! He still ends up on top in my view.
I guess you could argue the Ukraine war for heating costs and brexit is the ultimate problem for higher interest rates but Truss definitely caused the spike and expanded the issues to make them much worse, much more quickly. I retract the mostly receded point.
Their choice to spread the cost of the financial crisis amongst the whole country and including the vulnerable was the worst decision ever (assuming you care about the British public I guess...), Brexit then helped to keep us down and have nothing left when covid happened. Even the UN envoys on poverty are saying that about austerity being done in a tragic way.