BBC coverage of 1990 tax riots in London

I get the opposite issue. The video falls off the edge

The scary thing is that Blair is the last PM who was an improvement on their predecessor.

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Yeah, to my shame I can’t remember who was what between Blair and Johnson!

It was a confusing time for all of us… :grin:

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source-8

Yeah. Fuck.

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That happened about 20 years later…

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Only my opinion, but I’d add that the riots basically didn’t change anything for the better. Council tax (that the poll tax was to replace) is still in place and still has it’s own problems. The Criminal Justice Bill was 4 short years later. And as others have pointed out, although it damaged Thatcher, the Tories still won the next election.

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Labour dropped 60 seats in 1983, I think because people just didn’t like Michael Foot. The Bennites thought he was too moderate, and the moderates split off to form the SDP. That gave the Tories an almost impenetrable lead coming into the next election. Kinnock was doing very well in 1987 up until a brutal advertising campaign by the Tories, suggesting that the Russians would march into England should Labour win, presumably first taking the Eurostar through Germany and France and then walking on water. I’m not kidding about the campaign (my first experience of a general election in the UK), here’s one of the ads they ran in the papers:
image

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He also tried to cut disability benefits in 1999 too.

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I remember the 1987 campaign well. And remember the look of absolute indignation and “I can’t believe people are falling for this” on Kinnock’s face. It was stunning.

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Yeah, well, there’s that. I always thought the death of John Smith was an incredible setback for what Labour could have been… finding out he died that morning just after I landed in Glasgow was so sad.

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Yay, Sinead!

Blair was taking his cue from Clinton, who was also a neo-liberal.

Depressing.

Really depressing.

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This was the Blair campaign song.
Professor Brian Cox was their keyboard player.
He may be one of the few for which it came true.

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I had a lovely moment of nostalgia just there, thinking - Weren’t the '90s really weird?

And then I realised where we are now…

Grim

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That’s… terrible. I think I hate everything about that. :grimacing:

They were, but there was much better music out there than that…

I prefer THIS Things can only get better!

A much, MUCH better song, IMHO… And that 80s hair! Hells yay!

I’m a cold war historian, and I really want to go back to the sanity of the cold war… How bad is that?

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It’s not that hard when you have 95% of the media on your side spewing out blatant propoganda 24/7…

makes converstaions with my mother really difficult. She’s not a bad person but has a reasonable view of the Tories, yet hates, HATES the labour party and the EU for no actual reason… when questioned, she cannot provide any details to back it up…

She gets all of her news from UK TV…

I just have to avoid politics with her to avoid alienating my own mother…

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At least you could mostly tell who was on which side.
I’m not sure when we changed ends.

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This topic is so quintessentially British that I can’t even… politics, pop culture, propaganda and the proper spelling of labour. :heart:

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Ha! I prefer Howard Jones too!

I hated that D-ream song at the time, and I still don’t like it. But I find it delightfully weird that Brian Cox went on to be a world renowned physicist/heartthrob.

And the sanity of the cold war, I get that too.

As a teenager I was busily rejecting whatever authority presented itself but I always had the sense that the people in charge were competent. Well, maybe not Reagan, but people like Thatcher, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl and Yitzhak Shamir had gravitas worthy of world leaders. There was a sense of stability then that’s notably missing of late.

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Assholes all, but yes, at least they seemed stable!

(Brian’s not an asshole, he’s lovely :smiley: )

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I’ve always thought Black Boys on Mopeds was one of her most powerful (and of course overlooked) songs.

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