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Starmer announces resignation as prime minister and leader of the Labour party
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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UK Politics
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God, choosing a least bad one is even hard. ~~David Cameron or~~ Gordon Brown? I don’t know if I was just less informed about British politics during their tenures or if they were actually better.
Edit: oof, I forgot about how Cameron handled brexit, not him.
Probably Gordon Brown or John Major.
Brown sold off the gold reserve when gold was at a record low. He tried to increase pre-charge detention to 42 days and to introduce lie detectors into benefits claims.
Gold had been underperforming for decades before Brown sold it off though, you cant really fault him for not predicting the future.
Never claimed he was perfect. You can find fault with literally every PM that has ever existed. But him and Major seemed to be relatively scandal free compared to many who have come before and after them.
That’s fair. Major was before my time, so I just did a quick wiki glance, and did automatically dismiss him because he was a conservative in thatcher’s cabinet, but that doesn’t make him inherently worse than the rest on this list.
Plus, we just saw what you get from a former civil rights lawyer in the Labour Party
Cameron brought us get the unemployed to work unpaid for private corporations to keep their unemployment benefits.
If you want to argue that is technically paid work you can buy then it was paid at £1.60/hour, far below minimum wage and the tax payer was paying it rather than the corporation benefiting from it.
Slavery runs strong in British history
I realized after I commented that he was also the one who brought the brexit referendum forward
I actually kind of think Cameron introducing austerity may have been worse, overall, over time. Brexit was a fumble, but austerity was malicious.
Brown probably, but he didn't have much time to screw anything up.
Brown is frequently cited by economists as the person who did most to repair the world economy after 2008 and prevent the collapse from being catastrophic.
I was in Finance in Britain at the time.
He was the one who saved banks with unconditionally given public money, then turned around and put them in a special "hands-off" management structure where basically the bankers managed themselves.
Royal Bank Of Scotland did not restructure their Investment Banking operations for almost a decade and kept losing billions of pounds every year. I actually worked there for a bit during that period and they were spectacularly inefficient and chaotic compared to other Investment Banks I worked in and under no pressure at all to improve.
Oh and Zero Interest Rate Policy in the UK - that started under Gordon Brown too.
The 2008 Crash recovery was one of the slowest recoveries from a Financial Crash in History.
All this crap then led to Austerity (by then under the Tories), which in turn fed the mix of discontent and scapegoating of the EU that led to Brexit, which in turn put the UK in the sorry state it is today.
Gordon Brown did not repair even the British Economy, much less the World's.
I remember those claims back then already and they were complete total bollocks fed by a handful of opinion makers in British newspapers and New Labour politicians - as far as I know, not a single international Economist endorsed that idea that Gordon Brown saved the World's Economy: the whole thing was just one big circle jerk of New Labour politicians and supporters.
I think you've been watching too much BBC and reading too much The Guarding - they're the ones who invariably spin "Briton saves the world" stories out of British politicians swiping British problems under the carpet and leaving them for others to solve later.
Blimey! Didn't you notice that I wrote that Brown is cited by economists? That I didn't say anything about agreeing with that. If anything I agree with pretty much all you say. (Worth checking what someone actually writes before getting a bit accusative.)
Please point out a renowned international Economist who actually said that Gordon Brown saved the World's Economy.
I keenly remember that claim back then because it was part of Gordon Brown's campaign strategy against the Tories to keep Labour in power (which, by the way, failed) and there was literally no Economist or even Financier outside Britain claiming that Gordon Brown saved the World's Economy.
As I said, I was in Finance at the time and the rest of the World wasn't looking at Britain for guidance on how to react to the Crash, they were looking at the ECB and the Americans, which are far larger Economies - the only way Britain stood out back then was that it was the worst hit Economy of all after the US, and later it stood out because as the web was untangled on the whole thing, it turned out that many cases of market manipulation and other shenanigans leading to the Crash actually happened in London (most of which, by the way, having happened during the time Gordon Brown was Chancellor, and please don't get me started how both Tories and New Labour seriously defunded the Serious Fraud Office and turned the FSA into a joke)
That old claim you repeated in your post is a perfect example of British Exceptionalism.
Did you notice that they said no reputable international economists actually say that?
But you're right to call out the accusatory tone of @Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com's comment, that did kind of spoil an otherwise very informative post.
I thought I had left all the bullshit of that time behind after all these years, after I left Finance and after I left the UK, and here I am seeing once again one of the biggest pieces of bollocks spewed after one of the biggest systemic regulatory fuck-ups I've ever seen in any Industry up-close (from the front row, even, having been in none other that Lehman Brothers the day it went bankrupt).
Seeing this ridiculous claim again about a guy who I professionally believe that, as Chancellor during a period of de facto near non-existent regulation of Finance in the UK, has a seriously large share of the blame for the outsized amount of damage that Crash did to the UK (a gift which still keeps giving, since it's part of the chain of events that led to Brexit), might have pissed me off a bit.
Gordon Brown's time as PM was just a desperate rush to plug holes (same as in the rest of the World, though Brown did chose to have the rescued banks keep on self-regulating, a choice which I believe led to the subsequent Austerity), but his time as Chancellor was a shit show of incompetence and regulatory capture in Finance.
Again, I agree with you. But this "ridiculous claim" WAS made by economists like Krugman and others.
The more alarming aspect is that UK politicians - eapecially in Labour - are now calling for a return to pre-2008 levels of deregulation now because it's now "safe" to do so. Nothing is learned from history and it seems we are destined to repeat it.
It does seem like even the less offensive ones tend to have a major cock-up that results in them being denied entry into the "least bad PM" club, doesn't it?