James O'Brien asks: who is most to blame for the current state of Britain? | LBC 

The biggest contributor to the downfall of Britain, Thatcher. If she’d not sold off oil&gas we’d have £1trillion pension fund like Norway, we’d have cheaper electric & gas, water would be clean…..

Murdoch. That man has almost singlehandedly wrecked the entire planet. He's Emperor Palpatine in real life

Wealthy businessmen running this country feeding their wealthy mates to build their businesses whilst making the poor poorer.

I'm an OAP and as a consequence of Brexit we are still suffering the worst pension in Europe.

All of this can be traced back to Thatcher who was unfortunately successful in changing both the political & the economic philosophy. Before Thatcher we had council houses, now we have nothing , which apparently is not a problem. That’s just one example out of thousands.

Thatcher - she laid the groundwork

There are many things wrong with this country but every single one of them has been made worse by the Troy Party and the Brexit dead end the country chose to go down.

Murdoch, surely? His influence may have waned, but it set the course.

Has anyone mentioned George Osborne? He seems to have been forgotten, bearing in mind he was Chancellor during David Cameron's premiership. Evil.

Tories in power for 32 of the last 45 years. 72% of the time.

Media has an Awful lot to answer for

George Osborne. Without a second's hesitation. And he has gotten away with it

I blame the people unable to think critically.

Austerity and Brexit the Silent Killers in our Midst. End Off.

Anyone who voted Tory &/or for brexit.

Other than Thatcher for selling off the utility companies, I also blame Blair for not introducing PR whilst he had such a vast majority - all this brexshit would not have happened under PR.

I agree with first caller people will vote for Trump and Tories to avoid tax

get tory exit done

Or - the influence of American think tanks and the creation of UK-based American-style think tanks - e.g. the Heritage Foundation

The blame lays at the feet of the tory voter.

Powell > Thatcher > Osborne > Murdoch/Bannon > Farage > Johnson

I still see people going on about how they don't trust any politicians because [insert long list of broken TORY promises], I also personally know people who blame "duh librul eleet" for tory policies, these people deserve our contempt at this point.

I have absolutely no compassion for the conned , they were completely willing participants !

I blame Stanley Johnson, for inflicting Boris on the nation.

Margaret Thatcher. She's still in power.

the rich and there minions ,on both sides of the aisle.

Cameron, he was too much of a coward to stand up toi the far right.

Defo Cameron ..... he's the architect of this dreadful mess we are in .....never vote Tory

Oh my, where do we start? Cameron, Osborne, Clegg, Gove, Farage, Hunt, Dacre, Murdoch, Truss, Sunak, May, Johnson, Keunssberg, IDS, Hancock, Braverman, Dorries, Anderson, Rees Mogg. Just to name a few! 12 minutes is too short for this video!

I agree...people should be more pro active in looking into the manifesto..I wish I had a pound for every time people who voted for BJ over corbyn...only to realise later that tory policies favoured the rich and corbyns manifesto contained more of what they wanted

The media are to blame

I have colleagues saying they will still vote for Cs. It baffles me considering we work with children living in poverty and deprivation

Margaret Thatcher, end of

David Cameron is 100% at fault for everything

I agree with the caller who said George Osborne. What a wicked wicked policy is austerity. The rich certainly didn't suffer from austerity, in fact they gained from it. It's all just too disgusting and blatant cronyism

Brown not going to the Polls with an 11% lead is a massive what if moment, if he does the next election would be 2012 and with the feelgood Olympics I think Labour could've won that too. Then you are looking at 20 years of Labour and I trust Brown to of kept the UK finacially stable and thriving in that period. No austerity and No brexit. What a wonderful world that would be.

Nigel Farage.

I thought alot can be blamed on Ed Miliband stabbing his brother in the back and Davids exit from British politics.

Def Nick Clegg. He enabled the Eton Boys, wiped out the LibDems, supported austerity. If he’d gone with Labour, this would be a totally different country.

What Nick Clegg did broke the trust of a lot of young people in politics and politicians.

The fathers of Thatcher, Blair, Osbourne, May, Sunak. The option to pull out was there, but they didn't.

The lady was absoultey corrcert. Brexit,was voted in due to the financial malaise of the working and middle classes. Carmeron and Osbourne are 100% to blame for Brexit

The electorate.

The uninformed electorate

Osbourne and Cameron

Privitisation and lack of written constitution, plus fptp

Started with Thatcher in eighties then made worse since 2010

I could see an argument for Nick Clegg. He said that they'd sort student debt, which split the labour vote between lib dem and Labour. So that caused either labour to not get in, or gave LD enough seats that a coalition with the conservatives was possible that in turn gave them a "majority" because LD and Nick Clegg was too spineless to push back on things, which in turn allowed the conservatives to do what they wanted.

Centrists, media & Labour HQ are most to blame, for denying us a Corbyn govt that would have started the real transformation of this country desperately needed.

I agree about the Gordon Brown. If he had called his election earlier, things might be very different. I remember before 2010 being so much better on so many ways. My life has been changed for the worse by the Tories and I’m still fighting to get the healthcare I need which was taken away. I might have been able to return to work. Instead, given drug after drug (now on 20 drugs a day) as the NHS isn’t geared up for healing, just treating. It’s a massive difference.

Your country is in an irreversible mess .... You voted them in, so blame yourselves.

''I don't see how tuition fees helped the breaking of Britain'' ...Gatekeeping learning and trying to stop the commoners going to Uni isn't an issue to you James? Seems a bit of an obvious issue!

Let’s not forget that O’Brien is the man who spends most of his time crying about how biased everyone else is…incredible

The likes of Johnson and Farage obviously sicken me for what they consciously did, but they were acting in their own self interest and it's kind of in their nature. The one who really frustrates me is Jeremy Corbyn. At a time where we needed a Keir Starmer and a rock solid labour party, we had an ideologue who refused to put electability above his personal passions. To allow him to sit there ruminating on socialism whilst for years people were telling him "Dianne Abbott is a liability", "the antisemitism business NEEDS sorting out", "the general populace who aren't young adults do not want this socialist rhetoric, they want sensible social democratic liberalism and they want you to give them a reason to swing red as opposed to blue" - it makes me want to blame him for letting us continue rolling on past him down the hill, even if he wasn't the one who gave us the push to begin with. What a waste of an opportunity to stop this carnage his campaign was.

It can’t be denied that Nigel “Man of the PayPal” Farage played a crucial role in Brexit and the UK leaving the EU. His name will forever be synonymous with the success, the year on year improvements in the quality of life, living standards, economic prosperity, health and welfare, environmental standards, and international reputation and influence of our wonderful country since Brexit. We can only thank the Lord that he wasn’t successful in getting his German / EU passport ( unlike his children, who did, via his German ex wife )and moving to Germany.

Blair! When he followed and pushed to war in Iraq and subsequently many after. Started a spiral of a wider conflict could have been avoided. Since then the “Special Relationship” and then Brexit has affected us badly and a Tory government for far too long.

This is all our faults. We as a nation, all stood by and watched it happen. The media enabled it all. We watched them lie every single day. Can't blame anyone else.

The caller regarding Nick Clegg has a point but from a different perspective. The thing that broke Britain is absolute majorities, whips and spineless MPs who go with the party no matter what. Lib Dem’s had a sizeable contribution to politics as the 3rd party and were key in removing this binary 2 party chaos. But since Nick Cleggs pathetic performance, Lib Dem’s have been decimated and therefore, the polarisation and further push to total binary parties is absolute chaos. The next election, I fear a huge majority Labour Party. No healthy democracy functions with huge majorities and strict 3 line whips. We need MPs to vote with their beliefs regardless of party.

Osborne has said Rachael Reeves is the heir to David Cameron and has praised her fiscal policies.

"If you want better politics, you don't need better politicians… you need a better electorate." - Christopher Hitchens.

The solution to Britain's problem is to rejoin the Single Market.

I think it is the wrong question; it’s not who, but what is to blame. This isn’t one person’s fault.

Tony Blair, shifted Overton window by shifting Labour right of center took Britain from boom to bust and made the current tories swing far right.

I guess James ignores the fact that even though George ruined the country Reeves fiscal rules is just a continuation of Osbornes policies.

At the end of the day, the Libdems enabled the Tories. It was the coalition’s policies of austerity that led to Brexit.

Thatcher - privatisation/right to buy Murdoch - privatisation Cameron - Brexit Gove - Brexit Farage - Brexit Osbourne - Brexit May - Brexit DePfiffel- Brexit Truss - budget/crashing the pound Crispin odey/hedge fund billionaires/ultra rich Sunak - Brexit

Anyone considering voting Tory needs to remember that this is not the conservative party of pre 2016. The centrists like Rory Stewart etc have been purged and what remains is something completely different. To be honest, the current labour party is nearer to what the old Tories were pre '16.

Clegg has an awful lot to answer for. Without Clegg then Cameron wouldn't have got in. He also wouldn't have won 2015, Brexit & the rest is history..

So much of the chaos started with Thatcher

I'm not that old (30) but i honestly feel this decline has been happening for the last half a century based on datasets and statistics on factors in healthcare and the housing market:- For example in 1970 you could buy the average home on the average wage in around 4.2 years salary (fully paid off) while by 2020 this had effectively doubled to 8.4 years. In healthcare on the other side, there has been a continuous decline in hospital bed capacity year upon year (statista for reference - cant share links on YT anymore it seems). The health of the local population appears to have been continuous devalued in the view of many politicians while we have seen an increase in people out of work and difficulties accessing NHS services. I'm confident there are a lot more factors involved which are clear but the point I make is that the country has not kept wages fairly in line with essential costs and those with ill health struggle more now to get support and treatments they require. When you make it so difficult to survive for many, people lose hope and stop looking after themselves which leads to a deadly combination of ill health with a system that can't effectively deal with it. Politicians in this country effectively need to bite the bullet and begin to look at balancing wages fairly in line with the cost of essentials or they can go for what economic outcome they want but the reality is businesses will continue to struggle to get quality workers, particularly with the housing crisis and pushback on reliance of foreign workers whom historically they have been able to pay less than uk minimum wage.

Thatcher. By a mile. Many links. James Buchanan. Edward Bernays. John Nash.

On thing Nick Clegg did was give Cameron a taste for referendums with the AV referendum. And because it was a referendum for something the Lib Dems didn't want they didn't campaign that hard. Cameron got to see just how neat referendums could be and how some creative story telling coyld help you get the result you want. So arguably it led to the later Tory majority (when a bunch of Lib Dems stopped voting in disgust with the coalition) and the Brexit referendum... That's my argument for why Nick Clegg should be on the list.

Haven't watched yet but being 12 minutes long, I bet at least one person says Corbyn

This is one of my favourite segments James has actually done.

The media

Gordon Brown didn't contribute to bringing the country to its knees? Have we forgotten the 2008 global financial crash, of which GB was one of the main architects with his encouragement of the house price boom?

Forgot to mention that George Osborne collected more tax revenue than anyone before him !

Anyone mentioned Tony Blair yet? Starmer just might top that w⚓.

Without doubt Arthur Fowler from Eastenders

Arron Banks, Richard Tice & Nigel Farage and their Brexit machinations, enabling that shitshow

For me it started with Cameron and his austerity and got progressively worse .

The human species and the British are to blame . change the system and educated the population

Biggest downfall - Tory and Brexit voters.

Blimey Your not accusing Corbyn LBC wanted the Tories before Corbyn LBC have to take their share of the blame

Labour of course, havent they been in power for the last 14 years. Oh wait.

In a way, it's nice the incompetence and corruption has continued since Boris ran away in shame - we all have short memories and had there been even a few months of stability and tangible improvements, that may have all been forgotten and there may have been a real chance we'd have had another 4 years of the leavers who won't leave.

Peter Thiel - American tech CEO and venture capitalist who won the NHS IT contract. I feel like there was another one where the NHS were given software on the cheap/free but then the renewal cost was astronomical- as was the quote for moving everything over to a new system... Maybe it was the Thiel contract, maybe it was American healthcare... But anyone who goes into the NHS for a profit margin could justifiably go in an appendices, at the very least.

Free cup of sewage water if you tick conservative

Gordon Brown who dithered and lost to Cameron who then brought about Farage, Gove, Boris and Brexit

We've gone from 2.5 million unemployed in 2009 to "we need unlimited immigration" 15 years later.

The medias lack of real journalism where it matters

Nick Clegg never seems to get a mention when these questions are asked. Clegg constantly complained he had fights every day with Cameron and Osborne over austerity cuts. Never forget it was Clegg that handed the keys of Downing St to the terrible twosome...

We have become a very lazy nation. Bosses/managers/employees laziness and incompetance are all to blame!

To blame David Davis for single handedly changed an Indicative Referendum into a legally binding vote to leave during a few moments speach in the commons !!!

The public are.

England is living in the 12th Century. No Constitution, no bill of rights, just what? The Magna Carta, of rights and liberties put forth by King John in 1215. Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!

George Osborne is most responsible.

I think Nick Clegg should maybe get a notable mention because at the time labour wasn't as strong of an opposition as it is today. When the Lib Dems went to bed with the Tories. It weakened their over arching appeal as another alternative and were seen as Diet Tory which meant people who didn't want to vote Labour didn't feel like voting Lib Dems were worth it so they voted Tory which was seen as the lesser of Two evils at the time

Something happened in 1997... Blair. Cameron became the Tory Blair and Sir Kier is being advised by the same people as Blair.

Clegg said if he won he wouldn’t raise tuition fees and people are still blaming him for something he didn’t do because he didn’t win.