I'm half with you there. Libya would've been wiffed on, it was too close to Iraq (and during Afghanistan) and yeah, the Tories aren't going to want that. Syria the Tories would've had to do though, once Assad went chemical. "We are obliged to respond to the use of chemical weapons on children," as Cooper said[1] - it's like the Falklands, a government would have to respond or reveal itself as toothless. Whether someone else would've done it better or not, we can only speculate - those bastards in Da'esh lost their shot in Syria but moved to Iraq so that one's a no-score draw - but you'd need Foreign Secretary Galloway to have nothing.
[1] Miliband made her Shadow Foreign Secretary so she's got the equivalent job here and keeps it
Really, really not. The Falklands were an invasion of British territory. A government is obliged to protect its own territory. A government is NOT obliged to march into another country just because of the totally crucial and all-important difference between some guy using one type of weapon (a method of killing people) and another type of weapon (a different method of killing people), which matters because… because… because…
Was that worth the several hundred British military deaths and billions of pounds spent because Obama and Miliband regarded themselves as the saviours of the world and couldn't allow a conflict to happen in the Middle East without diving head-first into it to try and save the day (and actually just screw things up)?
We were under no obligation whatsoever to get ourselves involved in that ongoing war in Syria. It's Iraq 2.0. The problem being, of course, that we still have Iraq 1.0—and Afghanistan, which we could call Iraq 0.0, and Libya, which we could call Iraq 3.0, and they
all keep going.
That's why I voted Conservative. Their economic policies might leave much to be desired, but New Labour's endless militarism in the Muslim world in the name of interventionism—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the list goes on and every single one of those interventions has gone catastrophically wrong—is a far less sensible policy than the Conservatives' pragmatic
Realpolitik of "only fight wars for British national interest". Ultimately, it's always a bad idea to have a country's foreign policy run by ideology instead of common-sense.
OOC:
Foreign Secretary Galloway
Whatwhatwhatwhatwhat…?
A famous anti-war activist who isn't even a member of the Labour Party, taking one of the Great Offices of State in a militaristic Labour-Lib Dem coalition government?
Urg, don't remind me. That shit was catching on all across Europe too, you have to hope that they'd have wised up even if we'd gone with it too. it'd have been Occupy Strasbourg.
Nah, I don't think Europe was ever in real danger of sinking for a long time into that 'austerity' fad. They don't have the culture behind it, as I shall explain in the next few paragraphs; it was only the United Kingdom that did. Not that the United Kingdom ever would have fallen for it, because Fox couldn't have won, nor any other Conservative leader with his platform.
To sum up, the essential problem that Fox faced was exactly the same problem that Howard faced, and Hague before him. All three of them ran on an essentially Thatcherite platform that the British people had rejected in 1997. They were basically self-deluding; they ran campaigns that were pitched to the Conservative Party, not to the United Kingdom as a whole. And everyone with half a brain knows that you can't win an election by only appealing to people who are always going to vote for you anyway. Thatcher, in spite of her reputation, didn't win votes by just playing to the right; she won by getting people who would ordinarily vote Labour to vote Conservative instead (the so-called 'Essex Man')… and also by the fact that she faced Labour opponents as astonishingly stupid as Foot-In-Mouth who ruined Labour's credibility as a party of government for more than a decade by running Labour in 1983 as a basically Trotskyist party, but still, the point stands. No-one votes Labour because they think the Conservatives aren't right-wing enough, so the Conservatives can't win many new votes by going excessively right-wing. It's the same reason why Foot-in-Mouth himself was doomed in '83; no, Michael, funnily enough the British people
weren't voting for Margaret Thatcher because Labour wasn't being left-wing enough for them.
It's a bit like what would happen in the USA if the Republican presidential candidates actually did the things they said they would do in primaries. There, of course, potential presidential candidates have to go way to the right to get chosen as the presidential candidate and then they run back to the centre in time for the actual election. All the Conservative leaders between Major and Cameron did the whole 'run to the right to become the candidate in the first place' thing, but forwent going back to the centre—and, therefore, lost hideously.
The Conservative Party could not have taken power until it recognised that it had to appeal to the British people as a whole and it couldn't win by just hoping the British people were naturally right-wing. The 'austerity' madness was, I think, a peculiarly British phenomenon of men who refused to admit that it wasn't the 1980s any more and were desperately trying to pretend that it was. Thank God that Cameron got the Conservatives out of that and we now have a credible right-wing party in this country; I didn't especially like 18 years of our country being a Labour one-party state because its other main party was refusing to engage with reality.
OOC: It was a pretty widespread belief back then too and I saw a lot of lefties go with it, though not for the same reasons as the Tories. "Brown's debt!!" has grown as a belief but that one doesn't survive contact with debt stats, which show a rise during wartime (not Brown) and a sharper rise during an economic crash (the whole Earth got that one).
OOC: I didn't see it among Labour supporters. Lib Dems and Conservatives, sure, they hated Brown and wanted him to go. Labour? After the election, sure, everyone "knew all along" that Brown should have gone. In the same way that, judging by what people are saying nowadays, one might think that "everyone knew all along" that Ed Miliband was going dangerously far to the left, or "everyone knew all along" that Scottish Labour was going to suffer hugely to the SNP, or "everyone knew all along" that "the Tories had this one in the bag" for the 2015 election (as I heard it put). But I didn't notice great lots of Labour supporters wanting Brown gone at the time.
The idea that Labour would throw out their own Prime Minister, when he had only just become Prime Minister and hadn't even contested a single election yet (which, contrary to Conservative propaganda, is
perfectly legitimate under the British constitutional system; just look at John Major) is bizarre. Brown wasn't taking the party radically away from what it had been under Blair, as Major could be seen as moving radically leftward compared to Thatcher, which gave us the Redwood challenge. There was not going to be a Labour Redwood in the 2005-2010 term.