Who was the worst British Prime Minister?

[Slap47]

I hate Tony Blair. Sure was bound by past treaties but he abandoned Hong Kong.

He was also just a generic neocon + neoliberal.... and a labor MP?

Eden, the Suez crisis was probably the biggest international humiliation that the United Kingdom has ever suffered (aside from the Japanese capturing Singapore) It essentially shattered any authority or autonomy we had left and we've essentially been a vassal state to the Americans ever since.

It's weird because Eden wanted to support the USSR instead of focus on Suez during ww2.

He tried to recognize China in 1950 but was told "give us back HK first".

Chamberlain gets a bad rap,you have to remember that his opposition was trying to abolish Britain's military at the same time Hitler was arming Germany. (Chamberlain and Churchill belonged to the same party)

Chamberlain gets a bad rape despite everybody at the time wanting no more war.

Its weird because he's the one that literally said that the buck stops at Poland and declared the war.

Just a shout-out to Hitler and Goebbels, for returning from beyond the grave to give two votes against Winston Churchill. The bulldog was sixty years behind the times, but that was just what the world needed at the moment. Now if you excuse me, I'm going to arrange for an exorcism.

I actually dislike Churchill. Guy gave excellent speeches but his meddling in the war didn't help much. Hell, it was well known that he was drunk during his speeches and some didn't like that.

It's a shame that most Churchhill criticism is stuff that is just nonsensical like blaming him for famines in India. His "soft underbelly" strat led to the allies getting bottlenecked in Italy and his drama around generals was harmful to the war effort.

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

In the case of Edward Heath as well there is some evidence to suggest that he had a penchant for very young boys.

 

[NeoGAF Lurker]

Wilson for sanctioning Rhodesia and South Africa.

Yeah the British fucked these places over when they needed them most. Of course, Rhodesia and South Africa even as rogue states still functioned hundreds of times better than what they devolved to once they were “liberated”

They were first world countries with third world demographics. A sign to come for countries who embrace diversity and multiculturalism.

 

[Y2K Baby]

Churchill was probably a sociopath tbh.

 

[Easterling]

Churchill was probably a sociopath tbh.

No he was actually Bi-Polar.

 

[friends o' niall]

Voted Major to show some love, but Blair and May are fierce contenders. Elmo was robbed in Maidenhead.

 

[UN 474]

May. Bloody, Treasa, Fucking, May. I've seen some pretty pathetic PM's in my time, but Treasa May was truly pathetic. She had ONE job. ONE fucking job, and she failed miserably. It's obvious she has an agenda.

British politics is worth its own dedicated section on Kiwi farms. Sometimes, you come across absolute stupidity you can't help but laugh hysterically. While simultaneously horrified.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

It's a shame that most Churchhill criticism is stuff that is just nonsensical like blaming him for famines in India. His "soft underbelly" strat led to the allies getting bottlenecked in Italy and his drama around generals was harmful to the war effort.

Churchill wanted a Balkans campaign. That was dumb and got shot down.

Italy happened because they didn't have the naval assets to land in France in 1943 and needed another year for them to be built. Spending the year kicking the shit out of Mussolini and knocking them out of the war after the North African Campaign was a no-brainer. We would think better of it if Lucas didn't bungle Operation Shingle and shook the lead out of his ass.

 

[millais]

All Anglos must be killed.

By that metric, it's tough to pick a worst PM, because only a handful of them (all in 20th century) sent anywhere near one million of their people to their deaths.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Anthony Eden can rot for not intervening in the Ruth Ellis case because she didn't deserve to die.

 

[Sable]

Lord Palmerston is probably the worst PM.

For modern PM's? Shit. Even though May was literal cancer, it's probably too early to judge her time as a whole.

Thatcher did some awful things, but she did some super necessary things too.

For modern-modern PM's i'll probably vote Blair just for all the globalist bollocks and pushing to get us involved in the Middle East.

I'll echo what people have already said. It's easy to judge Chamberlain from a modern perspective because 'Duh, the nazis were NAZIS dude, he should have just gone to war with them!' but this completely ignores a) the majority opinion at the time which was 'Fuck no we would not like to send millions of our sons to die in a pointless european war, thank you' and

b) They didn't have anywhere near as an accurate view of the Nazi military power at the time as we do now. We know that the nazis wouldn't have been able to stand up to any military intervention in that point. As far as Britain was aware, Nazi Germany was ready to kick their shit in, and the economic troubles of the 30's meant they were not currently ready for a war on the scale of the Great War- so they needed buy time to rearm.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

How the fuck is Atlee not winning this by a landslide? Under his government the UK had worse rationing than during the actual fucking war.

 

[Buster O'Keefe]

It's a tough call deciding who was the worst, but it's easy to predict the next will be an exceptional faggot, whichever way the leadership vote goes.

 

[Spunt]

P.S: I'd actually say Brown was a good PM rather than a bad one, the Germans followed his recovery model to get out of austerity and look where they are now. Britain would have done better if they'd stuck with it vs still being in austerity measures even now.

He has all the charisma of a bowl of oatmeal but it's hard to doubt he had a brilliant mind for money and the economy.

Gordon Brown couldn't add up small change. As Chancellor he ran up a vast amount of public debt (all governments since the war have done this, even Thatcher, but Brown did it more), so that the Labour government could increase public spending without raising taxes (much), creating an illusion of economic competence. When the Tories pointed out that all this was unsustainable, the government fed the media the line that "The Tories are the party of cuts" which helped Labour win election after election by robbing the taxpayers of the future to bribe the taxpayers of the present.

One of Brown's most important tricks to manage this with was the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), a scheme whereby capital projects (particularly schools, hospitals and transport infrastructure) would be put under the auspices of private companies that were 100% owned by the state, but because of the way public debt was calculated any borrowing those companies undertook to finance the project (usually at higher rates of interest than central government borrowing) wasn't recorded as public sector debt, even though it effectively was because those companies were underwritten by the government. Then of course when those schools and hospitals collapsed under the weight of their own debt (and often mismanagement), all the debt was transferred to the public sector anyway, but by that time Labour were out of office and could blame the Tories. If a private company set up an arrangement like this, their directors would be prosecuted for false accounting, but when the government does it it's legal somehow.

Then when Brown lost the 2010 election, the public finances were in such an appalling state that massive spending cuts were necessary to fund the inflated debt repayments created by Brown's PFIs. The Germans could spend their way out of recession because they had higher tax revenues and less debt (at lower rates of interest).

When the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury (the 2nd in command Finance Minister) arrived in office in 2010, he found a hand-written letter on his desk from his Labour predecessor that read simply "I'm afraid to tell you there's no money left." Austerity of some kind was inevitable, and Labour knew this. The conspiracy-minded might even say that Labour lost the 2010 election on purpose to make the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition take the blame for austerity, which a Labour government would have had to implement as well. Now Labour can crow that the Tories destroyed the public sector and a horde of soy-fuelled young leftists who don't remember the living hell that was Britain in the 1970s can support Jeremy Corbyn free of guilt and full of the promises of other people's money.

TL;DR - Fuck Gordon Brown.

It's a tough call deciding who was the worst, but it's easy to predict the next will be an exceptional faggot, whichever way the leadership vote goes.

Agreed. At the time I'm writing this the next PM will be either Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt. Both will make fine additions to this list.

Boris Johnson is a two-faced, unprincipled, back-stabbing megalomaniac. He once wrote two articles for the same newspaper, one pro-Brexit, one pro-Remain, and decided at the last minute which one to publish based on which way the wind was blowing. Having hitched his wagon to Leave (actually hoping that Leave would lose, leaving him free to launch a putsch against his old school friend David Cameron on an anti-EU ticket), he travelled the country in a bus, with a claim on the side in 10-foot letters that leaving the EU would free up £350 million a week to spend on the NHS, which was simply a bare-faced lie. This is before you get into his other scandals, such as the time he paid a friend to beat up a journalist who said mean things about him, or his chaotic love life and claims of domestic violence therein. Boris Johnson is a horrible trash human.

Jeremy Hunt is arguably the worst Health Secretary the country has ever had, and we've had Frank Dobson. His "reforms" didn't save much money, but they did double the suicide rate amongst medical staff, and left them so overworked that deaths from clinical errors doubled as well. He forced bankrupt PFI hospitals to merge with non-bankrupt hospitals, causing those previously well-run hospitals to fall apart, and in some cases, close. Aside from Jack "Boots" Straw, who oversaw the invasion of Iraq as Foreign Secretary, I can't think of a single cabinet minister this side of WWII who caused so many deaths. And he's actually proud of what he did. Jeremy Hunt is a horrible trash human.

We are so fucked.

 

[Slap47]

How the fuck is Atlee not winning this by a landslide? Under his government the UK had worse rationing than during the actual fucking war.

The war ended but that just led to them having to feed Germany and fight a Cold War (Greece) and support the colonies (Burma, Bengal) more.

His hands were tied. You can argue about the merits of nationalizing literally everything and joining every international organization but I doubt that Churchhills strategy of fighting a bunch of colonial wars instead of aiding the people would have helped the situation.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

His hands were tied. You can argue about the merits of nationalizing literally everything

Not very easily, given how it pretty much always turns out.

 

[Slap47]

Not very easily, given how it pretty much always turns out.

The alternative history could have easily been an even larger leftwing backlash.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

The alternative history could have easily been an even larger leftwing backlash.

Touché.

 

[Sweetpeaa]

May ''may'' not even be as conservative as she claims. She strikes me more as a puppet for the Tory party. There is something about her that doesn't seem very original - and by that I don't mean she's ''Thatcher 2'' - she just seems like she's being told by her party to make certain decisions that aren't necessarily her own ideas.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

May ''may'' not even be as conservative as she claims. She strikes me more as a puppet for the Tory party. There is something about her that doesn't seem very original - and by that I don't mean she's ''Thatcher 2'' - she just seems like she's being told by her party to make certain decisions that aren't necessarily her own ideas.

She's a high ranked rube. Whoever it was pulling her strings was fucking with her and she likely didn't even realize it.