And by doing so have created the lowest level of unemployment I can remember. Removing barriers to employment increases employment and reduces the marginal benefit of industrialising jobs.
They've been very clear about their spending plans and the need to rein in the profligacy of their predecessors. By keeping those costs low they have kept borrowing at a far lower rate than it would have been, ensuring that our economy stays away from the (still very possible) collapse that could occur.
That, in turn, keeps taxes low and increases employment and investment, allowing the market to improve.
Just how bad are education and health in your opinion? More people than ever are in university (the benefits of that are another debate) and life expectancy is higher than it has ever been.
They allowed a referendum, the first party to stick to a manifesto pledge it didn't want to in about a generation.
A low unemployment rate is a very good thing. But it is currently also coupled with low-paid, insecure work in a country with high housing costs even at the lowest end of the scale. In-work poverty is a real thing, which is why foodbank use has exploded since 2010. Most of the spend on benefits is paid to people who work and changes to those benefits (Universal Credit) has made life for many people even harder, despite being employed and contributing to the rosy employment figures. Add the high cost of housing to benefit reforms like Universal Credit and you get a massive increase in homelessness. With less social housing and less services for these people to access due to local authority cuts.
The housing crisis is real and getting worse. Successive governments have failed in this area and the Tories continue to do so, selling off more social housing and not replacing it. If there was just one reason for me to vote for Corbyn's Labour, it's that they would at least try to build a lot more social housing, which I think is a key part of solving the high housing costs this country faces.
Reining in spending and keeping taxes low (lowering them unnecessarily imo, when they were already competitive relative to the rest of the G20) has meant cutting services, such as social care for the elderly, or the number of police officers, just as a couple of examples. That then feeds in to the NHS struggling to cope with all the extra elderly people that end up in hospital, or the rate of violent crime increasing. It leads to schools getting lower and lower budgets per pupil, with the schools then having to ask parents for extra top-ups to buy basic supplies. All the while, many of those same parents have seen their pay fall in real terms, lagging behind the costs of their housing and utility bills. Then there are all of the other, smaller social services that get cut by local authorities who no longer get the required funding from central government, hurting poorer people who previously made use of them. It is essentially paying for the deficit on the backs of those who can least afford it.
We are living in a massively unequal country (I know you don't have much truck with inequality). But as time goes on, more people seem to be moving into the "struggling" category from the "I'm alright" category. I'm with you in that I don't think there is a great deal of good leadership on offer. But for the Tories, I can't even see any policies on offer to solve anything. With the current Labour Party, for the first time since I've been old enough to vote, I think there are at least some policies that I can get behind that can improve things for the average person in this country.
