jonc

1. Competitiveness. Britain has dropped from fourth to thirteenth in the international competitiveness league under Labour.

2. Reading and Writing. Almost half of all 11 year-olds cannot read, write and add up properly when they leave primary school.

3. GCSEs. Nearly 23,000 children left school last year without a single GCSE.

4. NHS Deficits. The NHS in England is this year forecasting a gross deficit of £883 million.

5. Waiting Lists. Almost one million people in the UK are still waiting for treatment on the NHS.

6. Threat to Staff Numbers. Since February 2006, over 18,000 job losses have been announced by NHS Trusts in England

7. Growth Rate. Britain’s growth rate in 2005 was 1.9 per cent, the lowest for 13 years.

8. Inheritance Tax. The number of households paying inheritance tax has doubled under Labour.

9. Carbon Emissions Rising. Carbon emissions have risen for the second year in a row - emissions have risen for five of the past eight years.

10. Violent crime has more than doubled under Labour - over 1.2 million violent crimes were committed in 2005-6.

11. Gun crime has doubled under Labour.

12. Robbery has gone up by 47 per cent under Labour

13. Unemployment. There are 957,000 people out of work and claiming benefit, the highest level since 2001.

14. Child Support Agency. The backlog of cases at the CSA amounts to over 273,600 and £3.5 billion of debt remains uncollected.

15. Business Tax. The CBI estimates British businesses have been hit by a massive £50 billion increase in tax under Labour.

16. Stamp Duty. Under Labour revenue from stamp duty has quadrupled to over £10 billion.

17. Government debt has soared under Labour - it now equals 36.6 per cent of GDP, a seven-year high.

18. Council Tax. Typical pensioner couples have seen more than a third of the increase in the basic state pension snatched back in higher council tax.

19. Tax credits. Of the 6.5 million recipients - 2 million have been overpaid and over 900,000 are underpaid.

20. The Pension Credit is so complicated and unpopular that up to 1.6 million pensioners are not claiming the Pension Credit they are entitled to.

21. Manufacturing jobs. Since the second quarter of 1997, over 1.1 million manufacturing jobs have been lost.

22. Administrators in the NHS. The number of NHS managers is increasing three times as fast as the number of new doctors and nurses.

23. Child poverty. Over half of children in inner London live below the poverty line.

24. Benefit Take-up. Between 23 and 30 per cent of eligible people are not claiming the benefits that they are entitled to.

25. Young People. Over 1.2 million young people are not in work or full-time education - higher than when Labour came to power.

26. Pensioner Poverty. Two million pensioners still live in poverty.

27. Rising unemployment. Unemployment now stands at over 1.6 million and is at its highest level since January 2000.

28. Economic Inactivity. In a survey of 23 countries surveyed by the OECD, the UK had the highest percentage of economically inactive men between 25 and 49.

29. Incapacity Benefits. 2.7 million people of working age are claiming incapacity benefits.

30. Rise in Long-Term Benefit Claims. The number of people receiving incapacity benefit for five years or more is now twenty times as large as it was when Labour came to power.

31. Benefit Fraud. At least £2.6 billion of taxpayers’ money disappeared in 2004-05 in benefit fraud and error.

32. Underpaid benefits. £243 million in income support, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Pension Credit was underpaid in 2004-5.

33. Pensions Tax. Labour’s pensions tax introduced by Gordon Brown in 1997 has cost pension funds £5 billion a year.

34. Savings. The Turner Commission estimates that over 9 million people are not saving enough for retirement.

35. School results for low-income families. Three-quarters of 16-year-olds from low-income families in England and Wales failed to get five 'good' passes at grades A to C, which was double the rate for other students.

36. Savings. The household savings ratio has almost halved under Labour to 6 per cent.

37. Temporary Accommodation. The number of households in England living in temporary accommodation has risen by 139 per cent since 1997.

38. Failing Schools. Nearly a million children (980,000) are estimated to be at poorly performing schools, according to the National Audit Office - 13 per cent of the school population.

39. Truancy. Over a million children play truant every year.

40. Assaults. There is an assault on a teacher every seven minutes, according to teacher unions.

41. Home Office Bureaucrats. The Home Office has taken on 20,700 more bureaucrats – but only around 14,200 additional police officers since 1997

42. Asylum Removals. Only one in four failed asylum seekers is ever removed – a lower proportion than in 1997.

43. Special Schools. More than 100 state special schools have closed since Labour came to power.

44. Qualifications. Over one third of adults in the UK do not have any basic school-leaving qualification - double the proportion in Canada and Germany.

45. Waiting Times. Almost 45,000 people are currently waiting over one year for basic diagnostic tests, such as MRI and CT scans, and hearing tests.

46. Hospitals - Slower Improvements. 1.4 million more people would be getting hospital treatment if Labour had kept up the rate of increase in completed hospital treatments achieved by the NHS under the Conservatives

47. Dentists. 10,000 dentists have left the NHS since Labour came to power.

48. MRSA. The number of people who have died from the hospital superbug MRSA has more than doubled since 1997, despite Labour’s 23 ‘initiatives’ to tackle the problem

49. Productivity in the NHS has fallen by up to 1.3 per cent in each year since 1997 despite record increases in spending.

50. Productivity. Under Labour, Britain’s productivity-per-worker growth rate slowed from 2.6 per cent a year in 1992-7 to just 1.2 per cent a year in 2001-5.

Leslie

Surely you have to really work at it not to get a GCSE these days. Doesn't writing your name on the answer paper get you a long way to passing it.

Les

jonc

Yes, under Labours Education policy it does.

dpb

Hardly cos they prolly spelt that wrong ****

lozgti

I am slightly envious (only having a couple of A levels) that through labour's brilliance (and the fantastic teachers that we now have)...that most people have about six A levels and yet can't spell

As for labour' 'cafe culture' Raise alcohol age says top cop

Ten years till we all reap what they have sowed.Or is it sewed

Paul3446

Don't forget the 56% rise in drink related violent crime in Devon & Cornwall, since Labour brought in 24 hour drinking!

It appears that it hasn't turned our youngsters to a Continental cafe style culture after all, who would have believed it!

Wurzel

iTrader: (1)

So why do we not have the same if not worse drink related yob culture over here where alcohol is cheaper and even easier to get hold of 24/7.

kingofturds

iTrader: (1)

i woz taut undre labor and did not do me ane arm m8

Wurzel

iTrader: (1)

[PEDANT]

er i fink yu ment it never dun me no arm

i is were i is tday coz ov laybor!

[/PEDANT]

paulr

And what facts do you use to back that up. I have two neices who work incredibly hard and have taken some of their GCSE's a year early. Another criticism is that some schools choose easy examining boards, to damm right. Thats the point of exams...to pass.

Yet another Daily Mail reader repeating Tory rubbish.

When was the last time you ever took a similair exam Leslie?

Bodgit

I didn't think the point of exams were to pass them. I always thought they were an indication of compenticies. If everyone passes and everyone gets an A they become by default meaningless.

The exam boards and schools are failing your nieces. Would you not prefer they took a harder exam and gained a more meaningful grade? If this was done a year earlier then that would be even better.

kingofturds

iTrader: (1)

I went to my nephews school open night last year and the work on display had spelling mistakes galore. What hope do they have if the teachers don't pick it up.

Leslie

In the first place you should be careful when you accuse someone when you have absolutely no facts to back it up. It demonstrates the weakness of your own argument when you try to denigrate someone in such a way as well as being rather childish.

Your heros have worked hard at lowering the standard of education which is easily apparent these days, and they have also dropped the required standards in a cynical exercise to make the results look better.

Schooling is not supposed to be an exercise in passing exams, it is meant to be a way of teaching children the real knowledge that they need in appropriate subjects which will actually be of use to them in later life. An examination is the way to find out the true level of knowledge of the examinee, not to give false grades to bolster up the education service!

Why is it that so many children these days can hardly read or write or express themselves in English. Why is it that they need to be sent on a special "crammers" course to enable them to be able to actually commence a degree course? What good are half the subjects that they read at university to a future employer anyway?

It is no business of yours when I took my exams save to inform you that they were in real subjects which were relevant to what I wanted to do during my life and were a proper test of my knowledge in those subjects.

Perhaps you would like to ask your "nieces" to put you straight on your own spelling. I congratulate them on taking their exams early and for hard work. I hope they have been given the education that they deserve.

Who said I am "dyed in the wool" Conservative anyway?



Les

not really a newbie

it is not the price or avaliability - it is the attitude and culture in the UK