Hopefully "we" as a country have finally learned the lesson we needed to learn BJ...
Never
Trust
a
socialist .........especially with money which isnt theirs.

have we ever had a socialist government? that new labour lot looked, sounded and behaved suspiciously like thatcherites 
We certainly have in the past and is was not a pretty sight, no more than New Labour.
It is not Socialism that is the real problem though, or perhaps any political ideologies, but with them all the individual greed for money, power, and corruption that results in what is pure at the outset being totally devalued in the eyes of the common man.
Get rid of mankind and you will solve the problem.
Well we can't go back now to the times when people earnt a decent living rather than a fast buck from privatisations or betting on the future price of pork bellies etc or even more sophisticated tools like sub prime etc. I do remember that era was ushered in during Thatchers reign. She wasn't a socialist.
I had a friend, in those days,who was a building society manager who gambled the branch float on privatisations and made an absolute fortune (enough to buy a hous by cash in London.