Daily Express today

[BillyStubbsTears]

River Don wrote:

bobjimwilly wrote:

Isn't alot of this debt down to the recession though? Brown stuck with spending through the recession (rightly IMO) to avoid cuts in public services and prevent further unemployment.

What I am saying is, if the global recession hadn't have happened (which no-one can say they foresaw), would we be in this mess still under the current government? I'm not sure we would be...  

Brown did engineer an unsustainable property boom though. Northern Rock was a sub-prime crisis, most of the banks were involved in crazy lending here too it wasn't just in the US. And we were in massive debt before the recession, not the best position to be in. The low interest rates crippling savers, the massive spending and printing money since is just holding off the evil day of reckoning, which is due very soon.

I don't believe a Conservative government wouldn't have handled the economy much better either. In general they backed most Labour policies and would have gone further with deregulation of banks.

Vince Cable on the other hand was warning of a coming crisis and wanted to see action to limit its effects, though I don't think he foresaw just how bad it would be. He was regularly brushed aside and laughed at in the house.

Hang on a minute. Even AFTER the worldwide (remember: not just us) economic collapse, our economic position is still better than it was as recently as 2006 (measured in terms of GDP). Vince Cable may have prophesied the credit crunch. Full marks to him if he did. What he DOESN'T say is what he would have done differently. Since the Liberals are besotted with the EU, presumably he'd have had similar economic/fiscal policies to Germany and France. Those policies resulted in a decade of economic under performance relative to us, followed by an only slightly less sharp recession.

There's no magic bullet here. But one thing us sure which us that our overall and individual wealth is far higher now than it was in 1997. Our schools and hospitals are better. Our trains are better. Our city and town centres infrastructures are better.

And whichever way you look at it, when the recession did come to the whole world, the practical effects here (specifically, the number of people who were chucked on the dole) were far less vicious than in the 1980 or 1990  recessions, where the Tories left it to the markets to sort things out. Just like Cameron and Osbourne were screaming for us to do this time.

[River Don]

BillyStubbsTears wrote:

River Don wrote:

bobjimwilly wrote:

Isn't alot of this debt down to the recession though? Brown stuck with spending through the recession (rightly IMO) to avoid cuts in public services and prevent further unemployment.

What I am saying is, if the global recession hadn't have happened (which no-one can say they foresaw), would we be in this mess still under the current government? I'm not sure we would be...  

Brown did engineer an unsustainable property boom though. Northern Rock was a sub-prime crisis, most of the banks were involved in crazy lending here too it wasn't just in the US. And we were in massive debt before the recession, not the best position to be in. The low interest rates crippling savers, the massive spending and printing money since is just holding off the evil day of reckoning, which is due very soon.

I don't believe a Conservative government wouldn't have handled the economy much better either. In general they backed most Labour policies and would have gone further with deregulation of banks.

Vince Cable on the other hand was warning of a coming crisis and wanted to see action to limit its effects, though I don't think he foresaw just how bad it would be. He was regularly brushed aside and laughed at in the house.

Hang on a minute. Even AFTER the worldwide (remember: not just us) economic collapse, our economic position is still better than it was as recently as 2006 (measured in terms of GDP). Vince Cable may have prophesied the credit crunch. Full marks to him if he did. What he DOESN'T say is what he would have done differently. Since the Liberals are besotted with the EU, presumably he'd have had similar economic/fiscal policies to Germany and France. Those policies resulted in a decade of economic under performance relative to us, followed by an only slightly less sharp recession.

There's no magic bullet here. But one thing us sure which us that our overall and individual wealth is far higher now than it was in 1997. Our schools and hospitals are better. Our trains are better. Our city and town centres infrastructures are better.

And whichever way you look at it, when the recession did come to the whole world, the practical effects here (specifically, the number of people who were chucked on the dole) were far less vicious than in the 1980 or 1990  recessions, where the Tories left it to the markets to sort things out. Just like Cameron and Osbourne were screaming for us to do this time.

No, I'm delighted the Liberals were nowhere near power, I only mention Cable to make the point that actually the financial problems were apparent back then.

Voting Lib Dem isn't quite the same since the Euro is in such a bad state there's a good chance it won't survive, whatever the problem has taken care of itself for the foreseeable future. If the Liberals got enough seats in a hung parliament to force a change to PR it would be a good thing, so I hope they do well now.

I fear we haven't felt anything like the full impact of this recession yet. We're going to make big cutss and that will mean higher unemployment, and yes a Labour government would have to make those cuts, there is a reason why all the parties refuse to specify how the savings will be made. One thing you can console yourself with BST is it looks like this is the election to lose, whichever party is in power is going to be deeply unpopular for a very long time.