A pretty accurate summary of Cameron's time as PM

[BillyStubbsTears]

Didn't you.

My mistake. I thought that when you said there was a boom that Brown took credit for, you meant there was a boom.

I get it now. You meant there wasn't a boom.

[Sammy Chung was King]

They have stabilised the country, nothing more than that. To get the country moving away from just being above water, new business needs to be created, improvements to the whole system need to be made, while also watching you don't drop too far back in what you owe.
The country has to 'speculate to accumulate', but sensibly. The leave vote gives the opportunity for us to get out of the mess we are in, by trading with a much bigger group of countries. It is a fantastic opportunity for our country.
Our country needs to start looking in other areas to grow, whereas in the past it was steel, coal or whatever, new opportunities await the people with the vision, there is a lot of money to be made!.

Between the two parties, they have made a real clusterf..k of the job. The country has done reasonably well in the past inspite of them, not because of them .
I think the days of 'blind' voting on what you're mam and dad, or gran and grandad is coming to an end, there is an opportunity for a forward thinking leader and new party, to take the reigns of power.

[bobjimwilly]

The country hasn't done reasonably well though. It's done very poorly, especially recently. In terms of the 2008 recession, we're experiencing the "slowest post-recession recovery in output in the past 100 years" (National Institute of Economic and Social Research).

With regards to the economy, quite frankly this government have been shit.

[BillyStubbsTears]

And the really sad thing is that we've known for 80 years how to pull out of recessions. You do NOT cut Govt spending. You keep the tap on until the private sector has recovered. You then cut the Govt deficit when the private economy is strong enough to pay big taxes.

It's very, very simple stuff. But in 2010, much of the world lost its marbles and convinced itself that Govt debt was the big threat.

And here's the grimly humorous bit. The most authoritative academic work that convinced Govts that debt was a terrible danger (work quoted regularly by Osborne in 2010-11) turned out to be based on an error in an Excel spreadsheet.

http://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646

The theoretical case for Austerity is dead and buried now. We were the last nation to obsess about it because Osborne built his politics around it. But he temporarily ditched it in the run up to the 2015 Election, and now it's going to be ditched entirely.

Because it doesn't work.

Cutting Govt spending drastically makes you poorer as a nation and actually increases Govt debt. We've learned that lesson the hard way. And the lost output we chucked away in 2010-13 has cost us somewhere between £150-350bn in wealth, depending on whose figures you take.

Lost. Permanently.  £2,500-5000 for every man woman and child in this country. Permanently lost output that will never come back.

That's why those graphs flatline. And that is the doing of Osborne.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Actually THIS sums up Cameron's performance far more eloquently than I ever could.

http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2016/07/camerons-failure-austerity.html

[Lipsy]

This is a choker:

"David Cameron’s premiership must be considered a failure. He wanted to keep the UK in the EU, but failed; he wanted to preserve the Union but Scotland might well leave as a result of Brexit; and he wanted to heal a “broken Britain” but leaves the country divided and with hate crime rising."

And he was worried all along about his legacy. That, right there, is it.

[BillyStubbsTears]

And on the other points (which he was wrong about anyway, but which he set up as defining principles for his first premiership):

Eliminate the structural deficit by 2015: It's now not going to be eliminated before the mid 2020s.
Bring down net immigration to the tens of thousands: It's now higher than it has ever been.

Both of those were proposed as politically motivated themes to put opponents on the back foot. Both failed spectacularly, and both did big damage on the way (trying to impose Austerity f**ked the economy for three years, hammering on about immigration without doing anything about it lost him any authority in the Referendum debate).

An absolute disaster of a PM.

[Lipsy]

The deficit thing has become (at least in my warped mind) the ongoing joke of this current (last?) government. I have given up on it because they just bleat on about getting it down when - as we know - they've never looked like winning that war. It's just a thing that they say when the nation is vaguely paying attention. "We're fixing the roof" etc.

Net immigration, though, the one that they were going to reduce to the tens of thousands, really gets my goat. They stand up at conference time and bray to their converts that they are going to get the numbers of foreign types coming in, knowing that they don't want that/can't do anything about it and it's one of the small successes of our economy (relative to others')... As I have said before, removing the Immigration Impact Fund in 2010 while Theresa May was banging on about numbers has really done the damage. It's hard to not to feel that it a) purposefully made the poorer areas of this country suffer, and b) played a part in leading people to vote to leave the EU. The bas**rds.

Typically, our former leader announced in June something called an Immigration Impact Fund to help deal with immigration. f**king genius idea - wonder where he got that one from?