Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 8:01 am  

cod'ead wrote:

Not this old fanny again?

In 1997 Labour inherited debt that was far higher than we had pre-2008 financial crisis.

From Andrew Neil on Twitter:

@BBCr4today Miliband claims national debt was lower before crash 2007 than it was 1997. Not true: it was about £200bn higher

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 8:08 am  

Him wrote:

George Osborne, writing for The Daily Telegraph in June 2006:

Quote I fear that much of this regulation has been burdensome, complex and makes cross-border market penetration more difficult. This is exactly the wrong direction in which Europe should be heading and it threatens the global competitiveness of the City of London.



David Cameron, March 2008
As a free-marketeer by conviction, it will not surprise you to hear me say that a significant part of Labour’s economic failure has been the excessive bureaucratic interventionism of the past decade too much tax, too much regulation, too little understanding of what our businesses need to compete in the modern world.

And? It's like the captain of the titanic claiming it wasn't his fault because if the head chef had been driving he'd have hit the iceberg too! Whatever the Tories said is utterly, utterly irrelevant.

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 8:11 am  

Chris28 wrote:

Ah that old tripe. Again.

Even Gideon's own permanent secretary described what happened as a "banking crisis, pure and simple" so what part of this did Brown etc actually cause?

Indeed it was, because the banks were allowed to get away with it.

There wasn't a "global crash" like Labour apologists like to claim, many, many countries didn't enter depression, only the ones that "banked" on financial services to grow the economy. Like the UK. All overseen by Blair, Brown, Balls and Wallace.

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 8:36 am  

BobbyD wrote:

Indeed it was, because the banks were allowed to get away with it.

There wasn't a "global crash" like Labour apologists like to claim, many, many countries didn't enter depression, only the ones that "banked" on financial services to grow the economy. Like the UK. All overseen by Blair, Brown, Balls and Wallace.

That is absolute hogwash. Typical right wing apologist reply of blame anybody or anything but do not take responsibility even though you created the situation in the first place.
History and hypocrisy are the right wing watch words.

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 10:01 am  

BobbyD wrote:

Indeed it was, because the banks were allowed to get away with it.

There wasn't a "global crash" like Labour apologists like to claim, many, many countries didn't enter depression, only the ones that "banked" on financial services to grow the economy. Like the UK. All overseen by Blair, Brown, Balls and Wallace.

...so we should have had a bigger manufacturing base to counteract the banking failures then ?

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 10:19 am  

JerryChicken wrote:

I think the answer to your question is "not a lot" considering that the musical chairs game that was the international monetary trading system stopped the music first in the USA, not sure how Gordon Brown could have stopped the sub-prime mortgages or the US recession of 2007/09 that lit the fires underneath the whole shitpile of con artists.

City analysts were warning about the impact of sub prime two years before we started feeling the impacts, the government could have done more to stop the major banks getting in to far. The majority of UK banks were massively over leveraged and when funds dried up their lack of liquidity came back to haunt them. This could have been avoided by tighter controls over their balance sheets.

RBS went bust in the main because it got too greedy and borrowed and paid too much for Ambro. Northern Rock didn't go bust because of sub prime it went bust because it was massively over leveraged. Lloyds got into trouble because Brown persuaded them to take on RoBS/Halifax.Those who say it was all a global crisis and Labour were not to blame in the slightest need to revisit the facts.

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 10:40 am  

JerryChicken wrote:

...so we should have had a bigger manufacturing base to counteract the banking failures then ?

What happened to our large manufacturing base? A combination of poor management, lethargic worker attitude and increasing union power made us uncompetitive.

We have a solid manufacturing industry it is just smaller than it needs to be. We are very innovative engineers just not great at huge wigit type manufacturing.

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 10:59 am  

Leaguefan wrote:

That is absolute hogwash. Typical right wing apologist reply of blame anybody or anything but do not take responsibility even though you created the situation in the first place.
History and hypocrisy are the right wing watch words.

Hi, I'll just give you a quick history lesson. In 1997 the Tories got voted out. In 2008/9 we'd had 11/12 years of unbroken Labour rule. So, even with the best will in the world and whatever fantasies inhabit your mind, you can't really pin the Labour depression on the Tories.

Ah, hypocrisy. Well, look no further than Wallace, Balls and Burnham and their minions.

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 11:13 am  

JerryChicken wrote:

...so we should have had a bigger manufacturing base to counteract the banking failures then ?

There's been a steady decline, we now rank 7th on a par with S. Korea, Italy and France. US, China and Japan lead the way. Germany are on 7% of world manufacturing, we're on 3%.

We still make things, lots of things.

Manufacturing output as a % of national output
1970 27%
1980 22%
1990 19%
2000 16%
2010 10%

In 1997 it was 19% by 2010 it was 10%. I think we need to put to bed this myth that the Tories destroyed UK manufacturing.

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 11:45 am  

BobbyD wrote:

There's been a steady decline, we now rank 7th on a par with S. Korea, Italy and France. US, China and Japan lead the way. Germany are on 7% of world manufacturing, we're on 3%.

We still make things, lots of things.

Manufacturing output as a % of national output
1970 27%
1980 22%
1990 19%
2000 16%
2010 10%

In 1997 it was 19% by 2010 it was 10%. I think we need to put to bed this myth that the Tories destroyed UK manufacturing.

Thats a bit more than a steady decline over 40 years.

I'm well aware that the UK is still manufacturing things, I visit such places every week in my job, but to give you an example I visited a small (25 employees) engineering workshop a few months ago and found the experience so unusual that I mentioned to the owner that it was nice to smell lathe lubricants again, I hadn't realised just how long it had been since I smelled that distinctive smell but thinking about it so much of my time is spent in huge several acre warehouses where they stock cardboard boxes full of stuff that has been imported - the last very large engineering works I was in was British Jeffrey Diamond in Wakefield on the day that the miners strike was called, when the 2pm shift clocked off they were all saying their goodbyes because they knew it was the end of their business, and they were right.