Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 12:10 pm  

BobbyD wrote:

Ah, here we go, the usual tripe.

Pre 2008? You and the usual apologists trying to erase the depression that Balls, Brown and Wallace presided over, tell that to the million who lost their jobs.

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?

Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 12:14 pm  

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?

Perhaps if he had heeded the warnings about issues within the banking sector rather than compounding them by relaxing regulations that might have helped reduce the impact?

Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 1:13 pm  

Sal Paradise wrote:

Perhaps if he had heeded the warnings about issues within the banking sector rather than compounding them by relaxing regulations that might have helped reduce the impact?

Running a deficit in 'boom' years left us ill prepared when the downturn came.

Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 2:12 pm  

What is this stone tablet all about?!

[Kosh]

Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 2:39 pm  

Sal Paradise wrote:

Perhaps if he had heeded the warnings about issues within the banking sector rather than compounding them by relaxing regulations that might have helped reduce the impact?

Your mates Camoron and Gidiot were urging Labour to cut regulation of the banking sector even further during the entire period running up to the collapse. Not forgetting Gidiot championing the Irish economy as a model we should aspire to.

Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 4:48 pm  

Ajw71 wrote:

What is this stone tablet all about?!

Marketing.
Like cornflakes but with a smaller budget.

Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 5:44 pm  

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.

Re: The General Election Thread : Sun May 03, 2015 6:34 pm  

Oh fook, here we go again

Sal Paradise wrote:

Not quite as simple as you are setting things out:
Firstly the increases in population has put added pressure on both education and the health service. This would have been the case regardless of who would have been in power. Just think how high the borrowing would have been if Labour had continued to fund both to the levels you would deem satisfactory? What do you expect to happen at A&E when you have huge increases in population and life expectancy?

I would expect a competent government to anticipate the increase in population and invest in health and education to match those increases. But as we have seen over previous administrations, tories would rather the proles be garaged in hospital corridors and their children educated in leaky "mobiles"

Sal Paradise wrote:

I would still like to understand how come Aids is treated with such high priority within the NHS whilst cancer appears to be very hit miss. Perhaps if the NHS was re-prioitised the service would improve?

AIDS is relatively simple and cheap to treat these days. Don't believe the Farage rhetoric

Sal Paradise wrote:

The tax cuts to the rich is a straw man and you know it - the increases in personal allowances has reduced taxation to ordinary people far more than the cut to the mega-rich.

Increasing personal allowances makes little difference to the poor, it tends to benefit middle to high income earners most. The personal allowance increases were at the behest of the LimpDems and the benefits have been eclipsed by the increase in VAT, despite the "we have no plans to increase VAT" pledge. Increasing VAT is a regressive tax, it hits the poorest the hardest

Sal Paradise wrote:

I am no defender of the two toffs Cameron or Osborne but I would prefer them to the two Ed's - Balls was a hopeless chancellor, he could even get the baby P decision correct he is man of very poor judgement. Personally I would prefer Theresa May at least she looks up for the job unlike Cameron.

Ed Balls has NEVER been a chancellor, Gordon Brown was succeeded by Alastair Darling, both of whom AND Ed Balls are far more qualified than a 2.1 history graduate who flunked maths A level

Sal Paradise wrote:

Taxation is not a bottomless pit - I agree extracting more tax from companies who earn their profits here should be a priority. You could dump the whole GDP into the NHS and education and it still wouldn't be sufficient to satisfy your idea of what these services should deliver.

Now you're talking soft

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 3:40 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.

The question was what Brown could have done to ease the impact of the banking madness not what the Tories would have done. Given you believe Labour to be so superior to the Tories how come they did nothing? Do you really want the likes of Ed Balls let loose again

Re: The General Election Thread : Mon May 04, 2015 7:35 am  

Sal Paradise wrote:

The question was what Brown could have done to ease the impact of the banking madness not what the Tories would have done. Given you believe Labour to be so superior to the Tories how come they did nothing? Do you really want the likes of Ed Balls let loose again

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.