Just answer the question - it wasn't difficult, especially to someone with such self belief in your own opinion.

Exactly - they aren't coming in to office inheriting recessions. It's after they've had chance to bring in their first budget, that the recession happens.

The Conservative party works hard to push the line that they always come in having to clean up the mess after an inept Labour government, so that they have a line 'its Labour's fault' to cover themselves. The facts are quite different:

The time when a government came into office having to clean up a mess, was the start of Harold Wilson's second term, in 1974.

There was a recession at the end of Ted Heath's Conservative government in 1973-74. This is when there were energy shortages and the government had to go to a three day week to conserve energy. The miners were on strike and the country was in disarray. The Tories got voted out. Harold Wilson inherited a country in recession with double digit inflation. Two years later, we had to go to the IMF for bail out money. Of course the Tories always use this as a claim that "in the 1970s, Labour ruined the country and sent us into the arms of the IMF", they don't tell you that what they left Labour 2 years earlier was a recession, double digit inflation and having to be on three day weeks because of energy shortages!

Wilson resigned in 1976 and handed over to Callaghan who had a three year term like Gordon Brown later did. This was a turbulent time with union strikes following the IMF bail out but in the final year of Callaghan's term the economy grew 5.4%. It was not an economy in recession - far from it. That is well above the UK normal growth rate of about 2.5%.

I expect the next guess will be "put I bet Callaghan left a big budget deficit". The budget deficit the Tories left in 1974 was 5.5% of GDP, the budget deficit Labour left in 1979 was 4.7% of GDP, so the deficit had fallen slightly.

The recession didn't come till a year later, from 1980-81, after Thatcher had taken the reins. She also left a country in recession when she left office in 1990, as John Major took over at a point the 1990-91 recession had already started.

In more recent times, the financial crash was 2008. The recession under Labour was 2008-09, but the economy was recovering after that - a point which is often forgotten. It's only since the Coalition has been in office that we have had the story of 'stagnation' and 'flat growth' or 'double dip recession'. The last year Labour were in office, which was the year after the recession, the economy grew at 2.1%. This is approaching the UK's normal growth rate.

We went back into recession from 2011-12 under the Coalition.

The irony is, now, the Conservative line is 'of course we are back in recession because we had to cut back on public spending to deal with the deficit'. But at the time of the election, they argued that Keynes was a myth, and that cutting public spending wouldn't damage growth. They said that cutting public spending would free up resources to the private sector and allow the private sector to grow. But the private sector isn't growing.

Your statement was just a line from your club anthem - sooner or later the current government has to stop blaming the one who went before and start giving us some evidence that their plan was better.

Can you imagine a business being run on the same terms as GB PLC ?

A business where half of the board of directors diametrically oppose the other half and will vote every single plan down, even if they agree with it, just because its the other half that suggested it - and then every four or five years they all re-arrange the seats and the fighting starts all over again (even granted that you yourself worked in such a business in the past

)

Can you imagine such a business surviving in a commercial world ?

Sooner or later this current government has to wake up to the fact that in 2010 they told the electorate that they had a plan and that they knew what to do with the economy because in two or three years time they are going to have to come around knocking on the doors and asking "How do you think we've done then ?" and when they do, blaming something that happened seven years ago (as it will be) isn't going to help them one little bit - its time to stand up and tell it like it is right now instead of blaming someone else all the time, if they thought the job was impossible then they shouldn't have stood up for it in the first place.

An example of how statistics can be used to give a view that doesn't present the whole picture.

To begin with as a Tory voter I think the coalition are a total disgrace and completely out of their depth. I have always Tory but I will not vote Tory at the next election.

To just take the data and suggest that is the definitive answer is far too simplistic. The mix of private to public sector is different, the role of unions is very different, the idea the Labour was going into a period of sustained growth in 2009 is simply not believable

In very simplistic terms though do you think that had the "austerity cuts" of 2010 not been as deep, and had not promised much deeper cuts in future years, that the ground made in 2009 could at least have been maintained rather than slipping backwards ?

Thats a bit of waffling to try and create the impression that "you're wrong, I'm right because I understand these extra factors that I'm going to allude to without giving an explanation".

The cuts shouldn't have had anything to do with it. The Chancellor delivered a 'budget for growth' which was going to cut excessive red tape and allow the private sector to grow. The private sector would have also been able to pick up all the extra resources (labour and capital) released by the cuts in the public sector. And as the government is proud of saying, the number of jobs created in the private sector has exceeded the number of jobs lost in the public sector.

So lets not have the government hiding behind the left wing myth that the poor economic performance was due to them having to cut government. Surely small government is better for the economy than big government.

Do you honestly believe that under Labour the country was going to see a growth spurt from 2009? Especially as they had said they would also have to reduce public spending?

Not a spurt. I think we could have avoided a double dip recession and had growth of around 2% like we did in the first year post-recession leading up to the election. I think had it been a Lab-Lib coalition, with an economic policy headed by Alastair Darling and Vince Cable, we could have made better progress.

Unless you (or the government) wants to claim either a) the Torys weren't planning larger spending cuts than Labour, or b) that the fiscal multiplier in the UK is currently less than 0 (The Conservatives own calculations had it at around 0.5) then it is inescapable that growth would've been higher under Labour than the Conservatives. The only issue is how much higher would it have been.

Using the targets set out in Darling and Osborne's 2010 budgets (I assume steady pace of deficit reduction - both were ever so slightly back loaded), I calculate that in the 4 fiscal years from 2010/2011 - 2013/2014 the Tory were going to make cumulative net cuts (relative to Darling's plan) of 6.4% of (April 2010) GDP.

According to Oliver Blanchard (chief economist to the IMF, [url=http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp1301.pdfhere[/url) a 1% cut in public spending (in developed economies since 2010) directly leads to about a 1% drop in GDP. Therefore the Conservatives extra 6.4% of cuts would result in lower economic growth of about 1.6% for each of these four years. It thus seems reasonable to assume that instead of the Conservatives' slightly better than flat growth, we would be having around 2% growth under Labour.

ps. This only adjusts growth cuts under the Conservatives, for the extra growth due to Labour 'stimulus' (i.e. not as many cuts), so don't say it doesn't take into account things such as the Eurozone crisis and the slower than Darling expected global recovery, because it already does.

...and presumably Osborne is aware of all this ?

...and continuing with the presumptions he is now either stuck on a runaway train, has no plan b, or is cutting budgets as a deliberate political exercise with no care to the outcome ?

Osborne has no plan b. His plan is to use the failure of plan a, to claim there is no alternative.

Whenever he is confronted with evidence of economic failure he says "that shows it is even more important that we aren't diverted from the path".

Watch for this line to come out when the UK loses its AAA credit rating, that Osborne clings on to as evidence of his great performance at making the markets have 'credibility' in his plan.

I would like to think the Chancellor and his team spend more time reading about the consequences of deficit reduction than I do, so I would hope so.

I think that the Tories have invested way too much political capital in deficit reduction. If they were to be honest and say: 'We - like the IMF and other respected bodies, hugely underestimated the negative effects of deficit reduction during this period of economic trouble. If we had not cut so far so fast, we wouldn't have entered into a double dip recession (which has lead us to borrow even more than in Alastair Darling's plan). We're going to go for plan B' they would be absolutely wiped out at the next election.

I don't think political expediency is the only reason though. The Conservatives like to cut the state whenever they can. I think they would've made cuts for ideological reasons anyway, the recession has only gave them a good excuse to go further than they otherwise would've been able to get away with.

[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20989050One new pension for everyone – no means-tested add-ons.[/url

Interesting to see that the government now believes in universal benefits.

And in principle this is a good idea.

However it's tied to an increase n the pension age to (eventually) 68 and having to pay NI for 35 years instead of 30.

I think having to work in manual jobs until you are 68 is going to result in a sufficient cull of the population to make it affordable!

Also not sure how IDS sells it as good for women who take time off for child care because your national insurance is credited for time off looking after kids up to the age of 12.

I also wouldn't trust IDS as far as I could throw him so there is bound to be some small print somewhere that results in more people losing out than predicted. The devil will be in the detail in this one.

The point is the government encourages the inherently selfish attitude by playing different sections of society off against each other.



I have no idea how they justified it and I certainly wasn't pleased when they did it because it seemed obvious to me the fees would only go one way. Up. However how Labour justified it does not excuse Willets from his deliberately disingenuous and deliberately divisive comments.

Only those who have never had to live under a previous tory administration, or who wear glasses with such a blue tint that they can't see what's in front of them, will believe that when tories tell us we'll all be better off, that's what will happen.

The rest of us realise that when tories tell us "we'll all be better off", then that's the time to stock up on KY jelly and make the shafting we are about to receive as bearable as possible

Personally I support an increase in the pension age and I would go further than 68. Really the whole issue about 'sustainability' hinges around pensions, principally the state pension.

The government likes to go on about us spending beyond our means, but its not health, education or benefits spending that is unsustainable, its not even public sector pensions, those are sustainable too - its the long term impact of pensions that is the killer. The Office for Budget Responsibility figures show this - its their 50 year projections that are based on no change in public policy, that show us in dire straits, not the short term ones. If you increase the pension age to reflect increasing longevity then that has more impact on making the public finances sustainable than anything else.

It's politically difficult, but I think we could get people onside if we said you have to accept a state pension age of 72 or 75, but we can afford to spend on good healthcare, good education, good transport networks, the things that will promote growth anyway. That doesn't mean you have to wait till 72 or 75 to retire, just thats when the state pension kicks in so if you want to retire earlier you will have to pay higher contributions yourself to a private scheme.

Yet at the same time, we have record levels of youth employment.

Aye: I can see how making people retire even later makes sense.

We don't have record levels of youth employment because older workers are taking their jobs.

Older workers are a different part of the labour market. Young workers are people with little work experience and they don't compete for the same jobs as older workers.

But surely when old people retire, everybody moves up the ladder creating more entry level jobs at the bottom?

We need to be creating new, unthought of industries to drive the economy and employment growth. That job will be for the younger generations. Not a question of older people holding the young back, that's an oudated concept. Industries tend not to last that long these days. How many computer game designers aged over 68 do you know? Rappers?

I completely agree with the first bit, and I'm not saying the old are holding the young back. I just think we need to accept that if we were to drastically increase the retirement age this would have a negative impact on youth unemployment.

Yes there are some professions where there will be few people in their 60's such as game designers, but what about all the older people who work as check-out assistants, doctors, accountants, etc? If they all work an extra 10 years all that will happen is their companies will hire less people, and the young will lose out.

p.s. were you genuinely using the rap industry to back up your point or was that a joke?

No joke. The music industry is a big overseas revenue earner. But, the key point is that the young are more creative than older people generally speaking. That creative energy should be channelled into deveopling new industries, including manufacturing new unthought of products. This idea of "jobs" is not how this country will move forward again - it will only happen through entrepreneurial activity. As someone old enough to look back I would say that anyone in their early 20s and younger with few responsibilities should be putting all their energy into trying to create their own business, develop their own ideas, etc and not expecting to follow the path that their grandparents and maybe their parents were lucky enough to have. That era was a very specific one in our history - developed on wealth created by the graft of the previous few generations. The job for life norm of a couple or recent generations has gone. It was an historical anomoly and not in fact a norm.

I'm quite pleased that this government is actually tring to tackle the issue of pensions, the devil is in the detail of course but the soundbites sound like a reasonable proposal and they are the first government that I can recall who are at least tackling the issue rather than wait for someone else to take it on.

In theory I could still opt to draw my state pension in just ten years time, in reality I am already resigned to working until at least 70 - there is a Plan B (I always have a Plan B) but if we continue down the path we're currently on then 70 will be the first opportunity that I have.

I'm fine with that and if the soundbite proposals hold true then at 70 we'll be ok at the proposed rates plus our f'kin useless private pensions, and there's always the painting income which doesn't make a profit at all these days, oh no