Economy at 60-year low, says Darling. And it will get worse

dopester

Microstar wrote: »

Some arrogant comments there.

Fair enough. Strong opinions and maybe arrogant, but so what? GG calling Thatcher racist is ok?

I never claimed Conservatives were perfect. They made mistakes sure enough, like MIRAS run-up, the ERM fiasco of betting against the market (the market when it wants to be is more powerful than Government's money) and so on.

Yet here we are again, Labour at the helm with an HPI charged economy that went to mega peaks and now an economy that is falling in to the abyss. Remind me about how bad economy was in 1997 when Labour took charge.

Windfall taxes, tax raid on pensions, HPI, (can't blame them for dot.com bubble).

House prices are so absurdly unrealistic that people still think 35% is going to bring them back to some affordability in line with what they think reality is under 11 years of Labour - with an economy that is going in to some seriously dark times.

Microstar_2

I'm a businessman, not a politician, so I usually just get on with my business and don't get involved in politics. However I'm old enough to remember Tory leaders like Ted Heath and John Major.
Wilson did a pretty good job and was succeeded by Heath (not Callaghan BTW). Heath was pretty hopeless. Major was a complete wet blanket and his administration a fiasco - which is why we had the labour landslide of course.

Microstar_2

dopester wrote: »

Yet here we are again, Labour at the helm with an HPI charged economy that went to mega peaks and now an economy that is falling in to the abyss. Remind me about how bad economy was in 1997 when Labour took charge.
.

Were Labour also in charge of the US economy? Your description is equally applicable there - and the Republican's have been in charge.

If you want to start pointing fingers at who is responsible for HPI then maybe look back to mortgage deregulation in 1982 and the choking-off of social housing UK, or deregulation of the S&L market in the US in the late 1970's

dopester

It is near pointless all this attacking of the Conservatives for the really serious problems ahead.

You want me to go back to the late 1970s and early 1980s so we can identify where the blame should go for house prices tripling under 11 years of Labour government? It seems you want to point the blame anywhere but your party that has been in power for 11 years.

Under Labours reign, it was already known at the start that high house prices is not a long term economic platform.

Gordon Brown (1997): "I will not allow house prices to get out of control, and put at risk the sustainability of the recovery"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKZfLZWaV_Q

Now if you think house prices near tripling+ in 11 years was a great thing for an economy - then I think you are off your rockers. We will see if it is too late to begin building financial assets and back to productive values, without suffering meltdown in the process during the very difficult times ahead.

HPI to ludicrous levels is not the way to run an economy. People and society is better off for stability and the long term with investments in savings instead of housing.

Dan:_4

dopester wrote: »

You have to wake up Dan. The worse it gets, the harder credit will be to obtain.

And besides, you only took out a 20 grand loan not long back.

Credit will always be avaiable for those of us with a top notch credit history. It will just be more expensive then recent years.

Whats your plan anyway? To buy a house ouright when they have fallen enough?

dopester

Dan: wrote: »

Credit will always be avaiable for those of us with a top notch credit history. It will just be more expensive then recent years.

Whats your plan anyway? To buy a house ouright when they have fallen enough?

True and yes.

neverdespairgirl

Gorgeous_George wrote: »

She did it out of spite. Hatred for the working class. As bad as the worst racist.

I'm not at all sure that this is true.

After all, it was the organised labour which caused the problems, the endless holding the rest of the country to ransom. Much as the Tube lot still do to this day.

It wasn't under Thatcher that university grants for the least well-off went, for example.

neverdespairgirl

fc123 wrote: »

1985.....*thinks* I was 22, life was a ball, at college being a bright young thing. All of the above quote didn't even touch my life.

It didn't affect me either - I was 7, at primary school, and had a new baby brother. That's what I remember from 1985 (-:

Generali

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

It didn't affect me either - I was 7, at primary school, and had a new baby brother. That's what I remember from 1985 (-:

In 1985 I was 14 and thought that Kim from Portsmouth was the most beautiful woman I'd seen since Breakfast at Tiffany's was last on the TV.

neverdespairgirl

tomstickland wrote: »

The other thing that I find odd about the romanticism of the miners' cause is that the job was actually dirty, dangerous and bad for health.

And miners almost universally didn't want their own sons to work in the mines, I think?

The peak of the coal mining industry in the UK, in terms of both volume of coal and number of men employed, was in 1913. It was downhill all the way after that.