Mervyn King:Labour not responsible for crash

Gangaweed

CLAPTON wrote: »

One may or may not choose to recall, that the Conservative opposition promised to match Labour's spending plans and argued for relaxing banking rules further.

One further notes, that after 4 and half years of conlib the level of public debt is higher and private debt is rising too.

Presumably their 'true' legacy.

True apologist. Your posts are still as stupid as they were 4 years ago.

CLAPTON

Gangaweed wrote: »

True apologist. Your posts are still as stupid as they were 4 years ago.

tautologically that may indeed be so, as they were correct then too.

Marktheshark

As they were not in power in all the other economies that suffered the same fate I would agree.
The crash was down to sub prime mortgage bonds going **** up in the USA that some banks thought they could make a quick buck on.
So Max keiser says.

Gangaweed

CLAPTON wrote: »

tautologically that may indeed be so, as they were correct then too.

Pigheaded as well.

BobQ

DaveTheMus wrote: »

There you go with WWI & II, Sierra Leone and Vietnam/Cambodia...

No matter how hard you try I'm not interested in discussing it as I care nothing about the subject, moreover I'm not interested in discussing anything with you.

Intellectual arguments not being available you seem to have resorted to abuse. Calling me a red Tory is quite insulting! Calling me any kind of Tory is insulting.

But you fail to understand that Governments make decisions for good or bad very few make them with malice. I do not support a lot of what Cameron has done but I would never claim that he has deliberately done anything illegal.

No wish to rake over Iraq etc, but I do think that your nemesis did what he did in good faith. We continue to see the results of terrorism and appeasement in the region and continue to suffer the results of terrorism here. The sensible left in Britain has often stood up to despots when the right have appeased or helped them.

BobQ

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Brown abolished boom and bust according to his frequent speeches on his own economic prowess. In saving the UK banks and financial system he regarded himself as the prime candidate to head the World Bank. Deluded springs to mind.

That may or many not be the case but it is not an answer to the question of how a global financial crisis in 2008 creates an "opportunity". All it created was a situation where he was unlikely to have been able to get reelected. So I doubt he saw it as an opportunity.

It is very easy to argue that the wheels would have come off in any case, but Brown did what the electorate wanted in the period he was Chancellor, he created a stable economy and restored health and education from the abyss that Thatcher and Major were leading it into. All this political cr!p about the leaking roof is absurd.

In 2005 the Conservative Manifesto even said " Over the period to 2011-12, we will increase government spending
by 4 per cent a year, compared to Labour’s plans (on current trends) to increase spending by 5 per cent a year."

This was not an argument that things were going terribly wrong, it was a commitment to spend a little less than Labour. At the same time they were planning to spend more on defence, police and pensions and the same on heath and education. As usual there were different views on the size of the public sector but neither party was advocating radical change compared to the other.

prowla

BobQ wrote: »

That may or many not be the case but it is not an answer to the question of how a global financial crisis in 2008 creates an "opportunity". All it created was a situation where he was unlikely to have been able to get reelected. So I doubt he saw it as an opportunity.

It is very easy to argue that the wheels would have come off in any case, but Brown did what the electorate wanted in the period he was Chancellor, he created a stable economy and restored health and education from the abyss that Thatcher and Major were leading it into. All this political cr!p about the leaking roof is absurd.

In 2005 the Conservative Manifesto even said " Over the period to 2011-12, we will increase government spending
by 4 per cent a year, compared to Labour’s plans (on current trends) to increase spending by 5 per cent a year."

This was not an argument that things were going terribly wrong, it was a commitment to spend a little less than Labour. At the same time they were planning to spend more on defence, police and pensions and the same on heath and education. As usual there were different views on the size of the public sector but neither party was advocating radical change compared to the other.

Brown did not create a stable economy - he created a bubble, and funded government by increased taxes. He sold our gold low and raided people's pension funds to bolster his departments' coffers.

I think that some of the money which went into school education was good, but other was simply wasted on new teaching fads, and higher education became a total rip-off.

Regarding the health service, there was a load of money poured into it (including money stolen from charities by reallocating Lottery funds), but it was largely wasted; apart from ongoing medical advances, can we say that the NHS was better at the end of the NuLab regime than at the start?

CLAPTON

prowla wrote: »

Regarding the health service, there was a load of money poured into it (including money stolen from charities by reallocating Lottery funds), but it was largely wasted; apart from ongoing medical advances, can we say that the NHS was better at the end of the NuLab regime than at the start?

all the key indicators like hospital waiting times, patients treated, doctor training place (new medical schools), number of doctors and nurses etc all say, yes, the NHS was much better that under the conservatives.
Whether that was really value for money is another matter.

prowla

CLAPTON wrote: »

all the key indicators like hospital waiting times, patients treated, doctor training place (new medical schools), number of doctors and nurses etc all say, yes, the NHS was much better that under the conservatives.
Whether that was really value for money is another matter.

What we can say is that the hospitals focused on the indicators; for instance getting people off waiting lists (maybe onto other waiting lists?).

It's like Heisenberg - measuring something has the effect of changing the thing which you are measuring.

Did the number of doctors and nurses increase under Labour? (Certainly the number of administrators did; allegedly the management spend quadrupled under Labour.)

ukcarper

I think anybody who doesn't think the NHS improved considerably under Labour didn't have to use it before.