All very factual points those IMO
People could debate about the size of the debt inherited - the manner in which so much was hidden and repayment is constrained through Brown's obsession with PFI etc. - but the fact is the Tories made predictions and have gotten them badly wrong - their reputation must as a consequence take a battering.
So if we agree on that - can you help me out with something that I am struggling to work out please
Given all this Tory incompetence etc. - just what does it say about the Labour party that they are still, seemingly by a very large majority, deemed to be far worse that the Tories with regard economic competence.
Oh and pretty please do so without doing some cut and paste of the Sun, Express or Mail - the board can only take so much of that crap
It's to do with the Tory party being hugely successful at spin and PR and of course they are aided and abetted in this by their friends in the media, big business and the establishment.
As a result they are perceived to be the party most competent at running the economy.
But the truth is they aren't.
A couple of examples of the very effective spin, perception and establishment backing of the Tories.
Between 2010 and 2012 Osborne ran the economy into the ground. When it crashed he had to relax his borrowing targets. By engineering a housing boom ( which only served to inflate prices) he helped the economy to recover to levels of about 2% per annum growth, half of which would have been achieved anyway through natural recovery from a slump. The problem for him was that despite growth, Goverment tax receipts were actually falling because the growth was being fuelled by low paid, zero hour contact,insecure jobs. Consequently his borrowing targets were not being met. Also the increase in GDP was being met by simply increasing the labour force through immigration.GDP per capita was actually falling! In other words the economic recovery was mainly in low skilled, low paid jobs fuelled by immigration. And yet Osborne and the Tories presented the increase in GDP as some kind of economic miracle. The deficit and the national debt, increasing trade deficit, poor productivity of the labour force, per capita GDP hardly received a mention, least of all by the Tory media. In other words it was all smoke and mirrors BUT crucially very effective smoke and mirrors.
In the 2015 campaign that followed Red Ed was blasted for excessive borrowing by the previous Labour Government. Labour was so poor in it's PR and the media so compliant hardly anybody mentioned the Tories having borrowed half a trillion and failing miserably to meet it's deficit target. Only two people picked up on this - Paxman in his interview with call me Dave and Nigel Farage in the party leaders forum! The Tories got off lightly, and they continued to be perceived as better than Labour on economic management despite having fcuked up badly.
I could go on about the shambles of economic management overseen by Osborne between the election victory and the referendum and the latest manifesto mañana deferment of borrowing targets which in effect are an admission of a failed economic policy which the country has suffered for the last seven years, but what's the point because essentially the Tories can fcuk up but their highly effective PR and media friends can spin things so effectively that despite their screw ups they are still perceived as better than Labour.
Fcuk me we are still talking about Liam Byrne's treasury note seven years after the event and still blaming Labour for the global financial crash of 2008. What better example could you want?
