Rishi Sunak

hcblue95 said:
Predicting the future and then saying it's a fact makes you look a bit stupid.
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The figures I mentioned in the post are correct and you can check them if you want. It would have been nice if government debt hadn’t gone from 40% in one year to 140% the next but it did unfortunately.

Also, regarding austerity under a Labour government had they won the election in 2010, the Labour manifesto is very clear about this, and the planned reduction in the deficit was very dramatic, even if it wasn’t quite as dramatic as what Osborne initially targeted.

The Labour manifesto looked to cut the structural deficit by more than two-thirds over the next Parliament, whereas Osborne’s plans in 2010 looked to eradicate it entirely. But what Labour targeted in its 2010 manifesto was actually comparable to what Thatcher achieved in her first Parliament, which I think is pretty interesting.

You can of course argue about whether Labour would have stuck to this plan or water it down, but the manifesto commitment was for a period of sustained austerity and something not dissimilar to what Thatcher achieved.
 
Brewster's millions said:
Call it pseudo economics if that makes it more palatable to you, but I’m afraid everything in my post was a fact and you can have a look at the government debt figures yourself if you like, as I suggested in my original post.

Had Labour won in 2010, an austerity programme would still have followed, and while it may not have looked exactly as it did under the coalition government, it still would have hurt and large areas of government spending would still have fallen in real terms over the course of that parliamentary term.

You shouldn’t kid yourself on that, and if Starmer does indeed win the election next year, he’ll face the same challenges on fiscal policy as we’re facing today. He may get slightly lucky in terms of debt servicing costs - any cut in Bank rate by the BoE will directly reduce costs now, due to QE (@west didsblue is a expert on this, like everything else) - but the scope to do anything radically different doesn’t really exist and that’s one of the reasons why I think he could be replaced within a couple of years, as the clamour to do more will remain.
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Had Labour won, an austerity programme would still have followed?

Jeez, man, where are you getting that from? It's as much a fantasy as 15 minute town centre visits and meat tax. It's deranged nonesense.

When will it sink in that austerity was a poltical, and not a financial necessity. David Cameron admitted it in his autobiograhy. How much more proof do you need than the architect of that policy admitting it?

Answer me this question. Where did you get your government facts from? Was it from an off the wall Tufton Street research group?

I'd like to know where those figures came from. Sources, in other words. I'll have a look at them in a balanced way if you do.

I can quote you one fact that is indisputable, though. Our national debt is now 3 times larger than it was 13 years ago.

What is interesting though, is your refusal to offer any explanation as to why 7.5 million people are on NHS wating lists, the roads are crumbling, and I asked a a question in my last post that you haven't responded to, so I'll ask it again.

Why have school budgets this year been cut?
 
NPBlue said:
Had Labour won, an austerity programme would still have followed?

Jeez, man, where are you getting that from? It's as much a fantasy as 15 minute town centre visits and meat tax. It's deranged nonesense.

When will it sink in that austerity was a poltical, and not a financial necessity. David Cameron admitted it in his autobiograhy. How much more proof do you need than the architect of that policy admitting it?

Answer me this question. Where did you get your government facts from? Was it from an off the wall Tufton Street research group?

I'd like to know where those figures came from. Sources, in other words. I'll have a look at them in a balanced way if you do.

I can quote you one fact that is indisputable, though. Our national debt is now 3 times larger than it was 13 years ago.

What is interesting though, is your refusal to offer any explanation as to why 7.5 million people are on NHS wating lists, the roads are crumbling, and I asked a a question in my last post that you haven't responded to, so I'll ask it again.

Why have school budgets this year been cut?
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I posted on the austerity plans outlined in the 2010 Labour manifesto yesterday and it’s all there for you to read - a couple of posts above this one on this thread - so I’m not going to repeat that. The manifesto is widely available on line as well so you can have a look for yourself.

However, it wasn’t just a manifesto pledge as the last Budget delivered by a Labour chancellor in March 2010 also set the course for a sustained austerity programme. Fortunately the OBR website, in its Data section, contains a spreadsheet with the historical Budget forecasts of the past thirty years or so, and again you can look at this for yourself.

If you look at the worksheet containing the forecasts for the structural budget deficit - the cyclically adjusted current budget deficit (CACB) - you’ll see that the CACB was estimated at 4.8% of GDP in 2009-10, and Alistair Darling planned to reduce this to 1.3% of GDP over the next five years. The 2010 manifesto effectively repeated this commitment over the course of the next Parliament.

It’s interesting to compare this planned reduction to what actually occurred over previous parliaments in order to get a sense of scale. The March 2010 budget called for a 3.5%-pt of GDP decline, which is an enormous commitment, and only slightly smaller than the 3.8%-pt of GDP decline that Thatcher achieved in her first term (the historical data are also available on the OBR website).

So far from deranged nonsense, as you put it, I was simply referencing actual Labour policy, and Labour policy was for an austerity programme not dissimilar to Thatcher’s first term. You might still believe that austerity was a political choice rather than economic necessity, but the Labour Party certainly chose austerity.

Finally, I can’t find anything which suggests that school funding is declining this year, to answer your question. If you have the data or a source I’m happy to be corrected, but I think you may be referencing the recent civil service cock up which will result in a smaller increase in funding this year than the government had planned, but still not a decline as you say.
 
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