TOPIC: Labour bids to regain economic credibility by pledging only to piss money up the wall 'when necessar

The Labour Party has made a bid to recover economic credibility by pledging only to borrow in order to piss it up the wall.

The announcement marks a clean break from previous Labour policy of spaffing it all over the shop, and policy makers are confident the public will recognise the difference.

However, critics of the plan have already pointed out that it is word-for-word identical to Gordon Brown’s ‘Golden Rule’ in 1997, which led to him spunking money like a monkey in the zoo.

Speaking to reporters, shadow chancellor John McDonnell acknowledged Labour has an uphill battle in terms of regaining public trust on the economy.

“The first step is to guarantee that in government I would only borrow to invest,” he said.

“Like I invested six pints up against the garden wall on the way home from the pub the other night.

“It was a great night and the long-term feel good factor more than justifies the expense.

However, some are still defending the economic record of the previous government, pointing out they promised to end boom and bust and were only wrong once.

Where did you copy and paste that from?

There's far too much wit in that for it to from you and, anyway, haven't the Tories been borrowing money hand over fist since they got into power? And what have we seen for it? Oh yes, Cameron insulting the Labour leader for his dress sense to avoid answering questions on his own financial acumen.

"There's far too much wit in that for it to from you "

Says the man with his own private forum, have you tried recruiting from the away travel group ?

I'd rather recruit from ISIS than the away travel lot.

Who said anything about recruitment? Oh yes, you.

I'm debating with you, and I'd like to know where that came from. The Daily Mash?

Don't bother, I've found it. It's a cut and paste from News Thump.

thesilentone in "posting satirical news story as fact" shocker.

Just testing new forum rules, to see if I get sued.........

Just share the link along with the article, otherwise some may interpret it as you passing it off as your own material.

I share nothing.............

Funny article. Shame certain Sports Direct employees on here are too thick to know satire when they see it.

Would've been nice if it added something about how the despicable Tory filth have borrowed more than any Labour government ever. Then again it would cease to be satire at that point.

thesilentone wrote:
Just like God wasn't sharing IQ points on the day that you would have been better off dribbling down your mum's a*se crack.

thesilentone wrote:
Not surprised he's a Tory.

Self first, second, third..ad infinitum and sod the rest.

Loser, that's not very nice, don't take it out on me because they've stopped your dole.

I don't think there are any governments who have spent wisely.
I bought it hook line and sinker about austerity whilst Gideon has spent and spent. The country is skint and it's getting worse at an alarming rate.
They are all terrified of being kicked back out. Welfare needs sorted.

Way too much of my tax funds a dossiers lifestyle which I resent. They should be given drink and drug tests when they pick up their dole. The vast majority of the money should be put onto a prepaid debit card that can't be used to buy fags and alcohol along with a small amount of cash.

cyberslob wrote:
Welfare isn't the problem. The amount we lose due to benefit fraud is virtually nothing in comparison to what is lost via corporate tax avoidance. Sanctioning somebody off benefits doesn't give an incentive to find work if there isn't enough full time jobs out there. There isn't a single prison in this country that is allowed to starve inmates who misbehave. How is it acceptable to do this to welfare claimants? I understand in your post you don't condone sanctions, but many people do as they see its "sorting out the welfare system" and it isn't at all.

cyberslob wrote:
I totally agree. You work for 30 years for Pirelli, get fired because it is cheaper to make tyres in Timbuktu so you go on the dole, what right have you to fritter away that money on pleasure? Same for the disabled. If you can't work because you are blind why should you be able to enjoy yourself? Disgusting. Still the Tories have just cut payments to 600k disabled and terminally ill so that's addressing that appalling waste of Government money. Now we can spend it on essentials like using the army to build flood defences in Latvia

www.politicshome.com/home-affairs/articl...t-more-600000-people

Here's another 'story' I'm sure thesilentone will claim as his own any time now.

newsthump.com/2016/03/07/the-muppets-lau...mcclaren-comparison/

Possibly.

Read it and weep......................

'Ed Miliband’s worst moment in the Question Time debate came when he refused to accept that Labour had spent too much before the crash. The audience reacted with fury: how could he be trusted if he has yet to work out what he did wrong? This is toxic for him because his denial is completely genuine: he has convinced himself that the debt crisis is unconnected to what he got up to when serving in HM Treasury.

After three years of prudence, Gordon Brown switched tactics in 2000 and committed himself to a massive, audacious project: the Europeanisation of the British economy. He set out to shift our political centre of gravity, from being the ‘third way’ between the EU and the US and becoming an EU-style country with a massive government and masses of people dependant on that government. This was the Brown project. So the years 2000-10 saw the size of the state soar from 37pc to 50pc – a rise of 13 points. This is a faster rise than any other country, over any other postwar decade. And half of the damage was done by 2007, before the crash.

Using OECD data, tells the tragic tale. At the start of that decade, Britain’s spending was closer to that of the USA, but Brown then started his massive increase. He started to force feed the state like a foie gras goose, but couldn’t squeeze enough tax from the country. So his splurge was financed by debt . Brown stood out from every other global finance minister in borrowing like crazy, during the boom. So UK finances were in a precarious state when the crash struck.

By the time Lehman Bros collapsed, Brown had already increased Britain’s national debt by 43 per cent to fund his expansion of the state. He was already running up massive deficits: there was no deficit in 2000/01 but Brown (and his lieutenants Balls and Miliband) were running up a bizarre boom-time deficit of 3pc of GDP by 2005/6, the maximum allowed under EU rules. Brown’s ruinous profligacy defied every rule in the book of financial management. Even Keynesians argue that you need to run a surplus (i.e., reduce debt) in the good times. Brown had a different motto: more debt in the boom, more debt in the bust. And if it goes wrong: well, that’s my successors’problem.

Several countries that fared best during the crisis – Sweden, Australia, Canada etc – have laws forcing the government not to jack up any more debt in the boom years.
Look at the debt, not a penny of this is connected to bank bailouts. And even now, Miliband can’t bring himself to recognise what he did. As the lady from the Question Time audience so beautifully put it, if he can’t, why should voters let him do it again?

We weep when we read all of your posts. Do you have a link to the original article so we can see where the numbers come from?

It looks like quite an old one to me Marko. Here's a handy graph from the BBC last April:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32288751

The UK will miss the forecast for this year, over-borrowing by many billions. Those Tory skyscrapers are looking pretty tall. I'm not defending the over-spending by the last Labour government (it would be difficult), but you've got to look at those Tory borrowing figures critically at a time when there ISN'T a global financial meltdown. Pot and kettle?

thesilentone wrote:
I'll ask you politely, once again, to share a link with your article.

griff wrote:
One of the fairest comments I've seen on here in quite a while. I don't think it's unfair to say that gordon's plans left us very vulnerable and when recession did hit we were in deep. Likewise, it's not unfair to say that the tories have not exactly pulled up any trees in repairing the damage.

Try the Institute for Fiscal Studies......2010 Briefing Note 5. Last sentence third paragraph, should make you look in the mirror... bad management has cost us £42,500,000,000.00 (paragraph 5)



Total public spending is forecast to be 48.1% of national income in 2010−11, up by 8.2% of
national income from the 39.9% Labour inherited from the Conservatives. This would be the
highest level of public spending as a share of national income since 1982−83.

• Most industrial countries have increased public spending as a share of national income since
1997. But between 1997 and 2007 – prior to the financial crisis – the UK had the 2nd largest
increase in spending as a share of national income out of 28 industrial countries for which we
have comparable data. Over the period from 1997 to 2010 – including the crisis – the UK had
the largest increase. This moved the UK from having the 22nd largest proportion of national
income spent publically in 1997 to having the 6th largest proportion spent publically in 2010.

• Spending on public services has increased by an average of 4.4% a year in real terms under
Labour, significantly faster than the 0.7% a year average seen under the Conservatives from
1979 to 1997. This is largely due to increases in spending on the NHS, education and
transport. Since 2000–01 public investment spending has increased particularly sharply and is
now at levels not seen since the mid to late 1970s. Despite large increases in the generosity of
benefits for lower income families with children and lower income pensioners social security
spending has grown less quickly than it did under the Conservatives.

• Estimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest that public services have improved
considerably over the period from 1997 to 2007 with measured outputs suggesting a one third
increase in the quantity and quality of public services. But this increase in measured
public service outputs is less than the increase in inputs over the same period; in other words
productivity has fallen. The relative price of these inputs has also risen, so we find that the
“bang for each buck” that we get from spending on public services (output per pound spent,
adjusted for whole economy inflation) has fallen more than productivity.

• If the Government had managed to maintain the “bang for each buck” at the level it inherited
in 1997, it would have been able to deliver the quantity and quality of public services it
delivered in 2007 for £42.5 billion less. Alternatively, it could have improved the quality and
quantity of public services by a further 16% for the same cost. But perhaps service quality has
improved in ways not captured by the ONS’s measures. Or perhaps we were to bound to see
diminishing returns to additional spending when it was increasing so rapidly. To the extent
that additional spending boosts output fully only with a lag, we may not yet have seen the full
benefit.

cufcmike said: I'll ask you politely, once again, to share a link with your article.


and I'll answer you politely..I never share anything

It certainly doesn't make fun reading. The issues I have are
1) Having inherited a terrible mess Osborne has made the situation considerably worse than it would have been if Labour had stayed in. This is the Daily Telegraph, a newspaper fined this year for asking subscribers to vote Tory, telling us just how bad Osborne has made our financial situation
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11...r-national-debt.html

It’s now all but certain the UK will post a sixth successive year of triple-digit, billion-pound deficits, five of them under the Tories. Osborne has borrowed more in his half-decade as Chancellor than his predecessor Gordon Brown did during a decade at the Treasury. The Conservatives’ 2010 “emergency Budget” said the books would be balanced by next year. Official projections now suggest that won’t happen until 2018-19.

2) The poor financial management means that it is even more important that the Government make good spending decisions. So they buy themselves aeroplanes and bomb Syria while cutting flood defence expenditure. Now it turns out that they can't even kill Arabs properly and the psychotic Americans are calling Cameron and his troupe of monkeys incompetent.

What does the current Government do well?

thesilentone wrote:
You're a tory, you're too greedy to know how to share.
Wouldn't it be a shame for this board if you were banned by a mod for failing to share a link when you were told to?

Markovitch wrote:
What does the current government do well? Erm.....persecute disabled people?

thesilentone wrote:
Come on now.... Source?

deeksme wrote:
4/6 questions on PMQs the other week, Cameron responded with "We have a strong economy."

Now lets assume this is true for one second. This is great, but the recent government cuts of ESA by 30% are surely unjustified, and purely ideological, if we have such a strong economy?

Alternatively, this isn't true at all, and we really don't have a strong economy, and sacrifices have had to be made.

Its one or the other.

The source is stated.............

Try the Institute for Fiscal Studies......2010 Briefing Note 5

In Silentone's defence if you google the document he gave it comes straight up, and I am anal enough to have read it. And lets not ban people we don't agree with, a view is a view

This is couple of years old, but very depressing.

Maybe we can't afford to BREXIT.....

I'm still voting out.

thesilentone wrote:
I've seen that video before, fairplay to you for sharing it as it is very critical of The Tories and their Ideological Austerity. Part of their 2010 manifesto was to clear the defecit by 2015, they have got nowhere near to achieving this.

cufcmike wrote:

If you think it is to the Tories to blame, you need to watch it again......personal debt is the killer. When did that happen ?

thesilentone wrote:
Wasn't saying they are to blame for the whole mess we are in, but they are making cuts all over the place, saying it is to help solve this crisis, and it isn't helping. Banks are able to create money at a computer screen as a loan. You'll never see it. You'll never touch it. But its there, and you spend 25 years of your life paying them back, and they wonder why there just isn't enough money to go round.

The debt is hanging in the wardrobe not being worn, parked in drive still being paid for or you living in it. People went way beyond there means and are now paying for it. The cc companies are made for life.

So if I borrow money to buy a car that forces George Osborne to borrow money. Remind us why that happens

From the Guardian..............


The average UK household will owe close to £10,000 in debts such as personal loans, credit cards and overdrafts by the end of 2016, which is a new high in cash terms, a report has found.

Total outstanding non-mortgage borrowing grew by nearly £20bn or 9% in 2014, to reach £239bn, marking the fastest rate of growth in a decade, according to the report from PwC, Precious Plastic: How Britons Fell Back in Love With Borrowing.

It warned that people’s complacency over managing their debt may lead to a resurgence in bad debt.

The total amount of non-mortgage debt equated to nearly £9,000 per household last year, surpassing in cash terms its pre-financial crisis peak, the report said.

PwC projects unsecured borrowing will grow over the next two years by between 4% and 6% annually. This increase would leave the average UK household with non-mortgage borrowing of close to £10,000 by the end of 2016, taking consumers into uncharted territory in terms of borrowing levels, the report said.

Record low interest rates are helping to keep the cost of borrowing relatively affordable, but PwC warned that a 2% rise in interest rates on total household debt, including mortgages, would leave households needing to find an extra £1,000 a year just to cover the extra cost of interest.

A survey by PwC of about 2,000 Britons found there is a danger of complacency as people’s confidence in their ability to stay on top of their debts increases.

Fewer than one in five (18%) said they are worried about how they will make future repayments, down from 26% in 2013.

While just over a quarter (26%) of people expect their pay to be frozen or decreased in the next 12 months, this compares with nearly half (48%) of people who thought this in 2010, in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

But against the growing sense of optimism, PwC uncovered “warning signals”. For example, people aged between 35 and 44 are increasingly depending on credit to be able to afford essential items, with close to one in five people in this age group saying they borrow simply to make ends meet.

Gosh .that's a very long list of statistics. Absolutely none of which goes to explain why Osborne is so [censored] useless. He is borrowing money twice as fast as Brown, who was also [censored] useless. The massive rise in personal borrowing should boost taxable profits and employment levels in retail companies and increase revenue from VAT so Government revenue is increased not decreased. Your argument has the opposite effect of what you are trying to say. He has no money for flood defences for example because he is spending what he has on bullshit like bombs.
Still if your aim is to be the new Tony Blair you'll want lots of consulting projects to milk. Like £300m for infrastructure in the Caribbean! Oh, and an additional £30m for hospitals, only not British ones. And then there is the £9bn climate adaptation fund these countries can tap into as well! Aye, the future for Mr Cameron is so bright he has to wear shades
antiguaobserver.com/300-million-pound-gr...ised-by-the-british/

Personal debt is in large down to poor money management, unfortunately a lot of people make very poor financial decisions that starts them on a financial spiral that ends up with huge debts. Some less fortunate people are in debt through no fault of their own. Our education system has a major failing in not preparing kids for the realitys of life eg money management, they expect everything now and have no idea how to balance their books.

Markovitch wrote:

I have never read such absolute piffle....Let's all get in-debt so corporate business can hide it's profits offshore...cool idea.

Why are you bringing up personal debt? Trying to deflect the fact that Gideon has borrowed more money than any Labour government in history?

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

Also there is absolutely nothing wrong with manageable personal debt. You're just bitter because you can't get a credit card.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

I think we should all just stop taking the piss out of thesilentone.

He'm managing that perfectly adequately himself.

griff wrote: ...............said Billy No Mates, or the man with his own message board.

Is there any sense of logic to what you write at all?
1) Osborne is a terrible terrible Chancellor if you take success as managing the public purse. He has borrowed more money in 5 years than Brown did in 10 years, first Chancellor since the war who has made the British public worse off, failed in every key promise he has made
2) You have started waffling on about personal borrowing which has no consequence to the argument. The more people spend the more Osborne receives so your argument proves how crap he is
3) Osborne is from the Osborne family who own Osborne and Little the soft furnishings company, he keeps millions of personal wealth in offshore tax free trusts so dribbling on about offshore corporate profits just leads you back to the lack of ethics of your hero. Here is a channel 4 documentary about the millions his company makes from offshore deals
www.channel4.com/news/george-osborne-fam...l-with-offshore-firm
4) Cameron, Hunt et al have found no money for junior doctors but are building hospitals, prisons, flood defences and God knows what else abroad. They buy bombs that simply don't work. Why? Because the next career move is to ape Blair. The Torygraph on why Cameron loves Blair
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-b...rons-reputation.html

Marko, Not being funny or owt, serious question. You keep saying that Trident"doesn't work", In what way does it "not work"? I.e. does it not go bang? or is it just not a deterrent? Thanks in anticipation.

thesilentone wrote:
That's simply senseless. I've said before on here why I keep the other board going:

1. For accountability, so that one board can keep the other honest;
2. For emergency use, so that there would be an alternative if anything went wrong with this one
3. Because some supporters simply won't post on here because of this board's perceived affiliations with othe groups
4. Because I have fond memories of posting on Carlisle Mad; nostalgia I suppose

The fact that it's very quiet doesn't upset me at all. It's there if anyone wants/needs it.

Bruntonpasty wrote:
No problem
1) As a straight point and fire system the version of Trident simply doesn't work. The technology they (Cameron) are buying has been replaced due to quality faults. It isn't the system the US uses itself
2) It isn't a deterrent. As the Russians said to the Danes' no nukes, you are not on our radar, nothing is pointing at you, however get a nuclear system and we'll start pointing missiles at you. The same as the US said to North Korea. Having nukes makes us a target, not the opposite
3) The system is launched from 2 submarines. The Russians have drones which can find and destroy our submarines (the Russians claim) in under an hour so if the Russians were to launch an attack and our subs were in range the subs would be destroyed before the missiles could be launched

So take your pick from the list. We are protected from Russian missiles by US defence shields in the Poland so we are safe anyway if you feel these missiles are a necessity.
Trident reliability issues www.nuclearinfo.org/article/uk-trident/s...ve-it-works%E2%80%9D
Old technology hqinfo.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/nuclear-ne...-old-technology.html