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For someone who claims not to have enough time or interest to read up about subjects, you seem to put an inordinate amount of time into analysing me Hound. I'm sure there's some point to it.
Remember the Tories telling us that Govt borrowing was going to be the ruin of the country?Remember every news program banging on and on and on about the deficit and how dangerous it was?The Treasury just announced that last month, it borrowed more to balance the books than in any February in history. That's following a year when Govt borrowing has been more than twice as big as it was in 08/09 under Labour.Outrage in the news?Opposition screaming that it is the end of the world?Nope.See, in both cases the Govt has done the right thing. Classic economics to support jobs and businesses through the bad times. But in only one of those two occasions did we have an utterly mendacious Opposition who played the economics to their advantage by lying to the public, helped out by the media repeating their lies.
Odd but depressingly predictable that certain people in here decide how they are going to respond without actually reading the post they are responding to.
Belton.Your first two responses were both, however dressed up, clearly attacks on me for raising the issue (behaving "shamefully" as you put it).As I say, you actually agree with the substantive point, but decide to play the man instead.
To respond to the OP, you have to look a few years before 2010 to commentate properly on the Labour govt approach to debt management.At the start of 2007, there were few economists expressing concern at government debt running at 36% of GDP. By post-war standards, UK government debt was very low and the government appeared to be meeting its own reasonable fiscal targets.Given the period of strong economic growth, it is unsurprising that Labour wished to increase spending on health care and education. If the financial crisis hadn’t materialised, we may have looked back on the great moderation with kinder eyes.However, a critic would point out that we did have a financial crisis and running a budget deficit during an unsustainable economic boom was irresponsible. In retrospect, Labour would have been better reducing the public sector debt further. This would have given the government even more room for manoeuvre during the crisis of 2008-12.And as far as lying goes, isn’t that part of the job spec in govt? We cannot single out one moment in history when politicians were mendacious (or not) with each other.