General election

Quoted from Roast Em Bobby

or not to https://www.theguardian.com/so.....e-to-staff-shortages

Or not to vote Labour
- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/jul/01/mentalhealth.campaign

- https://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/mar/25/nhs-management-numbers-frontline-staff

The costs for Managers soared and left the UK with the lowest number of Doctors per head.

If just a shame we that we only have the real choice between these two clown party's, if only there was another party

Quoted from Skrill

One of the many reasons to vote Tory: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39702691

Surely the graph shows why we should vote Labour?
The deficit is much higher under the Tories and there are some years Labour has a surplus, there are none for the Tories either before Labour came to power in 1997 or since the Tories won back power in 2010

I see Boris has come out of hiding to make a fool of himself again, the man is an embarrassment, a superich childish toff who thinks playground insults are serious political debate.

Quoted from Cloudy

A thread dominated by the usual suspects. Sums up most of the political debate in the country, those that shout loudest have the least to say

UTM

If I don't like the title of a thread (and believe me it happens a lot on the football section) I tend not to comment or read it whilst respecting that to some people it is of considerable importance. Just saying.....

Quoted from codcheeky

Surely the graph shows why we should vote Labour?
The deficit is much higher under the Tories and there are some years Labour has a surplus, there are none for the Tories either before Labour came to power in 1997 or since the Tories won back power in 2010

The graph shows how incompetent Labour were in office, leaving with a £151.7bn borrowed debt. That does not include bank bailouts and amounted to 1 in every £5 being spent by the government being borrowed, or the entire NHS+most welfare. 7 years to get it down without closing the NHS, and we spend 5.3% on debt, £90bn. Yet Labour want to borrow another £500bn... - Posted by reactively-moderated on 25 Apr 2017 11:14

I'd also like to add another point. Labour wants to increase minimum wage to £10, while this all sounds dandy, simple economics dictates that this is a horrendous socialist miscalculation. Increasing the minimum wage would have a negative knock-on affect to the economy, in that businesses and companies would have to cater to higher wages. Therefore these businesses and companies would either have to conduct redundancies to make a profit, or employ less people to make a profit, or increase their prices to make a profit. Such a prospect gets even worse, as the workforce would be full of the un-skilled and non-experienced as the contingent that do have these qualities would be kept employed (making it even harder for the unemployed to find work). Even worse inflation would skyrocket, as prices would go up people would pay less. Look at Venezuela today, socialism has ruined that country, hence the 50% increase in minimum wage the country has seen.

Quoted from Skrill

The graph shows how incompetent Labour were in office, leaving with a £151.7bn borrowed debt. That does not include bank bailouts and amounted to 1 in every £5 being spent by the government being borrowed, or the entire NHS+most welfare. 7 years to get it down without closing the NHS, and we spend 5.3% on debt, £90bn. Yet Labour want to borrow another £500bn... - Posted by reactively-moderated on 25 Apr 2017 11:14

Borrowing to invest seems like common sense to me, the country is desperately short of  social/affordable housing, if £500billion was invested in this area it is not wasted money, there are major assets at the end of it plus decent jobs for skilled craftsmen.  Interest rates are at the lowest they have ever been now is a perfect time to borrow to invest in the future of Britain.

The Tories have borrowed money to give the very richest in society tax cuts. The Tories have always despised the working classes in this country and believe it is their right to rule.  The Duke of Westminster died last year and left property worth £6 billion, how much inheritance tax was paid on this? NOT A PENNY ! Truly the rich live by a different set of rules, the Tories always look after there own and that is the rich, the unscrupulous and the greedy.

Well Tony Blair says Labour have no chance of winning,

AND

Cameron says we should pay the EU Divorce money before we start talking trade,

Amazing how supportive they are about their old parties.

Quoted from codcheeky

Borrowing to invest seems like common sense to me, the country is desperately short of  social/affordable housing, if £500billion was invested in this area it is not wasted money

There would be another 3 million migrants here before those houses were built so it would be wasted.
This is the man who welcomes the day earth gets wiped out by an asteroid (all on public record) are you honestly taking him serious?

Quoted from Grim74

There would be another 3 million migrants here before those houses were built so it would be wasted.
This is the man who welcomes the day earth gets wiped out by an asteroid (all on public record) are you honestly taking him serious?

Better than a woman too frightened to appear in a debate on TV,  backed by a public school moron who thinks childish name calling is serious discussion.
They are frightened of debates because they know Labour policies are much more popular, it is terrible for democracy that our Prime Minister, unelected even by her own party thinks she is above being asked questions by the people she wants to represent

Quoted from Grim74

You couldn't be bothered to read the spending review then, anyway it's just the telegraph and not the Guardian😕 Even in the Big Short film the first warning reports of the imminent sub-prime disaster came in early 2007, you would of thought soon to be adviser to JP Morgan Tony Blair would have picked up theses warning and have his government put safeguards in place. At least he admitted is party should of taken a tougher fiscal position than they did.

In Blairs autobiography -  A Journey, (2010 I think) he says  "The economic crisis should have been (and indeed still can be) the moment when, instead of lazily succumbing to the idea that more state spending dressed up as fiscal stimulus is the sole answer, we took the opportunity to accelerate and sharpen reform".

Just one other thing you mentioned  the PFI debacle earlier would youn not count this then as an overspend? Just a mere amount of billions more off the balance sheet I suppose. I'm sure you don't mind my children and my children's children paying for These labour vanity projects for years to come.

Anyway nice to see what we would be getting under comrade Corbyrn as his policy's start to become clear, yay! a tax hit for everyone, especially those earning over £70000!! God how they hate aspiration.

And I'm sure as the anti Brit that you are, you will be in full agreement with them by putting the EU workers first in this Country by securing their rights,well before any deal takes place for your fellow countrymen..

Right, a little bit late as I've been busy, but here we go.

You posted a link to a database of over 50 articles so I think it reasonable for you to point out to me the exact article which disproves what I have said about expenditure! It seems that the one you are talking about is the "Spending Review Challenges" one - you're not even clear on this point. I've scanned through this file and, surprise surprise, it doesn't say anything about massive overexpenditure, rather just pointing out that the money hasn't been spent as efficiently as hoped. As we've noted in the past, after years of Tory underfunding, instant expenditure was required so it's not too surprising that it wasn't done as efficiently as possible. Not that this is a good thing, but you have to have some context. There were gains from the expenditure, just not as much as might be desired. They note that public sector productivity needs to be improved but it's not too surprising that they couldn't achieve this when our whole economy is notoriously unproductive. Nobody entirely sure why. Regardless, this doesn't prove anything about massive overexpenditure which isn't surprising because the figures show that it simply didn't occur!

Funny you should quote from Blair's autobiography. I've not read it so have no idea about the context, but it seems pretty obvious to me that he must be talking about reform of the financial sector and banks whose ineptitude caused the recession? We bailed them out with little more than a slap on the wrist so the only lesson they have learned is that the taxpayer will bail them out when they member up. Brown rightly takes credit for bailing out the banks and the Keynesian stimulus which mitigated the effects of the recession relatively well (subsequently messed up by Osborne's inept tinkering, of course), but it was a terrible mistake not to change the banking regulations to ensure that such a catastrophe can't occur again.

We've already discussed PFI to death - it was a blunder to carry on this Tory policy just to keep the figures off the books because a government can borrow massively cheaper than from the cost of the PFI deals. As I noted earlier, government borrowing at the moment is effectively at a negative rate of interest. It literally makes no sense whatsoever not to borrow to invest now but, unfortunately, we have the Tories in power and as we know they are useless, historically investing less than the governments of pretty much all of the other developed nations.

Funny to see that you are railing against PFI, however, as the idiocy of this scheme is one of the few points we agree on. The thing is, PFI was a Tory policy long before New Labour took it up and, despite his criticism of it, Osborne continued with the policy as soon as he took office. Difficult to find figures, but I saw a report that there were 71 new PFI policies started up by the coalition by 2012 so that's a similar rate to the previous government. This is even more foolish when you consider how low government borrowing costs have been since 2010.

Anyway, I thought it wouldn't be long before you resorted to a bit of name calling - "Anti Brit"? Don't be flipping ridiculous. I happen to think that being in the EU, the world's largest trading bloc, was much better for us than being out and all the experts agree with me - or more precisely, the arguments of the experts make sense so I agree with them. Being pro-EU doesn't make somebody anti British - that's the sort of bigoted jingoistic nonsense I'd expect to hear from May. Not that she believes a word of it herself, of course.