To not understand why people are blaming the coalition for the cuts

[tetrea]

The Labour Party were in power for the last 13 years and it was the Labour Party that racked up a structural deficit of £160 billion and an annual debt interest payment and there is a broad consensus that this needs to be eradicated. Why are some people having a go at Cameron/Clegg/Osbourne/Cable etc for doing what the majority of experts say is needed.

Yes - just the sort of thing Labour, in government, used to criticise the Conservative opposition for...

Don't know why anyone is surprised to find a big helping of hypocrisy in politics...

Labour did nothing in office that governments all round the world didn't do before the financial crisis, including the administration of George 'Dubya' Bush, who managed to run up a really large deficit despite belonging to the alleged party of belt tighteners.

There is not that much any party or government can do to change a global economic meltdown with the exception of the US and China; everyone else is a cipher, more or less. Thanks to Germany and the way her economy is structured, the EU may come out of this battered but unbroken. It's probably not possible for everyone to duplicate Germany's approach though.

So no blame at all for Labour then mathanxiety?

Thanks - but I lived through the last 13 years and know what I saw. Voted the bastards in once too!

The responsibility of oversight of financial institutions falls to government, and unless Labour purposely gutted oversight bodies as the Bush administration did in the case of the SEC, or muzzled voices that were issuing warnings (and where were those voices?) then they were no more responsible than the Tories would have been had they been in power. The vagaries of the international financial system are not under the control of any but the major players, which Britain is not at this point of time.

Casting blame is not a very productive way to spend time once there is a mess to be dealt with, though. Surely arriving at a good understanding of what really led to the meltdown is a better way of trying to build safeguards into the system to prevent something similar happening again? And it must be recognised that this was a global train of events.