to be depressed about the Tories response to the latest news on the economy

[dikkertjedap]

How can you brush off such serious news? The pound is further plummeting, not really good news given how much we import ... All but two sectors are contracting, including finance to which tax payers are so exposed. Inflation is soaring, household budgets are under severe strain and there is a lot more to come. All the big cuts still have to bite, like all the planned public service cuts ... all the people who are going to be made redundant will not have spending power ... so we are all going to suffer even more: less spending/ less demand so less need for expensive home made products and more demand for cheap chines imports.

I feel so sad, are we heading for the worst and deepest recession in years????

i think most people feel the same :(

YANBU, it is getting rather worrying and a bit depressing. Although I still blame the previous labour government for getting us into this mess in the first place!

I know there are no elections, but would there be anything we can do???? I mean to wake up the politicians as we will have to pay for this for years, we don't have their salaries, their generous perks, their pensions. How can we let them know that WE ARE WORRIED, AND WE DON'T THINK THIS IS JUST A BLIP WHICH CAN BE IGNORED?

But the deficit can't be ignored either. Sooner or later it has to be paid back. I do think that some of the cuts are going a bit far, but I voted Conservative because I felt that Labour weren't taking the situation seriously enough.

Anyone who's ever been in debt will know that there's only so long you can bury your head in the sand. Sooner or later you have to accept responsibility and pay it back, knowing that it will be difficult but it has to be done.

YABU.

The problem is with your expectation. It was never going to be an easy climb out of the problems we are in. You cant expect sparkling results Q on Q after a recession when austerity cuts have barely been put in place.

Still - its a gift to Balls! And things may get a lot worse before the cuts start reaping rewards, so lots of lovely open goals for the Labour party. Its always the case though with austerity governments.

Come back after a couple more bad Qs and then you may have a point. Until then - its just coalition bashing.

No, I am not interested in coalition bashing (as an EU citizen, I can't vote anyway), but I am worried, really really worried. TBH I am even starting to consider to go back to the continent after having build up my whole life here (and going back will come at a huge price given the collapse of the pound as all my assets are in pounds). I don't think we are talking about a few quarters of pain. I am concerned that we are going into a very very deep recession, if not hurtling towards stagflation. The UK hasn't got manufacturing like Germany to motor it out of a deep recession. I really believe that we are in a very serious situation and that the politicians are not taking it serious enough. I am not a great believer in the wait and see approach in a situation like this, we might be closing the stable door once the horse has bolted with future generations paying for our folly.

so the answer for being in debt it to take your job away how does that improve the economy

Labour are a bunch of cunts who refused to draw up a spending review ahead of the election, pissed billions away trying to get money out of the door and pursued a 'scorched earth' policy so as to screw the Tories over even more.

Ed Balls is the biggest cunt of all.

Pascoe don't forget Gordon Brown, the man who as chancellor sold our gold reserves when the price of gold was at it's lowest for years.

Hi pascoe.

I see you're here to enlighten us once again with your deeply intelligent views.

dikkertjedap

I know what you mean. The problem is that in this country, we have a large section of the population who seem to think that the government should do everything and that either there is a secret money tree somewhere or that "tax the rich" is the answer to all our woes.

And we have a bunch of politicans who govern for votes rather than whats in the LONG TERM best interests of the country.

That's why nations like China, Germany, South Korea, Japan are all kicking our butts. They plan for long term. the Japanese have ten year plans. We're in mass hysteria here because we've had a quarterly blip.

The simple truth is we have been living beyond our means for over three decades. Crunchtime has come but we now have so many people reliant upon benefits....the very voters who will vote out the party who dares to cut deep enough to actually make a lasting difference.

but there will be more people going onto benefits after the job cuts surely??

Buy shares in private health if you can afford it. It's the next boom industry.

There are a lot of good points in your post dikkertjedap.

Just what exactly does the UK really excel at any more, except finance? Its a massive problem and the rest of the world is competing faster, cheaper and often better than we are at the stuff we are supposed to be good at.

The cuts are designed to bring our deficit under control, which will give us a better foundation for getting competitive again. But much of our industry has been hived off abroad via outsourcing, or simply been bought up by hungry foreign investors.

Its a problem decades in the making, and will take as long to fix.

TheSecondComing - why not address my views instead of abusing me immediately?

MummyBerryJuice - hello there.

NiceGuy2 - good points...but what is the answer. In many ways, you're saying that we get the politicians we deserve, which is sad but true.

The last election was shocking in so far as none of the major parties addressed the issue of cutting spending, knowing full well that the other 2 parties (and media) would have torn them to shreds for so doing. Yet without such honesty, how does the electorate really get a chance to make an informed judgement?

southeastastra - yes, there will be more people on benefits as a result of the cuts but unfortunately it's cheaper to have someone on benefits than have to pay them a full salary. The Govt needs to save money.

Germany is kicking our butts because they have a strong export economy and very high taxes. The Tories have sold off the family silver and want to line the pockets of the rich.

YANBU - the contraction was a huge shock (DP works on a trading floor, and said everyone was appalled) and the government's response (which is pretty typical of politicians) of "la la la - it's not our fault" doesn't help matters. The inflation figures (3.7%) were pretty bad as well.

I honestly think that with the way things are going, we are going into a double dip recession. The VAT rise was unfair and will hit the retail industry pretty badly, and once all the public sector workers start losing their jobs, things are just going to get worse. I haven't seen much in the way of initiatives to create jobs for all these public sector workers to go into. And, as Niceguy2 has said - this government (in fact, most of the governments) aren't really planning on being in it for the long haul. They're not making policies that are designed to grow the UK and develop it long term - they're after votes in the short term that will consolidate their power.

On the plus side - the £ will probably be hit making whatever exports there still are cheaper

Man, I feel depressed now.

TheSecondComing - the mining and steel industries required a subsidy from Govt so they cost us money. What remained after the closure programmes were profitable enterprises that actually paid taxes on their profits and therefore contributed to public coffers instead of draining them.

I'll bet you think the price of something should be set by Government, instead of the market, doncha??!

The Japanese's ten year plans haven't done them much good economically...

Very high taxes leads to growth donkeyderby?

The UK is now one of the most taxed countries in Europe, if you take all stealth taxes etc into account. We should be racing ahead

Germany also had the advantage of being completely re-tooled after the war, with huge development monies paid to it by the victors. They focussed on manufacturing, while we moved away from it for some silly reason.

Its funny - before the credit crunch France and co were holding the UK financial model up as a big enviable success.

Not any more though...

it is not just the UK who has been living beyond it means, it is virtually the whole western world, including the countries on the continent. I just think that there is at the moment too much focus on cutting (destruction) and too little on building up manufacturing (not sure in what, but there must be something what can be done, the UK used to make lots of quality goods, it is not just Germany who makes quality goods). I am also wary of drasting cutting the public sector (I do agree the public sector is way too big though) with so little scope for the private sector to take up the slack. The private sector is not performing at the moment, as the latest info shows, all sectors bar two are contracting. I am also terribly worried about the UK's obsession with finance. To me it seems that there is little added value, it just seems to be a lot of air, very risky IMO to build an economy upon it. Small and medium businesses get support on the Continent, not here in the UK. These are the businesses which could possibly pick up slack from the public sector, but there is little hope in the current financial climate, with no funding available for such businesses. I see the future for the UK really grim if this is not addressed. I mean mass unemployment, huge income gaps between wealthy and the rest, social unrest, strikes, simply awful. Nobody will win in such a situation. People who think that they will be okay because their job is guaranteed won't win either, housing market will be severely depressed (with lots of assets tight up in it) and the social picture will not be pretty.

sorry, meant drastic not drasting