To think this silly patronising man needs to take long hard look at himself...

[MrsBuntyCuldeSacFunnyLady]

and his policies before telling the rest of the country what to do:
www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/oct/05/david-cameron-households-debts-speech
Of course households need to pay off their debts, nobody wants to be saddled with debts. It shows weak leadership IMO to now try and turn the blame of economic problems onto ordinary households, because months of blaming Labour is wearing a bit thin.

So the PM's speech should say "The only way out of a debt crisis is to spend like crazy. Never mind if you're up to your eyes in credit card bills and being threatened with the bailiffs, get yourself down to the shops and buy stuff you don't need because the country's counting on you!"

?

OtheHuge, People have to pay off their credit cards anyway, they are legally obliged to do so and he is stating the obvious. It's whats behind the statement you quote that disturbs me, on the one hand, "deal with your debts" - the absolving of responsibility on the government's part and laying blame at the public's door. At the same time he is speaking like he is just one of us when by saying "all of us". This shows weak leadership, he is clutching at straws.

They should be making low-cost loans, grants and investments more readily available to SMEs. Every business has a supply chain, mostly other small buainesses, and collectively they employ people. A national economy is mostly about keeping the money moving, not funnelling it all into a corporate honeypot.

Cogito, of course not - but as others have pointed out debt was encouraged and acquired during the reign of his Auntie Maggie in the eighties. His party is hugely culpable. The banks are hugely culpable. Now he condescends to tell us to pay our bills. People do not need governments telling them how to run their finances, they do not need to be treated by the PM as if they are stupid. His job is to lead, not patronise. He is failing.

OP YANBU, MissBuntyCuldeSacfunnylady I agree with you, he's out of touch along with the rest of them, the Catgate cock-up blunder just highlights that. I don't think it's fair to say everyone chooses to get into debt, I had this same conversation with a gentlemen the other day, some people have no choice but to get into debt in order to pay their mortgage and keep a roof over their family's heads whilst managing to pay the rest of the bills and buy the weekly shop too! x

Does DC's background and wealth matter? I think it does.

Here's an example of why, from the other end of the spectrum: there's a property porn thread that's active at the moment, where people are posting links to the dream properties they'd buy if they won the £85m lottery tonight. Quite a lot of the links are to houses worth 900k, £1.1m, £1.4m. That's because for many people, it's really astonishingly difficult to imagine their way into a lifestyle very very removed from theirs - to get their heads round what £85m really means.

DC would have absolutely no problem imagining how to use £85m and what kind of property he could buy. It's a step up from him, but it's won't feel outlandish: his and Sam Cam's assets are almost certainly well in excess of £10m, and there's no doubt that being PM is a significant pay cut for him compared to what his peers earn - and I'm talking about total pay package which includes not only the £140k property but two grace-and-favour properties, car and driver, etc etc - well over £500k pa in value.

His problem is the other way round: he'd struggle to really feel in his guts what it's like to worry about how to pay the school fees, as people earning "only" £100k in London do.

The notion of actually worrying about £20 for food this week will be completely unreal to him.

Here's how it works (based on earnings alone, not wealth, so it's actually more distorted in reality):
DC will compare his earnings with his peers - there are about 300,000 people earning between 100 and 200k pa who you might think of as his peers, and they are, nominally. But his real peers are the 89,000 people earning between 200 and 500k, the 16,000 earning 500k to £1m, and the 6,000 people earning £1m+. He will personally know quite a lot - hundreds - of the 16,000 and the 6,000. They are the celebs, hedge fundies, PE folks, property developers, aristos, accountancy partners, business execs etc who he spends his social time rubbing shoulders with and his working time doing business/government with. So he'll tend to look up, to these people.

The 11.4m people earning between 20 and 100k are decidedly not his peers, and as for the 18.5m people earning between 5 and 20k, they are on an utterly different planet.

I agree, DC's peers are fellow Bullingdon club members.

Cogito, no, as I said, paying down debts is clearly the responsible thing to do, especially if you're worried about redundancy etc. Problem is, if everyone does this, a recession turns into a depression.

Government role should be to gently and calmly make money available where possible, and let people spend it as they see fit.

Good post, slhilly.

it's also that all these guys, Cameron, Osbourne and Miliband were all SPADS or special advisors, they're not only very privileged but massively inexperienced in the real world.
I think Clegg was some kind of EuroSPAD, but don't think he's done anything like an ordinary job.

Having said that John Prescott did a real job and I don't know how much he really cared about other people once he got into power..
(shuffles away muttering "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely....)

"if everyone does this, a recession turns into a depression"

No it doesn't. As we found pre-2008, what really knackers a global economy is spending what we don't have and borrowing what we can't pay back whether that's individuals banks or governments. Spending what we can afford & borrowing what we can afford to pay back that's never been a problem. Not everyone is in debt.

Thanks garlic

DC is giving his speech right now.

I'm watching it. He most definitely didn't say people 'should' pay of their credit and store cards; he said people 'are' paying off those cards.

I'd have been happier if he'd stuck to 'should pay off their cards', to be honest.

Yes there are people who've had to turn to cards to pay for everyday living expenses but there are many, many more who've used them to buy shite and unnecessary gadgets, etc.

Blaming banks for the ease with which people were able to borrow is akin to blaming car manufacturers for making cars which can exceed the speed limit, when you get caught doing 80mph on the motorway.

slhilly excellent post :)

slhilly excellent post :)

But whilst there is a certain belief of 'why can't I have it now' and the irresponsible use of credit, there is also a large number of people for whom they have no choice but to use it.

People with sky high mortgages who bought 3-4 years ago, childcare costs, commuting costs, fuel. For a lot of people these basics take up all of their salary. Anything else beyond this is paid on credit because most wages in the UK have not caught up with the extortionate cost of living in the UK.

slhilly get real. Empathising with people who have only £20/week to live on is fine as far as it goes but if that's all we want a PM to do we might as well give the job to Lorraine Kelly. The last PM and his team got misty eyed about 'hard working families' but then the bankers ran rings around them. Maybe, if we'd had a few more wealthy types with actual experience of the nasty world of banking in on those meeting, we wouldn't have got so stitched up?

Cogito why should slhilly need need to 'get real' That's not what is being said, it's the fact that most of those in power were born with a silver spoon in their mouth and hence can't say 'I know what it's like", they don't, fact. Quite frankly it seems a tad hypocritical for DC to be saying drive down debt on one hand whilst lumbering a graduate with 30k debts on the other for example x

Not one single member of the government is saying 'I know what it's like'... people like slhilly are saying they're on a different planet and are therefore incapable of empathy. Which is quite wrong. The coalition is attempting to reduce the overspend to put the country in a better position for the future. An undergraduate investing in their education is putting themselves in a better position for the future.

Cogito, it would be helpful if you'd responded to what I actually wrote, not some weird strawman about Lorraine Kelly. Obviously, PMs need to be able to do more than simply empathise with the low-paid. As just one example, they need to be able to stop bankers running rings round them, as you say: and on that score, this PM is no better than the last, and I'm sure I'm far from the only person to suspect that this is because Cameron finds it extremely easy to empathise with the very eloquently put concerns of his peers who are in the City, and is a lot more tone-deaf to the concerns of people with not much money. You're also materially wrong on the facts: the last government had Gavyn Davies on its side, among others - you couldn't get someone more emblematic of a "wealthy type with actual experience of the nasty world of banking".

I didn't say that DC was incapable of empathy. I said (a) he'd find it very difficult, and (b) it matters. It matters because policy-making is all about tough choices, and there's often not a clear evidence-based "right" answer, and thus empathy will shape choices.

And I say this with the confidence that this is a notion is actively researched and managed in the business world, which you appear to think I know nothing of and am instinctively hostile to. For example: MBTI, Johari window, cognitive biases, etc - all stock-in-trade for businesspeople, to help them understand themselves so they can make better decisions.

You're still maintaining that a person with some money finds it more difficult to empathise with the poor, is more sympathetic to the rich and I still think that is a too-simplistic conclusion, usually borne out of inverted snobbery.

yes but that's the point, I am THAT graduate who invested in her future, but yet at the last interview despite me being one out of the top two, I wasn't offered the job "due to funding cuts they simply couldn't afford to train me?" & yet when I apply for other jobs I'm being told I'm too qualified for them whilst we 'manage' on Dh's PT wage. Could Mr C tell me what's fair about that? x