flowerderanger I read that blog piece and just sighed. You cannot take anything meaningful about public spend and borrowing from that kind of set of statistics.
I'll give you an example. Between 2001 and 2008, British tax receipts practically doubled from roughly £350bn to £630bn (receipts from stamp duty alone increased by 300%). This was largely the cause of the cheap credit boom; cheap money entered the economy and the ensuing fake boom filtered into tax receipts.
True Keynesianism would have meant Labour would have banked this windfall for the inevitable recession that would follow. Public expenditure was just under £350bn in 2001 (there was even a surplus of £4bn in 2001) but they didn't. They spent it, and more. By 2006, Labour were borrowing roughly £46bn a year despite the fact that receipts had doubled by that point.
This is a bit like winning £1 million on the lottery and buying a £1.5million pound house. Yes, it looks great and everyone goes wow! But you've still left yourself with a £500,000 mortgage you cannot service.
So that blogger chap is taking those years when Labour borrowed on inflated receipts and going "look, Labour only borrowed roughly £200bn during this time when the Tories borrowed far more during the early 80s".
What he doesn't recognise is that no party in power in the early noughties should have been borrowing a damn bean, regardless of whether they were Labour or Tory. And, of course, the Tories were borrowing during the 80s; any party would have been with public liabilities and tax receipt hangover from the 70s as they were (I notice he doesn't mention the 70s oil shock either).
Again, there are other issues he doesn't recognise. The only reason why Labour's borrowing was restrained between 1997 and 2001 was because they agreed to stick to Tory spending plans in their first term. This pledge was in the 1997 manifesto, and that is what led to the £4bn surplus in 2001 (they got round this pledge through PFI, but that's another story). The entire 80s period under the Tories was structured around recovering British finances after the 70s and getting us to the stable point of having a small surplus at the beginning of the noughties.
I have to say that I am nonpartisan these days in this matter, though it did cause me to leave the Labour party and Labour activism in the mid noughties because it was so obvious when the cheap credit boom collapsed, Britain would have liabilities of up to £300bn a year that it could not fund out of tax receipts. As it was, the shortfall was around £200bn (about twice the annual NHS budget at the time) , and, of course, that's when we got the coalition government, so that borrowing requirement than falls under Tory years.
But that £200bn annual deficit would never have occurred if Labour had not spent above inflated receipts from 2001 to 2008.