"We got into this huge 'debt' to bail out the banks"
Well if this is the best that the opposition to the Tories can do then we've got years of Dave and his chums to look forward to...
The debt isn't really the problem, the deficit is. In the last year of the Labour Government it spent £140 billion more than it earned, that is to say that for every £4 that the Government spent it had to borrow £1. And that spending wasn't to bail out the banks it was just to keep the country running.
Even before the bank crash the Government was spending more than it earned. Every year it was having to borrow money off of the banks to fund its spending. While other European nations were busy running their country at a profit or rapidly reducing the amount that they overspent by we were galloping ahead and getting deeper and deeper into debt. And whose dealing with this recession better? Those countries who made the most of the "good years" and started making plans for when it all would go wrong? Or those countries who just thought "stuff that" and ran off with the Credit Card to go and do some serious shopping.
That is the problem.
The banks weren't holding a gun to the Government's head and saying "right then Tony mate you've got to live beyond your means and pay your bills on this hideously expensive credit card." Labour spent pretty much every year during it's time in office living off credit cards, and I'm sure that anyone can tell you how smart a spending plan that is.
And the bigger problem?
The Tories were doing the same thing too when they were last in charge, from 1979 to 1997 they managed to live within their means twice. For every other year they were running to the banks to borrow the money to pay the bills too.
And so the Tories want to blame Labour for this problem.
Meanwhile Labour want to blame the banks.
Neither want to put their hands up and say "OK, we admit it, living off of credit was a stupid stupid idea." And you've bought that lie, it's all the fault of some evil banker or corrupt banker friendly politician.
So you can stick your head in the sand and deny there's a problem, all that will do is to further help the banks as we continue to spend beyond our means and have no choice but to turn to them and borrow vast sums of money from them to pay the bills.
We either have to pay more taxes or we have less provided for us by the state, to do anything else is just fiddling while Rome burns and playing right into the hands of the bankers who just can't wait to lend the Government even more money and earn even more interest from us in return.