Dawndonnaagain …. Re this first paragraph of yours and your subsequent posts you ‘weren’t going to bother’, and then did, posting a series of links;
“Oh dear. Same old, same old. Tory bankers fucked the economy dear. Unless of course you can explain to me how the little old Labour Party in charge of just this sceptred isle managed to screw the world economy. No, thought not.”
From your links, please correct me if I’m wrong, the first one is about bad Conservative spending, the second, third and forth, was stating the bleeding obvious, if Labour handed over in 2010 an economy in emergency and spending £157 billion more than we were earning, the UK debt will go up faster under the Conservatives – so clearly your problem is you do not understand what economy the Tories handed over in 1997, and that a lot of shit went on until handed back over in 2010.
Re the economy and resulting budget deficit of £157 billion;
Labour/Brown in 1997 promised to (and did) adopt the pre election Tory finances, which after a European recession in the early 1990’s, meant the UK budget would finally come out of a spending deficit and go into SURPLUS around 2000, WHICH IT DID. So Labour/Brown had the option to either start paying off the national debt a government will rack up during any recession, or go BACK into an over spending economy, which he did in spades when the global economy started booming, when economic theory states IS WHEN YOU NEED LEAST TO RUN A DEFICIT ECONOMY.
The problem was, although Labour/Brown’s SIGNIFICANT increase in government spending was MATCHED by growing tax receipts (and borrowing ££££10’s of billions each year) - much of the INCREASE in tax receipts were volatile and UNSUSTAINABLE - due to increased City/Investment Banking profits (estimated in 2007 to £100 bil a year direct & indirect), Housing Stamp Tax Brown increased from a Flat !% and was now bringing in £7-8 billion, plus all the GDP/tax growth from government and consumer spending/debt.
In other words, Labour built an economy on the tax receipts of speculation, record spending and record debt, which was to come unstuck on the FIRST MAJOR RECESSION, and did, but don’t take my word for it, read the link below.
www.economicshelp.org/blog/5509/economics/government-spending-under-labour/
• “If the government had entered the credit crunch with a budget surplus and lower public sector debt, the government would have had much more room to pursue a real and sustained economic stimulus. However, because there was already a deficit, the recession caused a rise in the cyclical deficit. The deficit of 2009-10 of 11% of GDP was primarily due to the deterioration in public finances, only a small part of this deficit was due to expansionary fiscal policy (VAT cut)”
• “A great failure of spending decisions of the 2000s, was to allow budget deficits during rapid economic expansion. A budget deficit of 3% of GDP may have sounded relatively low. But, in hindsight, this exaggerated the underlying deficit because tax revenues were boosted by tax revenues which evaporated during the credit crunch.”
Labour therefore had built this huge spending/public sector economy, much of it an army of expensive Quangocrats and administrators that could no longer be supported by taxes, as from late 2007 on, we were to lose a record 7.2% of GDP/output and resulting private sector unemployment.
And Labour’s 2010 solution; no measures to help the Private Sector/employment (in fact they RAISED the tax N/I tax on jobs), but lets keep this Public Sector Quango and non job fest going, and HOPE something turns up – as the annual budget deficit and accumulating national debt went higher – HENCE the 2010 £157 bil passed over, from Labour’s ‘customizing’ of the 1997 economy they inherited.
So think of how much worse our situation would have been if carried on with 'the old' for years more under Labour - certainly without 1.8 million new private sector jobs that don't grow on Labour's 'money tree'.