Soo.. what proportion of Boots retail staff claim benefits and use the NHS?

[vinegarandbrownpaper]

Sick of 'business leaders' with businesses propped up by tax breaks, working tax credits and people propping up contracts with benefits when there is no work.. making sure those workers can still come back despite zero hours. Pay your staff properly before you complain about a supportive society you dolt.

AllThePrettySeahorses …. sorry I forgot this from the previous points you/I made. Part 3.

Growth, dodgy smoke and mirrors sales, and private sector competence.

You said
”Any recent "growth" is from one-off boosts; for example, people holding back their tax returns to benefit from the reduced top rate (which had a detrimental effect on previous tax income), the ill-advised sales of Royal Mail and Eurostar, among other stunts”

Apart from telling me how you get “growth” from sales reducing an annual budget deficit, how much was received by the exchequer, do you know where the proceeds of the Balls/Brown sale of our gold reserves at a 20-year low price actually went?

Re Royal Mail; would it have been OK if Labour would have sold it, as they planned to, but apparently didn’t want to protect the workers pension fund as Osborne did, in a company with a pension fund deficit made worse by the Balls/Brown early 1997-8 private pension raid – that if the pension fund was honoured in full, would have bankrupted our mail service???

“Peter Mandelson abandons plan for part-privatisation of Royal Mail”
• Business secretary blames poor market conditions
• Trouble looms over £10bn pension deficit
www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jul/01/royal-mail-mandelson-part-privatisation?guni=Article:in%20body%20link

“As part of the deal, the government had been planning to take on the £10bn pension fund deficit, as well as to change regulation.”

“But now Mandelson has put himself on a collision course with Royal Mail, its pension trustees and unions by refusing to bail out the postal company's estimated pension deficit.”

“The trustees are expected to revise their estimate of the shortfall from the current figure of £3.3bn to at least £10bn in the next few weeks. This would require Royal Mail to more than double its annual payments to plug the deficit, which would bankrupt the company.”

Re the UK nuclear plant building company Westinghouse; can you tell me why with the UK in dire need of nuclear energy and Blair announced a 2004 ‘push for nuclear’, why Brown sold the company to Toshiba of Japan for relative peanuts – and signed over the building and funding of the UK’s nuclear power to the French State (via EDF where his brother Andrew was a director), who failed miserably to do so, even breaking ground by 2010 - BUT will sub contract to Westinghouse when they do???
news.sky.com/story/405200/bnfl-sells-westinghouse-to-toshiba

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/politics/1983467-UK-Energy-Policy-Price-scandal-outages-due

P.S Westinghouse was our ONLY nuclear power building expertise, that in a rush for nuclear' would have made more government sense to BUILD up the company, rather than sell it, to fund their rush to build the 'growf' of government quangos instead.

Isitme - can I give you an example? My mum was very elderly and frail and needed care at home. When she first left hospital, that care was provided by a team of carers employed by the council. It was really high quality: the same carer ( one 3 x a day and a different one at bedtime), they were lovely, spent a few minutes chatting to her, helped her have a bath twice a week, kept in touch with me, organised her medication, rang up if she needed her repeat prescription, rang the Dr if she was unwell, asked her what she would like to eat and monitored what she ate and drank.
After a month, the service passed to a long term care provider because the long-term care service had to go out to tender to a private company. It was appalling. She had over 20 different carers. Some spoke hardly any English ( my mum was blind and almost deaf). New male carers would just turn up and let themselves in and my mum would suddenly find herself with an unknown male ( or female ) infront of her. They were incompetent- she was left with partly frozen microwaved meals, given neat peppermint essence to drink instead of a glass of water, her medication was missed, the commode was emptied into the bath, when she asked for a hot water bottle in the bed a cold one was put in the bed, they would turn up 45 or even 90 minutes late, they never got to know her and sometimes were in the house 5 minutes. Shenever had a bath unless I helped her at the weekend- they never had time.
She was supposed to have 3 x 30 minute visits a day and. 1 x 45 minute visit. However, because they were pad at minimum wage and only paid for the actual time they were in the house and had to travel from person toperson b bus or on foot at their own expense and were given 10 minutes between appts (sometimes two bus rides apart) they just could not make the system work. They never lasted more than a few weeks because they could. not earn enough money to live on.
Yet the private company was making a profit from the contract. My mum was getting rubbish care and the employees were being paid shockingly low wages. if they were at my mum's for 15 minutes, they would earn about £1.80 before tax. They then had to pay bus fares to the next appt. So if they got to two an hour they would earn £3.60 an hour and pay their travel out of it. Why would that attract high quality staff?
I complained and complained, over and over and kept a record of events. It ended in a formal complaint which was upheld in every aspect. The Chief Exec of the council made a personal visit to my mum to apologise. He said he was ashamed by the service people were getting but it had to go out to tender to best value and the council could not compete with private companies on price beacuse they pay higher wages than. the private companies.
My mum's service improved to some extent before she died, but what about all the vulnerable people who don't have someone to fight for them? The company had contracts in several nearby local authorities. The owners live in a huge house and drive flashy cars and yet that all comes from the adult social care money that should be spent on high quality care, not lining the pockets of businessmen.
The truth is a private company will always want to maximise their profits and that will always be at the expense of workers wages or people to whom they provide a service. I have a choice whether I shop at Marks and Spencer. I don't have a choice if I'm old, vulnerable, ill and not very well off and I need the NHS, or to be cared for.
This government is going down the same route with schools- academies, free schools - who can do almost what they like. Companies will soon be profitting from the taxes we pay for education as well.
I am happy to pay more health, education and care but I want that money to go into that system, not to pay private businessmen big profits.

IsItMeBut - in the past 55 years or so, there have only been 7 years where the government ran a budget surplus. 4 of them were during the last Labour administration 1999-2002.

LuluJakey1, excellent post highlighting the human cost of privatisation, where only profit matters.

IsItMeBut - finally had a few minutes to find and post some links:

Graph showing Labour's years of budget surplus www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/09/30/why-wont-labour-say-it-ran-a-budget-surplus-and-ask-when-the-tories-last-did/

Interesting graphs showing how government debt has skyrocketed due to the coalition's inability to manage the economy www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_chart.html

More graphs from the same site again showing how the debt has gone up and how interest payment on borrowing are getting out of control
www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/debt_history

Even the Torygraph's turned on the coalition with this summary of their economic incompetence www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11177862/It-is-truly-shocking-that-our-already-huge-budget-deficit-is-still-growing.html

AllThePrettySeahorses ……. Lets go through your points;
Firstly I see still no answer when the last time Labour handed over to the Conservatives a better economy than they inherited i.e. a stronger private sector and a lower unemployment figure, please come back on that.

Re Labour Budget Deficits; I knew that the UK books balanced by 2001/2 from the early 1990’s recession and then went into a spending splurge deficit spending thereafter, but I’m sure Labour did not inherit a balanced budget at that graph shows - and trusting my memory I believed at best, Labour had two budget surplus years _despite tax receipts nearly doubling up until the crash, which was piss poor financial management.

I will look into that BUT let us not forget Brown promised in 1997 to adopt Conservative budgets to please nervous financial markets and oldies like me who remembered the 1970’s under Labour, BUT WITHOUT PRIOR ELECTORAL WARNING, sold around 40% plus of our gold reserves, plundered private pensions, and put up Home Stamp Tax from a Flat 1% - plus numerous other taxes in the first several years as outlined in the ’80 tax rises under Labour’ link above.

So maybe due to those extra tax/gold sale measures I’m wrong, but I don’t think so as I also remember Brown kept early Private Financial Initiative borrowing ‘off balance sheet’ for several years and that graph may not reflect that other spending/debt – which in answer to the economist providing that graph, that would be WHY Labour doesn’t brag about the surplus years.

Re Conservative led coalition increases in national debt since 2010; you can show the rise in debt in 20 different ways, but I reiterate my points on the previous page, if Labour passes a £157 billion annual overspend to the coalition, can you name ONE Labour MP in 5-years who has said the coalition should cut an extra £100 billion from our annual spending in any single year – as all I remember at PMQT is them all shouting at every cut made.

If not, there are two alternatives and neither are very attractive for the Labour Party; the first being our Labour MP’s making laws in our name are economically illiterate in not KNOWING accumulating annual deficits INCREASE the national debt - and the second is all Labour MPs are pathetically bleating their budget deficit legacy has not been reduced as Osborne planned in 2010, when 5- years later they STILL don’t have a detailed plan to show the electorate.

But don’t forget there are numerous reasons why the annual debt has not been reduced further, as unlike Labour major tax rises was not on the Coalitions post 2010 agenda such as off the top of my head;

• Thanks to Labour’s decimation of manufacturing and EU stagnation still going on, we could not trade our way out of debt faster.

• The Coalition had to reverse most of Labour’s pre election National Insurance and Fuel Duty hikes to bravely come in AFTER the General Election.

• Wages (and tax receipts on them) have not grown as fast here (or anywhere else) as fast as expected in recovery from the worst recession in over 80-years and the influences of low inflation.

• The Coalition in recognising the fall in ‘real earnings’ continuing from 2008, lowered the start rate of income tax taking several million out of tax altogether.

• The Coalition helped those on the State pensions with the ‘triple lock’ policy, after derisory increases and huge cost of living rises under Labour e.g. 110% increase in Council Tax.

• The Coalition also helped by tax relief small, medium and large businesses to gain confidence and invest/hire, the 2014 world beating results versus our trading partners in the Eurozone, are now here for all to see.

There were other initiatives, policies and bills that came in e.g. an extra £10 bill or so to the NHS, I can't be assed to look up.

And Labour’s 2010 alternative; lets sit on our fat quango State expenditure, only raise taxes to companies and citizens to help growf and ‘the cost of living’ pressures – and hope something turns up – where would the debt be NOW under a Balls economy still needed to be rebalanced once it occurred to him what was wrong..

Correction to above;

-"The Coalition in recognising the fall in ‘real earnings’ continuing from 2008, INCREASED the start rate of income tax taking several million out of tax altogether." Doh.

LuluJaky1 …. I am sorry to read about your mothers experiences, my mother over 2-years having been admitted to hospital 3 times, caught the shitty energy sapping C.Diff and MRSA hospital bugs before she died, that all that NHS money, and all those managers could not control for ages – without being in a private sector hospital.

You seem to forget it was a Labour government through PFI and lack of business understanding that gave the private sector contracts and excess profits, as below, not this government as I have pointed out, of the current 6% outsourced to the private sector, 5% was under Labour.

The total value of the NHS buildings built by Labour under the scheme is £11.4bn. But the bill, which will also include fees for maintenance, cleaning and portering, will come to more than £70bn on current projections and will not be paid off until 2049

Across the public sector, taxpayers are committed to paying £229bn for hospitals, schools, roads and other projects with a capital value of £56bn.

So the choices seem to be, expensive State top heavy incompetence, expensive Private Sector rip offs, or better priced Private Sector provisions if needed.

And academy/free schools was a Labour idea, during a time when the toxic combination of a left wing government and left wing teaching establishment lowered standards; not just my opinion.
www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/labour-admits-great-crime-on-education-tristram-hunt-says-his-party-encouraged-schools-to-aim-too-low--and-pupils-paid-the-price-9053693.html

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/politics/1990838-UK-education-what-is-the-REAL-problem

The focus of real subjects that get youngsters into employment and standards, are starting to show in results.

Well, you are talknig to a Curriculum Leader in a comprehensive school in an extremely deprived area of the north-east, and a governor of another school, so forgive me if I find your interpretation of what was happening in schools completely ill-informed. It sounds like another opinion informed by The Daily Mail to be frank.

I don't know of a secondary school in our local authority that has had low expectations of students in the 13 years I have taught here. In our school standards have risen gradually and consistently across that time because of the dedicated work of extremely committed, talented staff and inspite of the government's appalling decisions- Labour and Conservative. However, Mr Gove has really destroyed comprehensive education in this country. His actions were ill-informed, ill-judged and the creation of free schools and the speeding up of the academies programme has produced a system that will never be cohesive again.

I count myself and our students lucky to work/ live in a local authority that has resisted academisation and retained a very high quality school improvement service. The government is now relying on schools to help other schools because they have systematically destroyed local education authorities. They don't offer these schools any funding to do this work and I can assure you secondary schools do not have excess, high quality, senior staffing sitting around waiting to be called upon to go and support struggling schools. Many schools are makng staff redundant already, never mnd when Cameron's school funding cuts are fully felt. My husband's school has lost 9 staff in the last few weeks, just as an example.

Tristram Hunt is only slightly to the left if Cameron and his cronies- and completely removed from the real world of state education.

My MIL and FIL recently retired from teaching - she was an Assistant Head and he a SENCO- in a local authority in Yorkshire where almost every school has become an academy. They are run by academy chains that do not have a clue. Some of them have had their schools taken from them and the government are looking for new academy sponsors but no one wants to take them on. In the meantime, there are children in these schools.
Similarly a local free school to us which was closed last month after just 18 months because of the appalling standards OfSTED found there. It is run by fundamentalist christians who have employed a set of part-time teachers with similar beliefs that no other school would employ. The achievement of children, the quality of teaching, behaviour and safety, leadership and overall effectiveness were all found to be inadequate. It will close and the students currently there will have to be found new places.
The futures of ordinary children who don't have the privileges of the likes of Cameron, Osbourne and Clegg, are being put at risk by policies of this government.
However, it seems to me their whole aim is to attack the most vulnerable - the old, the sick, the poor, children- who don't have any power. It is a measure of a society, how it looks after its most vulnerable members and this government's message is loud and clear. Protect the wealthy at the expense of the vulnerable.

waits in vain for isitmebut to answer my questions about quangos and proving that the private sector is more efficient

For goodness sake, IsItMeBut - NO ONE is saying that there wasn't a deficit in 2010. Of course there was, after the global crash. What the evidence says is Labour is better at running the economy doesn't even bother mentioning tory promises to match Labour spending pound for pound.

allThePrettySeahorses .... You say "NO ONE is saying that there wasn't a deficit in 2010. Of course there was, after the global crash."

For god sake, Brown was running an overspending/deficit economy from 2002 to the 2008 crash, up to 2010, JUST LOOK AT THE GRAPH YOU PROVIDED - any fool of a government can spend money we have not got playing 'Barry BIG Bollocks', doubling budgets based on increased tax receipts, and then ANOTHER £30 to 40 billion PLUS increasing our national debt.

The problem was pre crash, Labour was RELYING on City Tax receipts £60 billion a year plus, it was RELYING on High Street having already leveraged up their balance sheets to dangerous levels to lend/add to consumption to carry on, Labour was RELYING on a booming Housing market bringing in around £8 billion plus a year in higher Stamp Duty etc etc etc.

Labour built up the UK's increased budgets and fat government quango/non job employment ON THE PROCEEDS OF DEBT/BORROWING/SPECULATION, it was a badly unbalanced economy.

So under Labour there was an INHERENT massive budget deficit in the UK economy on the first recession, never mind the worst honking recession in over 80-years, THAT is why we had the largest annual budget deficit in Europe in 2010, THAT is why our banks (and their excessively leveraged balance sheets) had to be part nationalised when other countries did not have to.

LuluJakey1 …. On education, we could faff around all day talking about individual schools, left vs right ideology etc, but clearly due to the doubling of the budget, no one blame ‘austerity’ if education under Labour wasn’t working for our young and the future of the UK, agreed???

So lets look at the NATIONAL results, not the bollocks in left wing papers slapping their own backs by attacking Conservatives, REAL TIME results based on facts.

Looking at 16-24 year old unemployment; in July 2004 as we opened up our borders to the EU there were 580,000 unemployed, in 2007 before the crash there was 711,000 - and in early 2010 Labour handed over 921,000 unemployed to the coalition, do you spot the trend?

Clearly AFTER the crash, an increase of unemployment of our youth would have an excuse, *but how would you explain during the Labour/global boom, when the UK were bringing in 3 million migrants for UK jobs, our children could not compete for those UK jobs??

Well IN THE REAL WORLD, based on the following, after a school life & education during 13-years of Labour, do you NOT think the following EXPLAINS how badly let down our children were?

“England’s young adults trail the world in literacy and maths”.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-24433320

”Young adults in England have scored among the lowest results in the industrialised world in international literacy and numeracy tests.”

”A major study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows how England's 16 to 24-year-olds are falling behind their Asian and European counterparts.”

”England is 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries.”

“More than four in 10 employers are being forced to provide remedial training in English, maths and IT amid concerns teenagers are leaving school lacking basic skills, it emerged today.”
www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9322525/School-leavers-unable-to-function-in-the-workplace.html

”A study by Nationwide finds that more than half of secondary school pupils struggle to work out change in their heads, prompting claims that maths lessons are leaving them "unequipped for everyday situations"
www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10631728/Pupils-cannot-count-out-change-due-to-poor-maths-skills.html

I will concede that under Labour, many children did not take advantage of that extra investment, maybe they worked out that for them they'd be better off on benefits - but I guess word will be getting around they'll not be under a Conservative government - and the coalition looking to improve the results of the BASICS before secondary school, will help the next generation, socially and be better qualified to hit the workplace.

God willing.

You are quite ridiculous in your blinkered, cut and paste approach to life in Britain. Anyone can find newspaper reports and policy unit reports that support or criticise every government. That is what they do-depending on their political leanings they support or criticise said government policy and the impact of it. They have to do so because the opposition parties have to be seen to offer different and better, so we have to be won over to believe that either the government is doing well, or it is doing badly or the other parties would do worse or better.

The point is that there is a basic moral imperative behind political persuasion. Mine is that a society does its best to see that its most vulnerable have social justice; they are not disadvantaged by poverty, they have high quality healthcare, social care and education, a good standard of social housing is available and employment opportunities. That costs money and I accept that there has to be higher taxation to pay for that- which in my view should be raised mainly from higher taxes on the wealthy but I would happily pay higher taxes myself as a middle income earner.

The moral imperative for the Conservative Party has always been to benefit the wealthy, reduce any burden to the state of looking after the most vulnerable. It is a party without compassion that looks for ways of the few becoming rich at the expense of the many - cheaper, limited, poor quality public services run by private companies who are taking money from them as profit, with high quality education, housing, care and healthcare available to those who can pay for it. It is about reduced responsibility of the state and increased individual freedoms for those that are privileged enough to take them - and they are taken at the expense of the working class in low wages, poor working conditions, zero hours contracts, apprenticeships that pay £2 an hour. It is a whole philosophy that perpetuates established privilege and greed.

I know which society I would rather live in and it isn't yours.

still waiting for an answer

Iggly ... I have answered you (and others relating to your 'fat government is good' view) over the past few pages, even drew link summary pictures, if you haven't got it by now Cochise, you ain't going to get it - it was a slice of life, but I've moved on.

LuluJakey1 …. Another nice one sided speech, but once again let me giver you another perspective, my view, that looks at the record of the ALTERNATIVE in 2015, a Labour Party who in my opinion pissed on the working classes and the poor from a huge height over 13-years - despite more money and the best decade of opportunity to help society, in the past century.

A Labour Party that is stuck in Victorian England, where in their view EVERY business is full of fat cats and taking advantage of their workers, only good for taxes until they run dry and go boobs up – yet happy to form a highly paid new ‘class’; a new ‘not so few’ class of middle to highly paid sinecures and quangocrats with taxpayers money/taxes that should have gone to the poor – with no sign that lessons have been learned and it will get there next time.

A Labour Party that has been proven to tax HIGH, spend HIGH, yet achieve rubbish results, yet they now want us to believe they can do better than rubbish, with a deficit economy and the need to foster private sector growth (with profits they hate) to pay down the deficit before starting to paying down national debt?

A Labour Party funded and run by trade unions that preaches & stirs up society that any profit is bad, the problem being, not all of us have honking great Public Sector Final Salary Pension schemes that pays out a fixed portion of final salary no matter what obstacles and taxes a Labour government throws at that scheme – so how the fluck can the rest of us get a pension fund return with no company profits,

Labour keeps raiding them, and safe government 10-year bond only offer interest rates around 2% - leaving our State pension fate in Labour’s hands, really?

In whose world does Labour's recent record of ‘social justice’ help the indigenous poor, when in a democracy a Labour Party makes a ‘multicultural immigration’ decision from some Whitehall sofa that was to create here a benefit culture for a generation, offer new generations a mediocre education, put huge pressures on services like the NHS and Education, put huge pressures on housing leaving 5 million people (1.7 million families) needing social homes by 2010 – is THAT a record you are proud of, as if that was MY party I’d never vote for the fuckers again, especially as most of them are still in the shadow cabinet.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html

Labour’s ‘multiculturalism’ in 2000 was a dangerous social and economic experiment ahead of opening doors to Europe in 2004, which clearly was no accident as if 2/3rd of the 4 million immigrants under Labour were NON EU citizen, they had to be signed into the UK, so how did this policy NOT “disadvantage” the indigenous poor and disadvantaged in homes, education, jobs and compressed pay rates – and when were the tax rises to the masses going to stop to COMPENSATE for this non democratic 2000 policy?

Labour’s daily mantra has always looked to divert attention from THEIR failing of the poor and disadvantaged, by attacking and looking to bring down the top, which in a competitive world market and EU they insist we stay within, is a race to the bottom to be able to help the poor and disadvantaged. We need an increasingly high skilled workforce, we need to give people decent ‘fishing rods’ to feed themselves, not keep doling out free fish so their vote for us, while driving away the entrepreneurs& tax payers supplying the ‘fish’.

Labour needs to engineer the ‘class war’ for this diversion, needing to label the Conservative’s the party of wealth, when it is the party of business that CREATES the wealth to pay for all our services, as if we had to rely on a Labour Party business policy to PAY to help the poor and disadvantaged, by now they’d be rummaging through bins like in Greece.

And for about the forth time, you (and senior Labour MP’s) accuse the Conservatives of being ‘for’ privatised companies and profit, yet Labour gave out more government contracts and profit over 30-year contracts, than the Conservatives did, what was THEIR motivation?

So PLEASE do not lecture me on the theories of socialism, leave it for the new 16-year old naïve school kids Labour so actively courts that won’t ask too many questions.

Or lecture/diss a successful economic alternative to a Labour Party, that ideologically DID NOT, and CANNOT deliver your Utopia - even over an uninterrupted 13-years, with the humungous taxes of speculation to do so, and huge parliamentary majorities to model society for the 21st century, only to take them back decades.

You do talk twaddle - and underlining it and putting it in bold with links to crap like the Daily Mail doesn't make it anything other than twaddle. Trades Unions and The Labour Party are way off being perfect- no ne could argue that, but The Conservatives have their heads up their own backsides and always have done.

David Cameron- man of the people, the acceptable face of modern Conservatism- prep school, Old Etonion, Oxbridge , Bullingdon Club, married to the daughter of a titled man, house in Notting Hill, weekend home in the Cotswolds. He is a real change from the traditional, removed from reality, privileged Tory. He has no idea what life is like for people not like himself and his pals- Osborne, Johnson et al.

No you haven't.

Prove that the private sector is more efficient please give me the evidence

And why are quangos inherently bad? Not answered.

You've just ranted.

So Labour ran a deficit after 2002. Big deal. Tories ran a deficit between 1979 and 1988 and from 1990 to 1997. One year, 1989, ran a surplus. So what a load of rubbish, criticising Labour for being unable to manage the economy - who ran a surplus for FOUR YEARS.

Interesting graph here (if it posts) showing how much the deficit was reduced between 2009 and 2010 (one could argue only down to Labour policies) and how much the recovery slowed down from 2011, despite the Tories swingeing cuts. The Tories have shown again and again that they are unfit to deal with the economy and no amount of links to daily fail opinion pieces or remarks about "ballsian growf" will change the fact that we're currently in deep doodah.

Ooh, it did post! Anyway, you can see the initial rapid recovery tailing off once the Tories got their incompetent hands on it.

And if there was a similar graph for years 1979 to 1997, only 1989 would scrape above the 0 line.

AllThePrettySeahorses ….. do you have the first clue of the detail in the graph you have posted?

You do know that Labour were in power from 1997 to 2010, as when you say ”you can see the initial rapid recovery tailing off once the Tories got their incompetent hands on it.” - the “tail off” I think you refer to is the PEAK of an over £150 billion DEFICIT was in 2010, and what you see afterwards was the Conservative led coalition REDUCING IT. Duh.

According to the HM Treasury figures mentioned below, the annual BORROWING was trending lower (after the early 1990’s recession) based on Conservative budgets, we then went into a surplus in 1998/9 for 2-years, and from 2002/3, Labour Brown started borrowing even though the tax receipts from a bubble economy were steeply higher than in 1997.
www.economicshelp.org/blog/5509/economics/government-spending-under-labour/

Under the title; Impact of Government Spending of Budget Deficit

Look for the bar chart; Net Borrowing under Labour

Who cares what budget deficits there were since 1979, there is more to running an economy than budget deficits or surpluses, Labour/Brown from 1997 totally unbalanced the economy and WASTED much of the proceeds of the Brown financial bubble/speculation. If Labour would have built infrastructure with that deficit, it would supply service and growth for the future.

In 1979 Labour handed to the Conservatives/Thatcher an economy that had seen manufacturing fall during the 1970’s from 29% of the economy to 23%, with 20% inflation and interest rates, many millions of man hours lost each year due to strikes and penal tax rates and penal tax rates; the lowest income tax was 32%, the higher rate from 60%, the tax of unearned income over 90%, and should any company fare to make a profit Corporate Tax was 50% - so I’d be very surprised with that legacy the Conservatives were running a budget deficit economy.

And Labour from 1997 to 2010 saw manufacturing fall from around 22% of the economy to 12% - yet massively increased the size and cost of the State and public sector employment that was not sustainable as running a £157 billion budget deficit in 2010 – but HOW could they cut public sector numbers, as their trade unions fund Labour MPs and the 2010 General Election?

We were ‘doomed, doomed, I’ll tell ya’ with that 2010 economic structure then under Miliband/Balls, with a Labour Party who don’t want to be seen on the side of business to ruin their red street cred, somehow thinking one day we might be able to export our fat State for trade/earnings. Idiots..

there is more to running an economy than budget deficits or surpluses

But that's what you complain about the most....

Okay - you say the benchmark of success for the Tories is that they run a balanced economy that results in growth but, when shown that the opposite is true and that it is the 1997-2010 Labour administration, that you complain about, who have provided the 4 of the 7 surplus years in he last 55 years, you u-turn and say that this doesn't matter. There is no doubt that after inheriting the Tory mess in 1997, Labour turned the economy around and managed a surplus. If you think they pissed it away, then what do you think the Tories did in 1990 because you can't have it both ways? Exactly what is your revised benchmark for success?

And I stand by the comment that the upturn in 2010 was because of Labour reforms. After all, it happened before the Tories, well, didn't actually get into government and continued until the coalition's financial policy
asserted itself and slowed down the recovery. Given no evidence to the contrary, I speculate that the country would be in a far better state, financially and ideologically, if it was still under a Labour government.