Ian. How can Labour attack Theresa May for being a remainer when Corbyn was also? That is why Labour are quiet on that front. The fact that Corbyn and May are both really Eurosceptics is by the by with May making a "career decision" thinking that remain would win and Corbyn letting his party bully him into backing remain after years of being a sceptic. So it is a cubject that Labour steer clear of. They can't attack May for something that Corbyn also did.
And if Labour were in at that point with Brown you don;t think he would have done Austerity too? The EU were critical of Osborne not being austere enough for them. People have short memories. Even Germany and France were fully paid up members of the austerity club: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10162176
Each to their own. Come on Imps you can do better then this. Who decided what to cut in this country? It wasn't the EU was it. This is a austerity done by the Tories, they saw over the cuts and so are to blame. **** like the rest then
You are missing the point. I am calling out something that is effecting the poor and sick/disabled in this country. The Tories brought it in and decided to cut what they wanted. So they are the ones that are to blame for how badly more and more people living standards are. If Brown had come in and done the same I would have called it a Labour thing and be calling them out.
It's true that the ECB governors, the French and German Governments, and David Cameron's governments were all equally guilty of the economic illiteracy that pushed austerity as a response to the global banking crisis. In so doing they prolonged a recession, turning it into a depression in all but name. To suggest that Gordon brown would have made the same mistakes is just plain wrong. It was Gordon Brown who moved quickly to underwrite the British banking sector, shortly after the Americans had allowed Lehman Bros to go to the wall. In so doing so he persuaded the Americans to change course and so prevented a far worse fiasco from taking hold globally. He might have chosen his words badly when he talked about "saving the world", but in economic terms, that is what he did. It's especially ironic that the right wing press got away with pinning the blame for the global financial crisis on the Labour Government. Gordon Brown showed a far more astute understanding, and a far prompter and more courageous response, than any other world leader then or since. He also had the UK economy back to robust growth before George Osbourne's disastrous austerity measures pulled the plug on that. When the history of the 21st Century's economic meltdown comes to be written, Gordon Brown is one of very few politicians world wide to whom history will be kind.
The global financial crisis wasn't pinned on Gordon Brown. Some media might play that but not even the most Labour hating person believed that the global crisis was Labour/Brown's fault. What was pinned on Gordon Brown and Labour was how close they were to the City and how on their watch this happened. It is ironic hearing a Labour leaner come up with this when they banged on about the "Tory recession" in the early nineties despite it being a "global" recession!!! That recession hit everyone else way before it hit us and the UK fended off that recession for a year more than the US. Are we starting to understand that recessions do happen no matter what the government of the day is doing? It is just opposition parties that play the easy card of blaming recessions on the incumbent. All Brown was guilty of was letting the City have a freehand and deregulating. You could add selling the gold off when the market was low as well but then New Labour were always good at helping the rich to a good deal
Talk to an awful lot of people in this country and they will tell you that Labour caused the recession - I heard this the other day when out canvassing for Labour. They have been sold this story by the right wing press, and many people have swallowed it. The last Labour leadership took the decision, foolishly imo, not to bother defending the economic record of the Blair years, so effectively conceding the argument. Brown did not deregulate the financial sector, Margaret Thatcher's govt did that. Brown did, as Chancellor, take the decision to continue with a light regulatory touch as long as the tax revenue was rolling in (being unaware of the extent to which the City was exposed to toxic US deritives). But yes, I agree recessions are cyclical. How nations respond has a huge effect on how severe and how deep those recessions are. Austerity is the worst possible response. John Maynard Keynes pointed this out in the 1930s, and eventually Roosevelt's government in the US put the theory into practice. It's why they built the Hoover Dam. It's also why this time around, George Osbourne to his credit attempted to counter act the detrimental effects of his idealogically driven austerity budgets with capital projects such as Crossrail and HS2. Edit: On the subject of the 90s recession, I'll give credit where it is due. Kenneth Clarke did an excellent job of mitigating it's worst effects once he replaced the hapless Norman Lamont as Chancellor. He handed Gordon Brown the reins of an economy well on the way to recovery. But then Kenneth Clarke has not followed the rest of his party down the ideological back alley they have been following since the days of the 'Mad Monk', Sir Keith Joseph.
Very true Imps. But also how someone can cope when everyone else on that stage is trying to cause them to buckle under pressure.
Regular one when collecting for Foodbank. Allegedly, "I Daniel Blake" is lefty propaganda. When I say that it understates the situation I am looked at pityingly. Heigh ho.
You can't blame Brown for the financial crisis but you can blame him for the position of the UK economy at the time. Here's what Ken Clarke had to say about Gordon Brown in 2005, well before the crash. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/apr/25/election2005.economy Excessive borrowing? Public finances should have started running a surplus by this point? Surely not! Our economy has recovered just fine. Not spectacularly but not terribly either. You can't credibly borrow to invest when you're already up to your eyeballs in debt and lenders are about to start charging you higher interest because you haven't been paying down your current debts. That's all down to Brown. About the only time when he ran a surplus was in his first couple of years as Chancellor, when he stuck to Ken Clarke's spending plans. Also, the idea that Keynesianism is a formula for recovery just doesn't match what happens in the real world. You can cite the US economy in the 1930s but what about the UK economy at about the same time? The UK slashed government spending (Ramsay MacDonald was thrown out of the Labour Party for going along with this) and proceeded to recover much faster than the US. Now this is quite simplistic - I've seen people argue the real key to the 1930s recoveries was how quickly a country ditched the gold standard and the problems in the Eurozone show the difficulties economies have when they don't have a floating currency - but it shows that spend, spend, spend isn't the only ( mor even the best) answer. The French weren't fans of austerity so rejected it by electing Hollande in 2012 and their economy hasn't recovered as well as ours since then. The Japanese have tried a few times to give their economy a Keynesian boost since 1990. It hasn't worked, it's just left them with a vast national debt. So you can't claim that spending is the unquestioned route to recovery. Even when it does work it comes at a cost. The 1970s (it's that decade again!) was when Keynesian economics finally left the U.K. in a financial mess and forced Jim Callaghan to go 'cap in hand' to the IMF. Callaghan then admitted "We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step." Gove on TV last night suggested the Tories will start campaigning more on the economy and I think that's a sensible move. Labour are claiming they can fund a massive spending spree just by taxing business and the top 5% of earners. It won't work - when France tried to tax the richest in society the rich just left the country. If/when people realise that increased tax on business is unlikely to raise as much money as predicted but is likely to mean lower wages and fewer jobs and that they will end up having to pay more tax themselves Corbyn's plans may not look as appealing.
They should come to work with me. I step over homeless people under the bridge every day on my way in to work in Finsbury Park. This was not the case 10 years ago.
Haven't got time right now to take this point by point. However, there's a couple of assertions you make that I can't leave unchallenged. You seriously think our economy has recovered "just fine"? By what criterea? Growth is anaemic, wages are stagnant, our trade surplus is widening by the hour. There is barely one credible economic source that believes austerity to be an effective way of balancing an economy during recession. The IMF certainly doesn't https://www.theguardian.com/busines...es-do-more-harm-than-good-imf-study-concludes Does Michael Gove think he has has sufficient credibility to lecture anyone on the economy? Really, this guy? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-38138820/michael-gove-attacks-expert-economists
I think that Corbyn is clawing back a lot of voters that Ed Miliband lost during his poor campaign in 2015.
And more besides. He has made the Labour Party worth voting for again IMO. I still don't think it will be enough though. Had a conversation with someone earlier who came out with "well yeah, majority of crime is committed by immigrants isn't it". The right-wing rhetoric and the level it is ingrained into our society makes me want to cry. The fear of anyone different, and inability to want to help others horrifies me.
Whatever happens next Thursday, the momentum gathered by Labour in this campaign will continue into the next Parliament and beyond. If May wins, the Brexit negotiations will be such a disaster for the Tories that she could even be out of office before 2022. In fact many people are now saying the Tories realise what a train wreck May is and want to lose the election to give them an excuse to dump her. A few Tory candidates have stated publicly that May has completely ****ed the campaign up. Corbyn, on the other hand, has got stronger and stronger by the day.
If the Tories were to win though, would Corbyn be allowed to stay on as boss? I suspect when he goes the next leader might be back to the blairites that have taken over the party.
Approximately 300,000 party members voted for Corbyn to be Labour leader, although I think that included some block voting. That would take some shifting.
