Where did I say that. You like to take what someone says and spin it. There are multitudes of reasons PFI being one of them. I am merely pointing out that people in this thread jump on headlines and then all agree with each other.
Tories have been talking to a US private healthcare firm = Tories are privatising the NHS. Never mind that this partnership goes back to the Labour government in the early noughties and there are all sorts of partnerships like this where governments work with the private sector to "try" and improve the state sector.
And here we have borrowing by the Tories outweighs Labour without ever looking into the detail that inflation means that we quite likely need to borrow in 6 months what we would have borrowed in a whole 5 year parliament from the 70s because of inflation. Add to that there are several roll on factors like PFI from the past government that we are still paying for as well as the fact that we have been in stagnation for nearly a decade and we are comparing it to a period where Labour were in power in one of the biggest booms ever yet still borrowed loads while also loading up future debt on buy now pay later PFI deals.
You all seem to want the answer to be 5 and when you see someone say it is 5 you do not question it.
The one about Osborne's austerity holding our growth back is laughable. We grew faster than most of the western world in that period and while the EU was stagnant. How did he hold our growth back or are we looking at false growth like the housing bubble that Blair utilised?
How would we grow faster when the world (and apparently our biggest market the EU) was struggling against deflation and negative growth? To grow you need people to buy your products and when the EU took so long to come out of recession who is buying? Germany was still at zero growth while we were "being held back with low growth"
People seem to have forgotten that in 2015 and 2016 it was being suggested that we could overtake Germany and Japan!!! We have outperformed Germany for the past 5 years!!
We still have higher growth than Germany.
Does the Beeb and Guardian not tell people this? Or do they put out misinformation and say Osborne held us back (despite no customers) and people believe it because they want to?
Do people not remember when the IMF criticised Osborne for not doing real austerity like the EU? Do they not remember when the IMF finally admitted that they had been wrong because they couldn;t argue with the growth figures? Do they not remember the IMF at the same time gave a caveat of "BUT" when again they were wrong because we are still ahead of Germany this year in growth?
The forecasts still have Germany projected to finally grow faster than us from next year but like Liverpool FC these forecasts of doom have continually said "next year." Our growth projections for next year are really low like they have been for the past few yet the actuals have always ended up being higher and the projections keep having to be amended to project the doom somewhere along the line. When that happens they will say "See we said this would happen." Of course it they will eventually be right but then if you keep predicting growth will slow down then eventually you will be right.
I'm not Osborne's biggest fan and glad he is out but you can;t blame him for the lack of growth when we were performing better than virtually all of our competitors in that period.
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