A year ago today...
Discussion
... we were treated to this joyous spectacle on our tv screens.
Oh happy day!
Tonight, I shall celebrate with a little 12 year old Scottish malt.
Is anybody else going to mark the happy occasion?
Don
--
Oh happy day!
Tonight, I shall celebrate with a little 12 year old Scottish malt.
Is anybody else going to mark the happy occasion?
Don
--
Blair won 3 elections. Just wtf are you going to execute him for? Being successful? Not liking him?
He didnt bankrupt the country. He didnt ruin the country. He didnt sell the country into slavery.
He attempted to improve what he saw as social mobility. He attempted to try and have ppl in work employed by the State rather than on the dole and supported by wildly successful financial institutions. He almost tried to reform the public institutions of State. If he had bigger b
ks and ditched Gordon sooner, his main obstacle and the man responsible for truely draining all the value out of the economy, then he might even have managed it and we wouldnt quite be so fked as we are now.
Dont forget, an awful lot of people vastly improved the quality of their lives under Blair. The explosion of credit to the wider society wasnt a massively bad thing, a lot of people made very good use of it. No, they havent all gone bankrupt, the are just paying their debt off. Normally. Boringly. But that improved life still exists.
Illegal war? No such thing. War is *never* illegal or legal, its only won or lost, popular or unpopular. His big crime is an unpopular war and that was 90% down to the previous decade of military thinking and the rise of the network centric warfare doctrine that fooked both the British and American militaries. The Americans managed to realise it earlier and fortunately still had Petraeus who had been preaching hard against it for quite a while and busy writing his "anti" doctine just in time for it to become useful when America needed it. But hey you know, never let the boring stuff get in the way of a more interesting narrative.
Personally speak I didnt find Blair too bad. An awful lot of the talentless fkwits around him and the calamatously incompetent idiot after him however should be tried for treason and then shot. They truely did have their personal handprints on the ruination of the country.
He didnt bankrupt the country. He didnt ruin the country. He didnt sell the country into slavery.
He attempted to improve what he saw as social mobility. He attempted to try and have ppl in work employed by the State rather than on the dole and supported by wildly successful financial institutions. He almost tried to reform the public institutions of State. If he had bigger b
ks and ditched Gordon sooner, his main obstacle and the man responsible for truely draining all the value out of the economy, then he might even have managed it and we wouldnt quite be so fked as we are now.Dont forget, an awful lot of people vastly improved the quality of their lives under Blair. The explosion of credit to the wider society wasnt a massively bad thing, a lot of people made very good use of it. No, they havent all gone bankrupt, the are just paying their debt off. Normally. Boringly. But that improved life still exists.
Illegal war? No such thing. War is *never* illegal or legal, its only won or lost, popular or unpopular. His big crime is an unpopular war and that was 90% down to the previous decade of military thinking and the rise of the network centric warfare doctrine that fooked both the British and American militaries. The Americans managed to realise it earlier and fortunately still had Petraeus who had been preaching hard against it for quite a while and busy writing his "anti" doctine just in time for it to become useful when America needed it. But hey you know, never let the boring stuff get in the way of a more interesting narrative.
Personally speak I didnt find Blair too bad. An awful lot of the talentless f
kwits around him and the calamatously incompetent idiot after him however should be tried for treason and then shot. They truely did have their personal handprints on the ruination of the country.DJRC said:
Blair won 3 elections. Just wtf are you going to execute him for? Being successful? Not liking him?
He didnt bankrupt the country. He didnt ruin the country. Personally speak I didnt find Blair too bad. An awful lot of the talentless fkwits around him and the calamatously incompetent idiot after him however should be tried for treason and then shot. They truely did have their personal handprints on the ruination of the country.
Er, who was PM while Brown was Chancellor? He could have sacked him. The buck stops with the PM.He didnt bankrupt the country. He didnt ruin the country. Personally speak I didnt find Blair too bad. An awful lot of the talentless f
kwits around him and the calamatously incompetent idiot after him however should be tried for treason and then shot. They truely did have their personal handprints on the ruination of the country.DJRC said:
Blair won 3 elections. Just wtf are you going to execute him for? Being successful?
Here's your starter for 10:- £22,500 of debt for every child born in Britain
- 111 tax rises from a government that promised no tax rises at all
- The longest national tax code in the world
- 100,000 million pounds drained from British pension funds
- Gun crime up by 57%
- Violent crime up 70%
- The highest proportion of children living in workless households anywhere in Europe
- The number of pensioners living in poverty up by 100,000
- The lowest level of social mobility in the developed world
- The only G7 country with no growth
- One in six young people neither earning nor learning
- 5 million people on out-of –work benefits
- Missing the target of halving child poverty
- Ending up with child poverty rising in each of the last three years instead
- Cancer survival rates among the worst in Europe
- Hospital-acquired infections killing nearly three times as many people as are killed on the roads
- Falling from 4th to 13th in the world competitiveness league
- Falling from 8th to 24th in the world education rankings in maths
- Falling from 7th to 17th in the rankings in literacy
- The police spending more time on paperwork than on the beat
- Fatal stabbings at an all-time high
- Prisoners released without serving their sentences
- Foreign prisoners released and never deported
- 7 million people without an NHS dentist
- Small business taxes going up
- Business taxes raised from among the lowest to among the highest in Europe
- Tax rises for working people set for after the election
- The 10p tax rate abolished
- And the ludicrous promise to have ended boom and bust
- Our gold reserves sold for a quarter of their worth
- Our armed forces overstretched and under-supplied
- Profitable post offices closed against their will
- One of the highest rates of family breakdown in Europe
- The ‘Golden Rule’ on borrowing abandoned when it didn’t fit
- Police inspectors in 10,Downing Street
- Dossiers that were dodgy
- Mandelson resigning the first time
- Mandelson resigning the second time
- Mandelson coming back for a third time
- Bad news buried
- Personal details lost
- A referendum denied
DJRC said:
Illegal war? No such thing. War is *never* illegal or legal, its only won or lost, popular or unpopular. His big crime is an unpopular war and that was 90% down to the previous decade of military thinking and the rise of the network centric warfare doctrine that fooked both the British and American militaries. The Americans managed to realise it earlier and fortunately still had Petraeus who had been preaching hard against it for quite a while and busy writing his "anti" doctine just in time for it to become useful when America needed it. But hey you know, never let the boring stuff get in the way of a more interesting narrative.
Lied to th ehouse and the country as to the reasons for going to war, sent men and women into conflict without the required support / equipment.Left winky in charge of the finaces
Allowed the country to get further and further into debt.
Introduced the country to Mandleson (The tower for that offence alone)
Introduced the country to Mrs Hideous (stoning for that one....and his wife)
Fittster said:
Would a supporter of the Blue ties like to post a list of achievements in the last 12 months?
today's Wall Street Journal said:
The Coalition's First Year
David Cameron and George Osborne have successfully contained the U.K. fiscal crisis. But Britain's monetary policy still looks lost at sea
By WARWICK LIGHTFOOT
Britain today faces a series of serious and interconnected economic challenges. Most of them the country shares with other advanced economies: an aging population; a public sector that is inefficient and overexpanded to the point of crowding out the private sector; serious competitive challenges to the private sector, mostly from abroad.
By any measure the coalition government that took office last May has made an impressive start toward tackling these issues. In its emergency budget, enacted only a month after entering office, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government met the immediate fiscal crisis head-on, setting out a plan to eliminate the current budget deficit by 2015-16 through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Taken together with deficit-reduction measures announced by the outgoing Labour administration in March 2010, the total fiscal consolidation in the emergency budget is projected to amount to £128 billion.
One year on, the coalition faces two big questions. First, did it do enough to deal with the immediate fiscal crisis? And, second, is it wise to make continued progress on remedying the spending crisis at such an early stage of a slow recovery?
The answer to both questions is a decisive yes. The scale of the U.K.'s fiscal problem a year ago was too great to be ignored. If credible action had not been taken immediately, the bond markets would have subjected the country's triple-A credit rating to intense scrutiny. The U.K. is not Greece; the average maturity of British government debt is twice that of other major economies. But such details would not likely have prevented investors from losing confidence in British debt amid last year's broader unrest in European borrowing markets.
As the economy returns haltingly to growth, however, the pressure to contain spending should not be let up. Most economists agree that fiscal stimulus measures should be targeted, timely and temporary—not broad, protracted and permanent. By the first half of 2010 it was clear that output had started to recover. A start had to be made on withdrawing the stimulus provided at the height of the crisis so that it did not permanently add to the structural deficit.
The core strategy laid out in the emergency budget does much to contain the long-term borrowing problem. Because a large proportion of the deficit is structural, it is essential that spending reduction, rather than tax increases, form the bulk of the consolidation; some 77% of last June's consolidation strategy takes the form of yearly expenditure cuts. It is to Chancellor George Osborne's great credit that his first March budget, announced earlier this year, contained few surprises with regard to the deficit. Mr. Osborne's concerted plan right out of the gates meant that subsequent budgets will not need to do much in the way of re-evaluating and re-strategizing; they just need to stick to the original design.
This is significant progress. But it is still not likely to be ideal in terms of long-term economic performance. A substantial body of economic literature, pioneered by economists such as Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, has explored the question of the optimal balance between public and private spending. This research implies that once government spending exceeds about a third of GDP, the public sector has expanded beyond the point that achieves best results.
That is why it may prove even better if spending were further reduced by about five percentage points of GDP, to around 35% of output. But even given the present scale of the British Treasury's belt-tightening, there may yet be swifter structural dividends in terms of improved economic performance than expected. No forecaster or finance minister should plan on it, but a rebalancing of this magnitude between the public and private sectors could yield pleasant "crowding in" effects sooner than conventional economic models expect.
Then there is the issue of monetary policy. Britain's banking crisis was part of a wider international meltdown, but domestic monetary policy also had a hand in it, financing a house-price boom that was compounded by strict U.K. planning laws. The legacy of those policy mistakes is still being felt acutely now, as the Bank of England addresses a credit system impaired by elevated debt on personal balance sheets and house prices that have room to fall further.
But beyond the immediate term, there are fundamental questions about the conduct of British monetary policy that need to be asked. Should the Bank of England's mandate be adjusted or modified? What is the proper institutional context in which monetary policy is decided? Should the central bank's economic forecasting assumptions and models be made more transparent? The Bank of England's present policy regime, based on a symmetrical inflation target, failed to avert an asset-price bubble and has consistently missed its inflation objective even in a period of apparent excess capacity.
Answers to such questions should be sought both among the public and within the Treasury itself. A proper debate would include discussion of the formulation of the inflation target and of the role, in deciding policy, of asset prices and measures of liquidity. The composition and operation of the Monetary Policy Committee should also be examined. A greater diversity of experience, opinion and intellectual interests among the committee's members would allow for broader-canvased decision making than currently seems to prevail.
In the past, errors in monetary policy were usually attributed to political interference overriding the technical judgments of the central bank. That explanation was always too simplistic. The U.K. Treasury sets the Bank of England's policy target, and much more than central banks in other developed nations, Britain's monetary authority receives guidance from the political arena; the judgments of the Treasury and the chancellor deserve as much credit for good monetary policy as for bad.
That is why the coalition today cannot rest on its laurels for having contained the fiscal crisis. It does so at the risk of letting the recent failings at the central bank undermine the economic legacy of a first year well managed.
David Cameron and George Osborne have successfully contained the U.K. fiscal crisis. But Britain's monetary policy still looks lost at sea
By WARWICK LIGHTFOOT
Britain today faces a series of serious and interconnected economic challenges. Most of them the country shares with other advanced economies: an aging population; a public sector that is inefficient and overexpanded to the point of crowding out the private sector; serious competitive challenges to the private sector, mostly from abroad.
By any measure the coalition government that took office last May has made an impressive start toward tackling these issues. In its emergency budget, enacted only a month after entering office, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government met the immediate fiscal crisis head-on, setting out a plan to eliminate the current budget deficit by 2015-16 through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. Taken together with deficit-reduction measures announced by the outgoing Labour administration in March 2010, the total fiscal consolidation in the emergency budget is projected to amount to £128 billion.
One year on, the coalition faces two big questions. First, did it do enough to deal with the immediate fiscal crisis? And, second, is it wise to make continued progress on remedying the spending crisis at such an early stage of a slow recovery?
The answer to both questions is a decisive yes. The scale of the U.K.'s fiscal problem a year ago was too great to be ignored. If credible action had not been taken immediately, the bond markets would have subjected the country's triple-A credit rating to intense scrutiny. The U.K. is not Greece; the average maturity of British government debt is twice that of other major economies. But such details would not likely have prevented investors from losing confidence in British debt amid last year's broader unrest in European borrowing markets.
As the economy returns haltingly to growth, however, the pressure to contain spending should not be let up. Most economists agree that fiscal stimulus measures should be targeted, timely and temporary—not broad, protracted and permanent. By the first half of 2010 it was clear that output had started to recover. A start had to be made on withdrawing the stimulus provided at the height of the crisis so that it did not permanently add to the structural deficit.
The core strategy laid out in the emergency budget does much to contain the long-term borrowing problem. Because a large proportion of the deficit is structural, it is essential that spending reduction, rather than tax increases, form the bulk of the consolidation; some 77% of last June's consolidation strategy takes the form of yearly expenditure cuts. It is to Chancellor George Osborne's great credit that his first March budget, announced earlier this year, contained few surprises with regard to the deficit. Mr. Osborne's concerted plan right out of the gates meant that subsequent budgets will not need to do much in the way of re-evaluating and re-strategizing; they just need to stick to the original design.
This is significant progress. But it is still not likely to be ideal in terms of long-term economic performance. A substantial body of economic literature, pioneered by economists such as Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, has explored the question of the optimal balance between public and private spending. This research implies that once government spending exceeds about a third of GDP, the public sector has expanded beyond the point that achieves best results.
That is why it may prove even better if spending were further reduced by about five percentage points of GDP, to around 35% of output. But even given the present scale of the British Treasury's belt-tightening, there may yet be swifter structural dividends in terms of improved economic performance than expected. No forecaster or finance minister should plan on it, but a rebalancing of this magnitude between the public and private sectors could yield pleasant "crowding in" effects sooner than conventional economic models expect.
Then there is the issue of monetary policy. Britain's banking crisis was part of a wider international meltdown, but domestic monetary policy also had a hand in it, financing a house-price boom that was compounded by strict U.K. planning laws. The legacy of those policy mistakes is still being felt acutely now, as the Bank of England addresses a credit system impaired by elevated debt on personal balance sheets and house prices that have room to fall further.
But beyond the immediate term, there are fundamental questions about the conduct of British monetary policy that need to be asked. Should the Bank of England's mandate be adjusted or modified? What is the proper institutional context in which monetary policy is decided? Should the central bank's economic forecasting assumptions and models be made more transparent? The Bank of England's present policy regime, based on a symmetrical inflation target, failed to avert an asset-price bubble and has consistently missed its inflation objective even in a period of apparent excess capacity.
Answers to such questions should be sought both among the public and within the Treasury itself. A proper debate would include discussion of the formulation of the inflation target and of the role, in deciding policy, of asset prices and measures of liquidity. The composition and operation of the Monetary Policy Committee should also be examined. A greater diversity of experience, opinion and intellectual interests among the committee's members would allow for broader-canvased decision making than currently seems to prevail.
In the past, errors in monetary policy were usually attributed to political interference overriding the technical judgments of the central bank. That explanation was always too simplistic. The U.K. Treasury sets the Bank of England's policy target, and much more than central banks in other developed nations, Britain's monetary authority receives guidance from the political arena; the judgments of the Treasury and the chancellor deserve as much credit for good monetary policy as for bad.
That is why the coalition today cannot rest on its laurels for having contained the fiscal crisis. It does so at the risk of letting the recent failings at the central bank undermine the economic legacy of a first year well managed.
Fittster said:
Would a supporter of the Blue ties like to post a list of achievements in the last 12 months?
Don't try to spoil the party by taking us off topic. Can't we just rejoice in the fact that a year ago today Winky walked out of Downing Street for the last time.In an hour I shall be getting out the
Don
--
Edited by don4l on Wednesday 11th May 17:29
Greg66 said:
DJRC said:
<snip>
Personally speak I didnt find Blair too bad.
I find it offensive that he overtly used the office of Prime Minister as a stepping stone on his career path. Being PM should be more than something to garner your cv. Personally speak I didnt find Blair too bad.
I can see the future now...
The very people who complain about the irrational emotional hatred of Thatcher she gets even after all this time, will be the same people still holding an irrational emotional hatred of Brown/Blair in 20 years time.
The very people who complain about the irrational emotional hatred of Thatcher she gets even after all this time, will be the same people still holding an irrational emotional hatred of Brown/Blair in 20 years time.
Edited by Shay HTFC on Wednesday 11th May 18:51
Zaxxon said:
Lied to th ehouse and the country as to the reasons for going to war, sent men and women into conflict without the required support / equipment.
Left winky in charge of the finaces
Allowed the country to get further and further into debt.
Introduced the country to Mandleson (The tower for that offence alone)
Introduced the country to Mrs Hideous (stoning for that one....and his wife)
Ill accept the wife, I was thinking of mentioning her amount the fLeft winky in charge of the finaces
Allowed the country to get further and further into debt.
Introduced the country to Mandleson (The tower for that offence alone)
Introduced the country to Mrs Hideous (stoning for that one....and his wife)
kwits surrounding him, but thought it was so obvious that I didnt need to Lying to the house and public are irrelevent. I expect a PM to lie, frankly I expect them to lie like a b
d and be bloody good at it.I quite like Mandelson
He's a superb "villain" and to be perfectly honest an outstanding politician, Id rather like him employed in the services of the country.The country got itself into debt quite happily. The personal finances side of thing that ppl like to whinge so much about arent the crippling problem laid at the feet of TB though, they are for individuals to be accountable for and individuals are paying off their debts. After excesses you tighten the belt, that is what people are doing.
Ive never voted Labour in my life btw, I voted Tory last time, but some of you really must understand how the majority of the country thinks and why it doesnt think like the raving loony brigade on here does.
And Zod I did say if he had the b
ks to deal with Gordon, you ignored that bit though DJRC said:
Lying to the house and public are irrelevent. I expect a PM to lie, frankly I expect them to lie like a bd and be bloody good at it.
I agree, but taking us to war on the basis of bullsd and be bloody good at it.t is something else, the men and women he sacrificed for that lie mark him out as a murderer imo. DJRC said:
The country got itself into debt quite happily.
I didn't. The debt hanging over me was run up for me by the scum previously in power. The current incumbents don't appear to be any better mind, since they are inflating away what savings I had but don't tell me I got MYSELF into debt because I fking well didn't.Shay HTFC said:
I can see the future now...
The very people who complain about the irrational emotional hatred of Thatcher she gets even after all this time, will be the same people still holding an irrational emotional hatred of Brown/Blair in 20 years time.
It's not irrational when it has a damn good reason which hatred of bLiar & winky does.The very people who complain about the irrational emotional hatred of Thatcher she gets even after all this time, will be the same people still holding an irrational emotional hatred of Brown/Blair in 20 years time.
Edited by Shay HTFC on Wednesday 11th May 18:51
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