I find it interesting that this Labour government appears to be unable to see failures in anything it is involved with until something goes wrong!
The 'credit crunch' seemed to catch them by surprise. But plenty of people around the world were forecasting economic problems. I will grant that they generally saw economic recession and financial problems as the consequence of the credit boom and did not forsee a global recession of the size that has occurred. But why didn't the UK government investigate and consider these concerns?
The government, which means Gordon Brown as chancellor and then prime minister, seemed to have been totally blind to any prospects of problems whatsoever. And remember, as the government in power they are responsible for looking after the UK economy. It doesn't matter what other people did, it was Gordon Brown's job, amongst other things, to safeguard our economy.
They have failed lamentably. The UK has huge debts that all need to be paid from our future taxes. The debt levels were too high even before the credit crunch! The PFI debt (all our new hospitals and schools) was borrowed money and which needs to be paid back. There are other massive debts which are also excluded from the debt measure that Gordon Brown used when he claimed that the UK debt was not high. It was high but he used a figure that excluded a lot of UK debt!
And one must remember that all the debt has interest to be paid on it. So one can double or even treble in some cases the amount of taxpayer money required to pay back the debt.
Look at all the expensive computer systems which are brought in by Labour but simply don't do the job. Why do they all seem to fail? Are they not tested? Did the government understand what these systems were supposed to do? It would appear not judging from the problems that occur!
Gordon Brown and New Labour do not seem capable of understanding what they are doing and are always firefighting, ie having to fix what has gone wrong!
Perhaps running the UK economy is just too big a task for them!