Michael Dean : Weblog items tagged with economy

IF Brown could have run the UK better then he would have done!

Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:47:02 GMT

Amazing how many people are prepared to state what Cameron and the Conservatives are going to do next. Some sort of gift of prophecy?

Yet they forget all that Brown and New Labour have actually done, stuff that is all documented, it is in fact history.

How can anyone expect Brown and the rest of New Labour to do anything different than they have already done.

We have a major financial meltdown in progress. We are going to be taxed to the hilt and beyond just to pay the huge debts we have incurred. The UK economy now is almost on the same level as Greece!

IF Brown and New Labour could have run the UK better than they have managed to do, then I would suggest that they would have done better.
What we have seen in the financial meltdown is the best that Brown and New Labour can manage to do!

Their best is nowhere near good enough. That is why they should be out of power ASAP.

Where has all the money gone?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:49:56 GMT

So new taxes are required to care for the elderly! Surprised that Brown let this out into the public domain!

The UK cannot take care of it’s elderly, who have paid their taxes throughout their lives, without taxing the current generation.

Looks like Labour have simply spent the money whilst in power and have done nothing to provide for the elderly and those who need help in their old age.

Is Gordon Brown incapable of planning ahead?

How can Labour have spent it all IF the UK economy has been as successful as Labour claims whilst in government!!! Remember they started with the ‘Golden Inheritance’ from the last Conservative government?

Labour took office with a strong economy. So where did the money go?

It appears to me that Brown, despite his friendship with Prudence, has simply bankrupted the UK whilst in power. (And don’t blame the recession, we were in trouble before the global recession hit!).

If Labour REALLY put the UK first then we would have an election as soon as possible to allow an elected PM to get on with the job of fixing the UK as soon as possible! Whilst Labour hangs on hoping that the economy gets better, Brown is putting his own career BEFORE the needs of the UK.

Governments MUST be elected

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:09:18 GMT

I heard Brown yesterday say that he would stay as PM if he was re-elected. He seems to have forgotten that he was never elected as PM in the first place.

Brown is a very good example of the dangers and folly of allowing anyone positions of authority over a country without being elected by the people. If people get a chance to elect someone who turns out to be useless, then they have no one to blame but themselves. That is the way the system works.

But Brown was not elected.

That is the main reason, in my view, why people are so against New Labour now that Brown has taken the UK from an economy in a really good position (remember the Golden Inheritance of the last Conservative government?) and almost bankrupted the UK and leaving us with debts that will take twenty years of austerity to pay off!

Brown has messed up this country big-time! And he was not elected by the people, he was foisted on us by this Labour government. Both will take the blame for the mess that the economy and the country is in.

Blair 'I would have gone to war if there had been no WMD'

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 23:29:14 GMT

Blair seems to be saying that he did not lie about the WMD but would have done so if necessary! The fact that he would take the UK to war against other nations without a very good reason, one which has to include the defence of the UK, shows what a bad choice was made at the last election by many people in the UK. It won't be a popular view, but I believe people voted for Blair because they were taken in by what was effectively an advertising campaign rather than selecting a PM who had substance! Many people blame Brown for the huge financial mess that the UK is in, but it must be remembered that Blair was the PM until June 2007 by which time the UK was set fast on the course towards near financial collapse.

Record recession for UK economy

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:23:22 GMT

The UK is now in a record recession, and this is not a good thing.

Some people are doing OK during the recession, in fact those with money can buy houses, businesses etc cheaply. These people are in the minority!

Those without work are really suffering, losing their businesses , their jobs and worse, their houses.

We are now in the worst financial situation since the 1950s. New Labour have failed completely. Even disregarding the fact that their policies have put us in a dreadful financial situation, it is clear that they have no idea how to get us out of recession. They seem to be simply waiting for an upturn in the economy which can only happen purely by chance!!

We need action now! The government is now simply waiting for next May when they will be rejected by the electorate because of the dreadful way they have managed the economy.

I would like to see Brown put the UK before himself and call an election now so that a government with a mandate from the people can get straight to work fixing our broken economy.

Every day Brown and New Labour stay in power is another day that the UK economy is being damaged.

the banks are not lending!

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:19:40 GMT

Just watching a discussion on tv.

I hope that Labour MP, Angela Eagle carries on fronting the Labour attempts to justify it's actions and get back in power! In my view, she (and her leader Brown) are helping the Conservative cause and doing Labour harm. Which is good!

She was saying that the banks should be lending money to get the economy going. But (almost) everybody in the UK knows that the government (the one that she is a minister in) has told the banks to build up liquidity and they are doing this rather than financing the businesses and the mortgages of the UK!

We all know that, the banks know that, the businesses know that.

So why does Eagle not seem to know that when she talks about the banks financing businesses and house loans.

I also like the way that Labour, particularly Brown and Eagle on tv tonight, blame the credit crunch for the financial problems. They seem to forget that Brown was in charge of regulating the financial industry in the years before it went belly up with a severe case of bad loans!

The fact that the US and other countries had similar problems does not let New Labour off the hook in the UK. Their actions (or inactions!) allowed the credit crunch to hit the UK severely.

So it is a severe case of hypocrisy to blame the credit crunch for the UK's problems!!!!!

swine flu – can Brown get it right?

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:06:15 GMT

Remember this quote from our prime minister Gordon Brown?

The UK is one of the best prepared countries to deal with swine flu and “all action necessary” will be taken to stop its spread (april 2009).

So did Brown take 'all action necessary' to stop the spread of swineflu? Clearly not since we have the virus running freely throughout the UK!

Was it possible to stop the spread of swineflu? I don't know, I am not an expert! But Brown made these claims to make himself look good, to look like a PM in control of events, a PM who can make a difference, unlike the lightweights (as he calls them) in opposition.

In reality we are now the third worst country in the world with swine flu and the government itself has now said that there will soon be a rate of 100,000 cases of people a week catching swineflu. Quite different from 'all action necessary will be taken'. So who is the lightweight now?

There will be a vaccine available soon, it is due to be released by the end of the summer, just in time for the round of flu injections that the elderly and susceptible people (of which I am one - susceptible that is!) receive every year. Will it help? Probably.

But Brown has put himself in a position where he is dependant on other people to rescue the situation, in this case those people are in Germany I believe (which is where the vaccination against the virus is being prepared).

Brown does seem to be politically very naive. He makes statement that often sound OK but they are often soundbites only, they are clearly not thought through. And then he gets caught up with trying to salvage the situation which tends to make him and the government look incompetent.

Lets hope that these people ouside the UK who are preparing the vaccine can get it to us in sufficient quantities before the flu season arrives.

(vaccine won't affect me, whole family had swineflu last week, not over it yet!)

a government without a people!

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:49:57 GMT

Yesterday was a really interesting day. The UK seems to have ended up in a strange position.

We have a government but nobody seems to want them. Does Labour, or do I mean, does Gordon Brown, have any credibility at all now? But this reputation is deserved!

The UK is in an awful financial state. The one single person who is most responsible for this mess is Gordon Brown. His reputation is shot to pieces. He is totally discredited now. He was not elected as the prime minister and this fact alone rankles deeply with many people. But if he had done a good, or even reasonable job, then most people would accept him.

But he has not done a good job!

As chancellor he inherited a Golden Inheritance, an economy in really good shape. He took the credit for this, ascribing it to his good stewardship.

Clearly however, his good stewardship was not the reason that the economy was so good for many years. It is obvious now that the economy remained so healthy for the first years of Brown's stewardship because did not actually change the policies of the previous Conservative government!

Then Brown and Blair went on a spending spree. They abandoned the policies that had kept the economy stable and blew the lot. Many people tell me that this resulted in good hospitals, schools etc and to an extent this is right, some of the money was indeed spent this way.

But we do need a proper analysis of where the money went. Because most of the new hospitals and new schools etc seem to have been built on borrowed money. The UK built up debt to pay for these hospitals and schools. This is the Private Finance Initiative, PFI for short, and is a massive amount of money.

Brown has redefined the UK debit levels to exclude the PFI as part of the UK debt.

My personal view is that this is just deceiving the people about the state of the UK economy. There are some other debts, huge amounts of money, that are also excluded from the UK debt levels. (I do get wound up when I hear Brown on the tv saying that the UK has the low debt levels because he is choosing to ignore these other debts.)

So when the economy went into a nosedive following the global credit crunch problem (caused by the banks and financial institutions not being properly regulated by this government and others!), the consequences of the bad stewardship of Brown come to the forefront.

The UK is in an awful financial mess. The policy of going into debt to spend huge amounts of money to get out of a recession caused by debt levels has to be questionable. Simply because we then have another massive problem of having to pay this new debt back!

‘I am the right man to lead these challenges’

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:53:05 GMT

I heard Gordon Brown defending himself following the utter devestation of the Labour vote today.

Apparantly Brown believes that ‘he is the right man to lead these challenges’. Of course it is not his fault. He can reel off a long list of things that his government are doing, although I am not sure that many of them have actually been done!
Brown is convinced that he can sort this out himself. (He may be the only person on the planet who does!)

I have to admit that his stewardship of the Labour party is a good thing. I don’t know of anyone else who could bring the Labour party to near extinction and single handedly turn most of the UK against them!

I am still trying to find out how many people holding government posts are not elected MPs!

Tony Blair needs to step in soon. He will be getting the blame for handing over to Brown without an election.

Prime Minister Question time

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:03:43 GMT

One wonders whether Brown’s cheesy grins are in direct proportion to the desperation he feels!

I have never seen him try to smile so much!!

There is this continual clash between Brown and Cameron with the PM insisting that Cameron announces Conservative policies for the UK; as though the leader of the opposition is in a position to implement their policies!

Brown appears to believe that he can pursuade people that Cameron's silence means that he has no policies. But most people would acknowledge that the Conservative policies, of which I am sure they would have spent a lot of time on, are not relevant simply because the Conservatives are not in power yet.

Invoking a discussion about the Conservatives policies during PMQs would take the pressure off Brown and the disasterous state of the UK economy.

So Cameron is right to stay quiet and keep the focus on Brown and the collapse of the UK economy after 12 years of New Labour.