Lee247

I liked Clarksons comment on Top Gear. Said the Millibands looked like they were coming to fix the computers

Luan Pra bang

Thatcher was one of the greatest leaders we ever had. Churchill far and away was thetbest but Thatcher is a legend and history will show her as a truely inspired political force.

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

Keep smoking the crack

mamoon2

Now we just need the minimum wage to be lowered so we can get some industry back. Oh, and encourage big business to buy up all the old mining towns and start factories with subsidised housing for workers.

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

Christ this place really is full of crackheads LOL!

The minimum wage is fine where it is thank you. The problem with being competitive isn't pay, it's the fact that the EU imposes one stupid law after another on us and our governments are too spineless to tell them to stick it where the sun don't shine.

chocolate_o_brian

iTrader: (22)

Fingering his own arsehole in his big brothers bedroom whilst claiming for the lubrication on expenses

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

How can any job not be wirth the minimum wage? Come on now, it ain't exactly a lot of money.

chocolate_o_brian

iTrader: (22)

Not when Pete's been quotes as saying £50k odd isn't a "high" wage. The comment was more than likely a big worm on a little fishing rod but it takes creditability away from further comment - possibly a bit similar to my comment about Ed Miliband, although it is probably closer to the truth than Mr Lewis' comment

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

That is precisely why the minimum wage was introduced. Otherwise unscrupulous companies will pay as little as they want. You will now tell me that is all they can afford and I will tell you that is bollocks (there, just saved a couple of posts ).

We wouldn't need a mnimum wage if we didn't live in such a greed driven society which brings us nicely back to Thatcher.

So I take it you don't really believe in the mantra 'an honest day's pay for an honest day's work' then?

SJ_Skyline

I do - but I suspect we'll all have differing perceptions of what constitues an honest day's pay.

f1_fan

iTrader: (9)

Yes I know what you said and what I am saying is that any employer who has a job that they don't think is worth £6 an hour is not thinking straight for whatever reason. Therefore we need the minimum wage!

In all seriousness what job is not worth £6 an hour in a country where a loaf of bread and a pint of milk cost over a quid each???

SJ_Skyline

Bread I'll grant you but where the hell do you buy your milk from? It's £1.10 for a 4 pint bottle.

dpb

Myabe he doesnt live near a lidls

Leslie

I think you are largely at the root of the problem, long past time when we should have got out of it.

Les

hodgy0_2

"people made unemployed and businesses bankrupted during the crisis had every reason to be resentful and voice their protest. He told the Treasury select committee that the billions spent bailing out the banks and the need for public spending cuts were the fault of the financial services sector."

who said the above? -- Mervin King

he also states

"The research makes it clear that the impact of these crises lasts for many years. It is not like an ordinary recession, where you lose output and get it back quickly. We may not get the lost output back for very many years, if ever."

as I have said previously we are moving towards the American model, a county that has never recovered from the voodoo economics of the 80's, a country where on an avergae wage you would be able to live comfortably, afford health care and college fees but now are 1 paycheck from poverty.

people earning under a 100k a really fvcked

and as I have repeatedly said -- I am not surprised the finance industry bounced back so quickly, I predicted it, I like big Merv am surprised they have escaped quite so easily.

good letter in that left wing rag - the Guardian

George Osborne dissimulates. He knows that Ed ***** is at odds with Labour party policy on cuts, knowing that we have 12 to 13 years to pay off debt and deficit. But he also knows that our level of debt (less than 60% of GDP net of bank assets) is within Maastricht Treaty limits (60%) and lower than almost all OECD countries; that this debt is low by historical standards (we sustained debt at more than 100% of GDP for 20 years up until the early 1970s); that debt repayments (less than 3% of GDP) are lower than they were under Thatcher (5.15%) and Major (3.8%); that our deficit is partly created by a low overall tax-take (around 36% compared with the EU average of 40%). He knows this because these are official statistics (available on Google - mostly Office for National Statistics but also ukpublicspending.co.uk).

He knows, therefore, that whereas our economy, dominated by manufacturing up to the early 1990s, delivered GDP growth of 2.5%, the financial sector since then has delivered growth rates of less than 1.5% – another element of structural deficit. He knows that, whereas public sector costs have risen year on year over the past 30 years, so has outsourcing to the private sector – currently at around 20% of total public sector resource. Though he may privately be content with Labour's failure to stem the concentration of wealth (the index of inequality rose under Labour – the Gini Coefficient up almost 5 points), Osbourne will be more circumspect that Labour borrowed less and repaid more debt than previous Conservative administrations (borrowing was roughly 50% less under Blair/Brown than it was under Major – more than twice Thatcher's debt repayments were made).

And his biggest dissimulation – under the continuing influence of the previous Labour administration, 2010 saw £20bn more than forecast wiped off the deficit as a result not of spending cuts but of "New Deal"-style growth stimulation. It is unremarkable that Osbourne can point to the OECD and IMF supporting cuts – they are the global advocates of public austerity. He does not mention the three Nobel prize-winning economists (Pissaredes, Stiglitz, Krugman) and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, all of whom condemn this austerity policy as a serious historical error. Why not? Clearly because he wants no balanced public contestation over the sustainability of a public sector. The real question is why opposition parties and dissident Lib Dems allow this level of narrative control by the coalition government – "crisis", "unavoidable cuts", "Labour's fault". It's neither "middle" nor "muddle" nor an economic crisis – it's a crisis of democratic debate.

SJ_Skyline

Hodgy, good is not the word I choose to describe that letter after reading it although I can think of another 4-letter word that sums it up more accurately.

Chip

I'm alright Jack

Gordo

What a comedy letter from the Guardian. I love the comparison vs debt repayments under previous Tory governments (cheerfully ignoring that they were also caused by Labour governments' overspending, ignoring the massive disparity in interest rates which creates the difference, and ignoring the continuing deficit which Labour created through hosing too much into the public sector, spending more than the income even in strong economic years).

Outsourcing to the public sector is good. Much more efficient than government cost control ever is, and delivers better services.

Labour borrowed a fortune through their period in office - even before they bailed out the banks they were happily taxing us to spend on their own ego trip.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/b...er-Labour.html

And to selectively cite some economists who disagree - pathetic, as you can always find economists that agree with your point of view - the old adage about economists predicting 11 out of the last 3 recessions is true.

I can't believe people are so quickly blaming the current government for the problems they inherited - how do people think that swapping governments was overnight going to suddenly turnround a country that, if it was a country, would have at best been put in receivership?

G