I read something interesting today.... Gordon Brown and Tony Blair did nothing much else apart from pillory the Tories over the past seven years about Black Wednesday where the government lost about £3 billion in 1 day

Something they didn't talk about much was the fact that in one day Gordon Brown offloaded 300 tonnes of gold at the lowest ever price of $250 per troy ounce.

Experts estimate that this loss tops Black Wednesday at today's prices where that gold would have been worth £4 billion more

Thanks Gordon! ****

 

Now go inspect the pensions and the National Deficit figures and you'll really understand what Bell-ends people voted back in

 

Pensions have been milked beyond belief, makes the £4Billion lost on the gold look like beer money.

 

Wait! Hang on!! Labours done really good things like kept the Economy booming; encouraging raising house prices and encouraging people to take out large mortgages from banks!!

Oh.. hang on....

 

And the whole Northern Rock thing could make £4bn look like small change

 

...how much public money has he effectively given away to a private company? £30 billion??

tsk tsk..

Thats going to be a good 21 years the Tories can mock labour for screwing up

 

Last I saw the exposure to the BOE was up to £50bn

If it all goes **** up that's a hell of an amount to be exposed to

 

Good old Labour!!Keep voting them in.!

 

Oi, they've created hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Admittedly, I can't put an exact figure on it and nor can they due to the fact they were all taken by immigrants/illegal immigrants. But still, most people are up to their eyeballs in debt which is a good thing obviously.

 

But because people are struggling to make payments on their mortgage & credit cards, they won't spend any more money - so labour can claim their cunning management has resulted in low inflation

 

I think you forgot to put a t in there somewhere

 

So why couldnt the 2 million on benefits have filled those jobs? Oh right, they cant be bothered......

 

As they get paid great wages sorry benefits to stay at home

 

I asked some time ago why he sold half our gold reserves and no one was able to answer apparently. Not even our NL expert Pete Lewis.

I read yesterday that the idea was that they could make more interest on cash in notes rather than in gold.

Well he sold it for $234 per ounce and it has now reached about $870 per ounce and is forecast to reach $1,000 per ounce before long.

Now that is a really impressive decision I must say-not!

As was said-it has cost us significantly more that the "Black Wednesday" debacle.

What a plonker!

Les

 

Not to mention the 3bn/year incorrectly paid in tax credits (rounded to the nearest 0.5 bn because they dont know) and approx 4bn/year in VAT carousel fraud, then theres the 7bn/year EU membership fees (which in return we get 75% of our laws made for us), not to mention the 5bn/year in the tax credit he abolished in 97 that screwed the pensions, then we have PFI liabilities and public sector pension liabilities....

Yes the "Brown Bottom" (google it) is just the start......

 

can't be bothered as there is little if no incentive in the UK, in the states they tried this approach they started to reduce long term unemployed benifits. There was public outcry from the usual PC/human rights mob.

It worked, people who could got off thier ***** and got to work, even the nah sayers had to admit (and did so) that it was the right thing to do.

 

Well I think there is a massive difference between the ERM debacle and the current ****-ups.

Our membership of ERM caused a massive depression in our economy, destroyed the housing market, and resulted in millions of unemployed. I think even the most ardent Tory would find it hard to compare todays issues with the total incompetence and stupidity of the last Tory government.

 

So that makes it all fine and dandy then.

 

Not at all, I was just putting the original posters comments into perspective

Too many people have commented on this thread that the dumb-*** mistakes of this government are in some way comparable with the ERM crisis, that is frankly ridiculous, as I said before ERM nearly destroyed our economy and in reality cost 100's of Billions

 

Where did you get the £100's of billions damage from? even the most pessimistic reports I read but the total cost to the economy at no higher than £30 billion

 

Well I guessed of course.

House price fell by 30 odd % thats several 100's of Billions
We lost 10's of billions on the currency markets (thats probably the £30bn you mentioned)
Business losses would have been massive
Retail & service sectors were hit really hard as people stopped spending thats billions too
Millions of unemployed thats a good few more billion

Overall the costs to the ecconomy were astonomical

So I was been cautiuos really

This is not meant as I defence of the current government, just putting some balance back into this thread.

 

If house prices fell by all those billions, then those people buying them saved all the same billions didn't they?

Les

 

Tell that to all the people who had their houses reposessed, or got caught in negative equity

 

Cost of "Black Wednesday" - official Treasury estimate just 3.3 billion.

Treasury papers reveal cost of Black Wednesday | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

That's peanuts compared to what Gordon has wasted.

Besides getting out of the ERM was the best thing that could have happened to our economy.

The only reason that New Labour have got away with 10 years of economic mismanagement is that the last Tory government left the economy in such a good position.

 

Absolute fact, when Labour came to power they inherited the strongest economy ever in our history for an incoming government.

Yet they still managed to leave the country FUBAR

 

Well ys that was the cost of the Wednesday on the currency markets, but what about the weeks that lead up to it?

You are just plain wrong on this, the policy of joining the ERM cost this country 100's of billions, not mention all the misery it caused as well

 

Why did they inherit such a strong economy though?

Because the whole economic policy (ERM) of the Tories failed, when we finally came out interest rates could once again be set at a rate that was right for our economy. Exports could recover because we were no longer pegged to the German Mark at a ludicrously high rate. So yes out of the complete failure of economic policy our economy did recover. So the fact that the Tories handed over an economy that was thriving was despite of them rather than because of their good stewardship.

I think to describe the last ten years of stability as FUBAR is a bit strong, OK it's not all been roses, but no government has achieved such a period without a major down-turn. We've been through a global ecomomic down-turn unscaithed, we became the 4th largest ecomomy on earth.

The shame for me is that so much of the growth that was generated was wasted by pouring money into inefficient and outdated public services. More reforms should have been carried out to bring these institutions up-to-date.

BTW I'll never vote for Brown, I will (for the first time) be voting for Cameron. Gordon Brown was very much the roadblock to reforms in this country. You may have guessed by now I'm a Blair man!

 

The stewardship of course was good as they realised the mistakes of the ERM and took strides to rectify the errors, hence the economy was strong at handover.

I disagree as there are so many areas Labour has let everyone down on not just the economy. Immigration, Law & Order, Taxation etc. Unfortunately for the country it took the Tories nearly 8yrs to find a suitable candidate.

Brown typifies all that is Labour, especially on the Tax, Borrow & spend front

Blair originally was a Tory and took a lot of his ideas from the Conservatives. So in essence, deep down Mark you have always been a Blue Boy

 

I think that your responses represent a fairly good re-writing of history. To describe the Major/Lamont as good stewardship is laughable 'they realised their mistake and took strides to rectify the errors', if by this you mean, we got effectively thrown out of the ERM, thus leaving their economic policy in tatters. What came after can ONLY have been an upturn, given we'd reached rock bottom the only way was up. It's like saying Hitler left Germany a great economic legacy after the second world war.

As for the 10 years of Blair/Brown, why do you only want to focus on the negatives? Why not bring some balance to your post by noting some of the good things that have happened.

As for being a Tory, I've never voted for them in the past, but as I said I will next time around. I think 10 years is long enough for any government. For real change to happen a new government is needed.

 

Martin - I struggle to see how Labour can be praised for maintaining a benign econcomy against a backdrop of no global recessions - i.e. we are to a fair extent a proxy for the wider global economy. We appear to have done better over the last 10 years as Brown has hosed huge amounts into the public sector. It's easy to make an economy look good doing that - the problem is the massive debt we've now got when things are looking uncertain when, by his own Golden rules, Brown should have been paying off debt through a period of prosperity.

We now pay record levels of tax and live in an environment of shocking spin and lies. (e.g. this week again we saw spurious claims about reducing unemployment when in reality it's got worse - they just re-labelled them as disability claimants etc - they don't actually know how many people are coming into the country, so how can they so stridently make claims on levels of unemployment?). They lost it for me with the latest manifesto commitment broken (referendum on Europe). I'm sill amazed the population put up with the 1% increase in NI after the promise not to raise income tax.

If Brown and his team were in charge of a plc they'd have been fired years ago for poor stewardship and lack of accurate reporting.

Gordon