Britain now officially in double-dip recession

You can't honestly see any of the other two parties dealing with the situation in any better way (not siding with tories here) can you?

I think handling the cuts in a longer term manner would not have caused so much damage to the country.


What sort of growth level though. Granted.. growth is growth but is that only to a level where you're still 0.5 points away from negative growth. Let's also not forget our economy is completely reliant on Europe, and thats also going down the pan. What country are you speficially refering to, and are they really comparable to the UK?

Ok lets look at the countries around europe (and some others) that had growth higher than us in 2011 - ours was 0.7%

Higher by 0.5% and above

Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Estonia, France, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Finland, Sweden, Iceland - (Iceland! :eek:), Norway, Switzerland, Montenegro, Macedonia, Turkey, US..

Lower by 0.5% and below

Greece, Portugal, Slovenia, Japan

Within 0.5%

Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Croatia

Take your pick, not sure who you would say has a comparable economy to us, but I would say a lot of those rely on the Eurozone for their economy too..
 
Ah the old, pretend we weren't really in recession the entire time, I think I already said what the tories did, they have put us in a better position for a recession that was 100% always going to happen due to the handling of the economy in the past 15 years, and specifically for how we "got out" of the last recession.

We FAKED our way out of the last recession, and by we I mean Labour, by borrowing more money and putting us in bigger debt, and increasing the burden of unrequired public service jobs that we could never at any stage afford.

Why haven't tories been able to do much to magically turn around 40 years of horrific economy planning in the UK? Do you really not know, a strong economy needs business, manufacturing, private sector making profit in this country, labour(and past tory governments) have destroyed this countries industry and left us with literally millions to many jobs in the public sector. Labour pushed up benefits and unemployment, and pushed forwards with many incredibly expensive plans to hide unemployement(like pushing as much of the population as possible into 4 years of extra education).

How much more would have been done by now if at every single cut that was absolutely needed to LESSEN OUR DEBT BURDENS, Labour hadn't pretending it wasn't happening. Labour put their heads in the sand, have no care for the economy or the future, they just want to be the "good guys" who wouldn't make cuts, they are campaigning to get in power, nothing more or less. If they cared for the economy they would have backed EVERY cut, made it much easier to slash the deficit by another 40-50billion.


This is where people just don't seem to get it, our economy is built on nothing, it was propped up by borrowing that is completely and utterly unsustainable, a "real" recession has ALWAYS been coming, the question was when and how bad. Labour's plan of keep borrowing more and more to keep buying our way out of one both, made the incomming recession worse, bigger, longer and their current plan is to... keep doing the same.

We've got Abu Dhabi, fully aware that their economy will collapse on the end of their oil supplies who for a decade or two have been investing all their profits into alternative worldwide industries that now have a massive and quickly growing turnover? When they saw one industry ready to disappear, they spent billions WHEN THEY HAD IT, on a NEW INDUSTRY. WHen Labour saw industry disappearing, they hid the unemployment by creating jobs we didn't need, that were paid too much, that unions have MASSIVE power over, and utterly screwed us. When you're making money in a healthy economy you PAY OFF DEBT so when the economy is going badly you AREN'T IN DEBT. What Labour did was when the economy was healthy they INCREASED DEBT MASSIVELY but spending money they never had, on the idea that economys will never ever get worse, they have always done the exact opposite of what we should have been doing. We should have paid off all debt, and then spent money we had on growing new industry, this would have put us in a hugely strong position for future world economic issues. Instead we let industry shrink, we increased public spending massively beyond our means, we got in heavy debt, we got a massive deficit, we got a massive public sector jobs increase, we got massive public sector wage/pension burden that we couldn't afford with our economy at its strongest, let alone now.

Everything Labour has done for the past decade has utterly boned us, completely, and their current plan is to continue making it worse.

While I wish you'd punctuate and lay out your posts a little better, you're saying exactly the right stuff and I'm inclined to agree with you on pretty much everything.

Personally as someone who voted for the boys in blue and secretly hoped for a coalition during the days that followed the election, I'm not delighted with what has been accomplished. However, I fully recognise the difficulty of the situation the new government was placed in by the previous group of muppets and therefore I'm not too displeased with them.

I cannot believe how stupid people are regarding the economy and the future of the country. This selfish short sighted attitude that seems to hover around most Labour supporters really does make me sad. The fact is, most of these people would be far happier in a magical bubble of economic comfort, propped up by borrowing spiralling wildly out of control.

None of the political parties are perfect and they're all packed with selfish and greedy politicians who spend far too much time helping themselves and their friends/allies when they should be fighting for the people that elected them.

The recession was coming, we can't spend our way out of it and the cuts that we have, which Labour and their allies are moaning about constantly, are nowhere near enough.

To quote Frank Sobotka from The Wire: "we used to make **** in this country, build ****, now we just put our hand in the next guys pocket".

It would also be highly foolish to think our country would escape unscathed by the Eurozone disaster the continues to unfold around us.
 
Lets not forget that Labour gave up and when the Lib-dems went to them to try to negotiate a coalition they were not interested. They just sat there saying nothing. They knew the next term was going to be poisoned chalice and were very happy for the Tories to get the next term which they knew would be horrible.

Labour - Bunch of Lazy, Stupid, Self-Serving cowards that have no compassion for the people of Britain, trying to shaft as many people as they can to be dependent on Labour as possible so they can stay in power, either by benefits or public sector jobs. Sure the Tories might not get it right all the time, but they care and at least they try to create a stable country we can all be proud of.

To have a go at the Tories when they've only been around for 2 years when they have a economic mountain range to climb set out by 13 years of mis-management and missed opportunities is short sighted and shameful.

Much like how the Labour party was like today at Question Time. Milliband looked like he hasn't slept in a week and was rocking back and forth and on a verge of a nervous breakdown, Ed Ball was sitting there with a retarded look on his face. The whole thing just seems like a game to the Labour party and i hope they don't get to be power for a generation
 
Lets not forget that Labour gave up and when the Lib-dems went to them to try to negotiate a coalition they were not interested. They just sat there saying nothing. They knew the next term was going to be poisoned chalice and were very happy for the Tories to get the next term which they knew would be horrible.

What are you talking about? They were prepared to get a new party leader to make it work. The lib dems were just unwilling to negotiate. Remember how Clegg spent tons of time with Cameron, and everyone was saying that he wanted to get a full understanding of the deal before seeing what else was on the table? Well what really happened was he got a good understanding of what Cameron was putting on the table, said he wouldn't deal with labour while Gordon was in charge and did the deed the next day.

Clegg always goes on about how 'they've been able to get more policies in than they would with labour' but with labour they would have been able to avoid a lot more of the bad stuff that comes with being in bed with the tories. And the bad stuff is what voters, and the population in general, care more about.
 
What are you talking about? They were prepared to get a new party leader to make it work. The lib dems were just unwilling to negotiate. Remember how Clegg spent tons of time with Cameron, and everyone was saying that he wanted to get a full understanding of the deal before seeing what else was on the table? Well what really happened was he got a good understanding of what Cameron was putting on the table, said he wouldn't deal with labour while Gordon was in charge and did the deed the next day.

Clegg always goes on about how 'they've been able to get more policies in than they would with labour' but with labour they would have been able to avoid a lot more of the bad stuff that comes with being in bed with the tories. And the bad stuff is what voters, and the population in general, care more about.

There was a programme soon after the election describing the events on the day. They described Labour and not touching this term with a barge pole. I'll see if i can find it on YouTube somewhere
 
Spot on. The public are disillusioned to what is actually required to turn the economy around. Nor are they aware of how things actually work. It seems the general consensus is 'as long as I'm okay for the next few years and no worse off' they're happy.

I don't think the public are 'disillusioned' . I think they simply don't understand the enormity of the scale of the hole UK Plc is actually in. When you read / see news reports that talk about GDP to deficit ratio's and UK being hundreds of billions to trillions in debt, they are figures that are simply incomprehensible to the average working person on the street.

I think parties of all colours prey on this public ignorance to then paint what ever picture they see fit to appease the masses and say we are OK ?
 
Labour turned us into a service sector economy? Wrong. Labour had manufacturing subsides, used to tax manufacturing less than services companies(Which ended with weirdness in the tax system). Maggy undid all that, but I believe it was the right thing. There's no reason manufacturing is any better than services.

NewLabour was essentially extending Thatcherite policies.
 
Some economist guy was on the news last night (ITV) and said that basically it was either going to be a tiny bit up or a tiny bit down. He said it would make no difference to the economy other than if it was down then it would make a 'technical recession' and cause a lot of political hassle.
 
quote Frank Sobotka from The Wire: "we used to make **** in this country, build ****, now we just put our hand in the next guys pocket".

We do build things in this country, we build stuff that other nations can't.

Unlike 'days of old' it's pointless us manufacturing many goods anymore it simply doesn't make financial sense, we would have to sell them at a loss.
 
How have the other countries managed it?

some of them haven't......

Greece
Spain
Portugal
Ireland

are the first 4 examples that come to mind. Each one of those countries was / is knocking back their last pint in the last chance saloon. Greece will probably become a vassal state of Germany the way things are currently going.......................

Other countries which have were not as overly exposed to toxic debt in the same way the UK was, so their return to growth had a far less rocky ride than some of the lareger economic powerhouses of the EU. UK was especially affected I think as we are one of, if not the largest financial centre in Europe, so getting back to growth in the UK considering the ammount of damage that was received from the global explosion was always going to be a much harder uphill fight
 
What are you talking about? They were prepared to get a new party leader to make it work. The lib dems were just unwilling to negotiate. Remember how Clegg spent tons of time with Cameron, and everyone was saying that he wanted to get a full understanding of the deal before seeing what else was on the table? Well what really happened was he got a good understanding of what Cameron was putting on the table, said he wouldn't deal with labour while Gordon was in charge and did the deed the next day.

Clegg always goes on about how 'they've been able to get more policies in than they would with labour' but with labour they would have been able to avoid a lot more of the bad stuff that comes with being in bed with the tories. And the bad stuff is what voters, and the population in general, care more about.

Althrough no expressly, if Labour don't want to make a deal at any price what does that say to you?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/wintour-and-watt/2010/may/11/coalition-talks-libdem-labour-deal
 
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