[nomadking]

Originally Posted by jfman

A sign of sheer panic among the establishment as the polls get tighter. Not unexpected, and fairly transparent.

---------- Post added at 08:28 ---------- Previous post was at 08:27 ----------



I'm quite sure it isn't yours either.

With no plans to pay off the 2 trillion of debt, and no answer of how austerity solves it, the older generations are admitting what we already know.

They've mortgaged off future revenue from public utilities for a one off windfall, and squandered state assets balancing the books with huge borrowing and leaving it all for future generations to pay back.

The only time the previous Labour government was paying off the national debt was in the few years that they followed the 5 year economic plan of the previous Conservative government. Afterwards they went on a spending splurge, which at first reduced the surplus, but by 2002(ie before the crash) led to borrowing being required.
Link

What the Manifesto said:

"For the next two years Labour will work within the departmental ceilings for spending already announced."
Conclusion: Pledge met.
In 1997-99, Labour stuck rigidly to the spending plans it inherited from the Conservatives, even though this sparked opposition on its own backbenches.

It might easier to cut back on single spending plans like road building, but spending on things like benefit levels, tax credits are almost impossible to cut back on. Gordon Brown purposely made tax credits more generous which led to an entrenched public spending requirement.
Link

Full details of what is on offer will not be made public until the spring, but the chancellor will use tomorrow's pre-budget report to signal the government's determination to widen the use of tax credits and make them more generous, despite rumblings in the party over whether the money would be better used on higher public spending.

Not sure how not having austerity in any shape or form would lead to paying off the national debt.


From 2008

How did it come to this? As trauma continues to course through the global financial system in the wake of the Lehman Brothers crash, the PM and his colleagues reassure us constantly that Britain is ‘well-prepared’ to withstand the shock of economic crisis. In fact, the opposite is true. It is a basic principle that most governments, even socialist ones, pay off debts in times of prosperity. Mr Brown’s innovation was to reject this tradition. Since Labour came to power, the national debt has risen 25 per cent to £581 billion. During the second it took you to read that last sentence, it rose by £1,520 — and that’s by the government’s more optimistic measure.

Labour's use of PFI locked in future spending for the next 30 years. Whatever government was in power would have to continue to pay those commitments.

Unofficially — and this is what Mr Brown grasped from the off, and what Mr Robinson was hinting at — PFI was an incredibly convenient way of concealing the true extent of public debt. Rather than pay upfront, the government promised to make fixed payments in each project over a period of about 30 years — keeping the whole thing off the books. PFI was a wizard’s cloak of invisibility which could be thrown around expensive new projects.

One myth is that Labour were good on social sector house building, and the Tories bad.
Just look at the graph in the link.
The yellow section of the graph which refers to housing association(ie social sector) building is much thinner under Labour than it was pre 1997 and post 2010. I got to admit, even I was surprised by that graph, because the impression that is given is that it was the reverse, ie Labour built more. The fact is they didn't, even in the good times.