According to the Labour Party website the Labour Party have achieved the following in their time in power:
Why Labour?
Labour is working to secure a fair future for Britain. We stand resolutely for the hard working majority of the British people. In this global economic downturn our approach is not only helping people now but also planning for recovery.
Labour is taking decisive action at a local, national and global level to help people through these tough times. We are providing real help now by supporting families and investing in jobs, public services and in key sectors of the economy.
And because we are Labour, we are giving real support to all – not giveaways for the few. We are bringing forward investment – not cutting services. And we will stand by those who are worried that they could lose their homes or jobs – not walk on by.
Key achievements
Labour is taking action to give real help to families and businesses now and for the future:
* Extra mortgage protection to help families stay in their homes
* Giving a £145 tax cut for 22 million basic rate taxpayers
* Cutting VAT this year worth an average of £275 off household bills
* Guaranteed work or training for 18-24 year olds unemployed for twelve months
* Increasing child benefit and child tax credit
* An extra £60 payment to pensioners on top of a rise in the state pension
* Increasing the Pension Credit to a minimum of £130 a week
* A Winter Fuel Payment of £400 for over 80s households and £250 to the over 60s
* Allowing businesses facing difficulties to spread their tax payments on a timetable they can afford
* Extra cash to encourage employers to recruit people without jobs
* Stepping up the training and support people need to get back to work
* Helping savers by increasing the threshold of Individual Savings Accounts to over £10,000
* Increasing statutory redundancy pay to £380 a week
* Extending the Stamp Duty holiday for properties under £175,000
* Supporting the automotive industry with a car scrappage scheme
New Labour, your Britain
As well as providing real help now to tackle the problems we face today, Labour is preparing Britain to seize the opportunities of tomorrow. We are investing now so we are best placed to take advantage of the upturn.
* To support families we brought forward an increase in child benefit and child tax credit. We helped pensioners during the winter months with an extra £60 bonus on top of the increase in the Winter Fuel payment. Labour has cut income tax by £145 for 22 million basic rate taxpayers and cut VAT, saving households on average £275 off their household bills.
* Supporting businesses so they come through the downturn stronger is integral for our future economic success. Working with banks, Labour is providing loan guarantees to businesses to help them get the credit they need. And to ease pressure on businesses up and down the country, we are allowing them to defer their tax payments on a timetable that they can afford.
* We are acting now to help people stay in their homes. Labour has introduced a homeowner support scheme which provides extra protection to help families stay in their homes if they suffer a temporary fall in income. In contrast, at a time of recession David Cameron’s priority is an inheritance tax giveaway of £200,000 to the 3,000 richest estates in the country.
* We are guaranteeing a job, training or work placement to all 18-24 year olds who are unemployed for 12 months. We are increasing statutory redundancy pay. Employers are being given up to £2,500 to recruit and train people.
* The UK will need to strive harder than ever to accelerate its transformation into a low-carbon economy, benefiting business and the wider economy. We will not shy away from key questions of the future, such as how we transport ourselves, how we heat our homes and workplaces and how we produce our goods. We will embrace these opportunities positively in order to meet our aim of creating thousands of new jobs in green technology and advanced manufacturing.
* So we need a strategy to support the UK’s economic renewal and future growth – building on existing strengths in low carbon technologies, life sciences and pharmaceuticals, digital industries, professional and financial services and advanced manufacturing. To achieve these objectives, we will need to forge a new industrial activism. Most of all, we will need to improve the skills of our workforce and adapt them to the specialist demands of a modern economy; invest in an effective modern infrastructure; innovate further in science and technology; and industrialise this innovation in commercially successful ways.
Labour Party Economy Policy :http://www.labour.org.uk/economy
I would be interested to hear both positive and negative views on Labour’s Economy policies in the comments below?
John Prescott compares Gordon Brown to an airline pilot.
An email a friend sent me-
Dear Secretary of State,
My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for £3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs.. I would now like to join the “not rearing pigs” business.
In your opinion, what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on, and which is the best breed of pigs not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy.
I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs, but if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will just as gladly not rear porkers. Are there any advantages in not rearing rare breeds such as Saddlebacks or Gloucester Old Spots, or are there too many people already not rearing these?
As I see it, the hardest pan of this programme will be keeping an accurate record of how many pigs I haven’t reared. Are there any Government or Local Authority courses on this?
My friend is very satisfied with this business. He has been rearing pigs for forty years or so, and the best he ever made on them was £1,422 in 1968. That is – until this year, when he received a cheque for not rearing any.
If I get £3,000 for not rearing 50 pigs, will I get £6,000 for not rearing 100? I plan to operate on a small scale at first, holding myself down to about 4,000 pigs not raised, which will mean about £240,000 for the first year. As I become more expert in not rearing pigs, I plan to be more ambitious, perhaps increasing to, say, 40,000 pigs not reared in my second year, for which I should expect about £2.4 million from your department. Incidentally, I wonder if I would be eligible to receive tradable carbon credits for all these pigs not producing harmful and polluting methane gases?
Another point: These pigs that I plan not to rear will not eat 2,000 tonnes of cereals. I understand that you also pay farmers for not growing crops. Will I qualify for payments for not growing cereals
to not feed the pigs I don’t rear?
I am also considering the “not milking cows” business, so please send any information you have on that too. Please could you also include the current Defra advice on set aside fields? Can this be done on an e-commerce basis with virtual fields (of which I seem to have several thousand hectares)?
In view of the above you will realise that I will be totally unemployed, and will therefore qualify for unemployment benefits. I shall of course be voting for your party at the next general election.
Vote BNP
Save Britain
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Great, I will not rear 100 pigs a week if I cant. lol
That letter is pretty damn funny :)
the last quarter of 2009 seems promising as we have seen lots of signs of econic recovery against the massive economic recession. i hope that in 2010 all our economies would be back on track. recession really sucks.
I would probably be happy to vote for the party that cut the amount of money being spent on; wages for everyone in the house of commons/parliment, claims for second morgages which they don’t need because they can only live in one house at a time! and stop banks paying hundreds of thousands of pounds on bonuses for already high earning people and used the money saved from doing this to clear any debt this country has and also put some of it back into the likes of the NHS; the POLICE, education and the community.
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To M… If the Labour party were actually bothered about any of the things you mention, don’t you think they would have legislated to cushion the effect of recession before it began to take full effect. It’s not like they couldn’t have known… You can’t have a massive boom like the one we had in 2007/08 without a bust… And should we not remember at this time that they promised no more boom and bust in 1997?
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I find it disgraceful that every party seems all too happy to engage in populist bank-bashing, when the City is really the golden egg of the British economy; there isn’t much chance of competing with emerging markets like China in the manufacturing sector, and trying to base our economic recovery on it is building our house on sand; without financial services, Britain isn’t likely to stop being the sick man of Europe any time soon – while I completely agree that the City wasn’t regulated enough, overtaxing and overregulating the sector now will just lead to companies and talent moving abroad, which is the last thing that Britain needs right now.
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Labour Party economic and fiscal policies are the economics of the mad house. If the Labour Party is returned to power in 2015, then with Mr Balls as Chancellor, he will apply ‘Old Labour’ policies of tax, tax and spend, spend, spend, spend. Mr Balls was a Special Economics Advisor to Gordon Brown. Brown was one of the worst Chancellor’s in recent times, and the worst prime Minister.
Every time Labour leaves office, the United Kingdom’s public finances are always left in a mess. The same can be said for economic and social policies. The Labour Party couldn’t organize a booze up in a brewery, and are as much use as teats on a bull, or an ashtray on a motorcycle.
labour Party Economics Suck!