Had Gordon Brown’s government not taken the country into debt to save

Comment on Weekly General Election Poll Results by David.

Had Gordon Brown’s government not taken the country into debt to save the banks and give the economy a life line when the crap hit the fan, where do you think we’d be now?

Please answer this question even if you ignore the rest.

BTW we are not in that much debt relative to both our past debt levels (we’ve had worse see: https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/downchart_ukgs.php?title=UK%20National%20Debt%20as%20Pct%20GDP&year=1950_2010&chart=G0-total&units=p) and relative to other countries like Germany that has a higher level of debt relative to their GDP (which is the important measure). Most countries like ours run what at first sight sounds like a high level of debt, but for whatever reason that’s what they do.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt

In 2008 our debt was between 45% and 55% of our GDP (different sources give different figures). CIA fact book figures had us at 47.20% GDP in 2008 with Germany at 62.60% of their GDP.

In 2009 the CIA fact book lists our debt at 68.50% of GDP.

To put it into perspective these countries have a much higher level of debt:

Zimbabwe 304.30% of GDP.
Japan 192.10% of GDP.
Italy 115.20% of GDP.
Greece 108.10% of GDP.
France 79.70% of GDP.
Germany 77.20% of GDP.

This is why it’s not a good argument to say Britain is bankrupt or anything like that. It would make me laugh if it wasn’t such a poor quality argument people like you make when you do say Britain is bankrupt!

To qualify my stance: I don’t think Labour was doing an awesome job of running the country before the banking crisis hit, but I do strongly believe they were doing a better job than the previous Conservative government. So given a choice between how Labour runs the country and how the Conservatives ran the country I’ll stick with Labour.

That being said, even if Labour had been running the country extremely well we’d have still had:

An American led banking crisis.

Resulting in a world banking crisis.

Which obviously had an effect on Britain.

This led to a world wide credit shortage, banks wouldn’t lend: the credit crunch.

Which inevitably led to businesses who relied on credit going under.

Which resulted in increased unemployment and higher welfare costs and more government debt.

Net effect recession (negative growth).

Please tell me which one of these dominoes did Gordon Brown or the Labour government directly cause?

The extra government debt is NOT the fault of the Labour government per se, we’d have a lot of it no matter who was in government. The choice was go into debt to stimulate the economy and keep the banks open or allow the banks to fail and let ordinary savers like you and me loose our savings and mass unemployment and rather than a recession a possible depression that could last over a decade before we got back into growth!

David