It was a world wide credit crunch and recession not just Britain

Comment on General Election 2010 Poll Results by David.

It was a world wide credit crunch and recession not just Britain you know!

Although I’m not impressed Gordon Brown didn’t see something like the banking sector disaster on the horizon (especially as he was a chancellor who did well) there was no other country to spot the potential problem and do something about it either, so hard to blame him for something no one else in power spotted and acted on!

The cause of the credit crunch and resulting recession has nothing to do with the British government, it was the greed of bankers (particularly US bankers) and a lack of worldwide financial regulations!

We’d have had a credit crunch and recession under the Conservatives if they were in power as well, (there was no way to avoid it) so to blame Gordon Brown for the recession is short sighted to say the least.

Now you want to argue the Conservatives would have done a better job of managing the countries finances during the credit crunch and recession, that’s up for debate, but not the cause. It was the bankers and their greed.

I honestly don’t know if Labour’s current plan to get us through the recession is the right course of action (I can see they have made mistakes, VAT decrease for example).

I do know if the Conservatives were in power they’d have cut spending SIGNIFICANTLY and services would be hit HARD.

Services hit hard means less money for schools, less money for the NHS, less money for services pensioners rely on, less money for EVERYTHING.

This would have resulted in less money in the economy now and lots of public sector job losses. All these cuts in the public sector trickles down to the private sector as there’s less contracts available etc…, less money in the economy and that means more business failing = more unemployment.

Everyone knows if you close a big business in an area it can have a disastrous affect on the local economy, just think back to when the Conservatives closed various coal mines, some areas never recovered from the loss to their local economy! Britain is all our local economy and every time services are cut it affects the economy in higher unemployment costs (benefits), lower government taxes and NI receipts and less money circulating through the economy as a whole.

I’m 100% certain if the Conservatives had control when the credit crunch hit we’d have a lot more people unemployed today than under Labour, though we might also owe less government debt, but would it have been worth the cost in jobs and lives?

The question then is, is it better to act sooner rather than later at tackling the government debt or hold on as long as possible and have it hurt less now and hope it hurts less over all in the long term?

If the Conservatives cut services and say they are going to save 10 billion in some area. That 10 billion saved is British peoples wages, (not all, but some is) if those people can’t find a new job they have to claim benefits. That’s going to take a big chunk of change out of that 10 billion saved. That 10 billion is no longer being paid as wages and so the government aren’t taking back the 40%+ in tax/NI/hidden taxes, so again it’s not really saving 10 billion. As that 10 billions isn’t circulating through the economy creating more jobs, the people who no longer have a job can’t afford to buy as much stuff every week, they can’t shop at M&S, they have to shop at ALDI/Lidle, they can’t buy clothes from Next, now it’s charity shops, they can’t afford a night out on a weekend, it’s eating in with a cheap tin of beans. They can’t pay their mortgage and their house is repossessed, property prices in the area fall…..

It’s a big domino effect and though some dominoes have to fall, Labour are trying to slow the above sort of cascading damage through the economy while the Conservatives wanted it to run it’s course as fast as possible and I think we can all remember how that went during the last recession that was caused by the Conservatives, not a global event the British government had no control over

David