The economy under Labour has not been as bad as you suggest.

Comment on Why I’ll Never Vote Conservative at a General Election by David.

The economy under Labour has not been as bad as you suggest. I’m not saying the management of our economy by Labour was awesome either, it’s been OK and better than under the Conservatives (there management was terrible at times). Add to this the ‘new’ Tories making the wrong economic calls since the banking crisis and I have no confidence in the Conservatives managing our economy better than Labour. I think the Tories would muddle through if they win on May 6th, but I expect to see many mistakes just like when they were last in power. The are way too selfish and don’t think medium to long term or even at the big picture of the true costs of making millions unemployed! The Tories don’t care enough about the average British family.

I generally agree on your boom and bust point, not that we couldn’t theoretically get away from the boom and bust cycle, but we are in a world economy and has been painfully made clear recently we can not count on the world to be economically stable all the time.

So yes IMO a prudent government would have got the debt level down and aimed for reserves for the bad times (that’s how I live). This is just as true about the Conservative government before Labour and they were so bad at economic management (recall 15% interest rates!) we had just as high level of debt as under Labour before the banking crisis and the Conservatives under funded public services. At least with Labour they significantly increased public spending: not saying it was all spent wisely (a lot was wasted on stupid things), but at least the economy was doing so well under Labour (they’ve done really well with promoting business and attracting foreign investment) that they could increase public spending without increasing our level of debt relative to GDP **

** I don’t pretend to fully understand economics or our economy, but it has to be better to have no debts and wait until we can afford to pay for a program, so in hindsight I think it would have been wise to not spend quite so much on services and clear our debts completely and when out of debt spend the money we actually have on public services keeping a little in reserve for the inevitable rainy day: unfortunately government (all of them) think short term!

As I’ve said before it would appear the vast majority of economies like ours run at a level of debt anywhere from 40% to 80% of GDP even in the good times. Labour kept our level of debt relatively low at around 45% (so they didn’t mismanage our debt levels) up until the banking crisis when the bank bail outs and the economic stimulus plan was paid for using borrowed money pushing our level of debt up to over 60% GDP (but still lower than most similar economies including Germany).

Our current level of debt was required to protect us from the worst effects of the credit crunch, unless you think the Conservatives was right and the government should have let the crisis take it’s course and see what happened?

Now we are hopefully through the worst of the economic problems it’s time to look at reducing the debt and that’s what all three main parties plan to do. None of them have given any real idea of how they will do it, so like the rest of you I have no idea which of the three parties has the best ideas for the future.

All I have to go on is Labour appears to have called it correctly on bailing out the banks and the economic stimulus package, the Lib Dems generally agreed and Vince Cable appears to have been warning about something like the banking crisis and the Conservatives got every economic call so far wrong!!!

BTW I think Sir Fred Goodwin should have been prosecuted, but as I understand things there was nothing to prosecute him for. Similar with his bonus, that was the banks fault offering bonuses even when bankers failed!!! I don’t see what the government could have legally done much different even if I’d like to see him in prison and all his assets stripped.

David