Did Brown/Blair borrow too much?

[Whitespirit66]

They're all clueless. They just try to keep a lid on things to last them their one or two terms in government, then hand the mess over to another party who do the same. We can't afford ourselves. Look around, telephone number mortgages and new Beemers/Mercs everywhere. Foreign made goods all paid for with credit and peoples' feel-good attitude because everything's on the up - ALLEGEDLY. People live like the government carries on - borrowing and hoping to manage the payments.

The government keep banging on about the economy and jobs. What economy - what do we make? The jobs - mostly min. wage/zero hours McJobs in service/retail.

 

[D_Hailsham]

Our national debt increased from 750 billion to 1.5 trillion under Osbourne. We pay around £50 billion in interest every year.

That's an average Interest Rate of 3%pa and it is less than 10% of the Government's Annual Income.

Most of the debt is in the form of fixed interest bonds for a fixed period, say 25 years. They are often purchased by large investment companies, such as Pension Funds, who use the interest to pay pensions.

 

[Norcon]

There were two big reasons for spending a lot of money


1: bank collapse - partly due to deregulation, part due to world collapse.
Tories would have done the same as Labour.not sure what UKIP would have done as they were a nonentity at the time

2 : military actions in Iraq. All parties were in favour of this IIRC apart from the LibDems


There is a graph here on the mess the Labour had to clean up after the Tories, which is rarely mentioned whether you agree with the commentary or not, the point is that the figures are there to see.

https://skwalker1964.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/the-myth-of-the-inherited-mess-52/[/QUOTE]

Your link...
Typical left wing socialist clap trap.

Just ask the IMF for their opinion on bliars stewardship of the economy.
From Sweden to Australia, sensible governments paid down debt in the boom years. Labour didn’t.
Bliar thinks he can get away with thrashing the UK economy. He thinks he can get away with taking the country into illegal wars costing billions.
He really doesn't deserve too.

 

[Whitespirit66]

And Gordo used to tell us that he'd solved the problem of boom and bust.

 

[Micilin]

There were two big reasons for spending a lot of money


1: bank collapse - partly due to deregulation, part due to world collapse.
Tories would have done the same as Labour.not sure what UKIP would have done as they were a nonentity at the time

2 : military actions in Iraq. All parties were in favour of this IIRC apart from the LibDems


There is a graph here on the mess the Labour had to clean up after the Tories, which is rarely mentioned whether you agree with the commentary or not, the point is that the figures are there to see.

https://skwalker1964.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/the-myth-of-the-inherited-mess-52/[/QUOTE]

Your link...
Typical left wing socialist clap trap.

Just ask the IMF for their opinion on bliars stewardship of the economy.
From Sweden to Australia, sensible governments paid down debt in the boom years. Labour didn’t.
Bliar thinks he can get away with thrashing the UK economy. He thinks he can get away with taking the country into illegal wars costing billions.
He really doesn't deserve too.

I said you can leave the commentary aside ( I agree with you on the 'wars') and look at the figures.

The figures are there to be seen, or do you have alternative source?

 

[RigidRaider]

From Wikipedia on Britain's gold reserves:

"Between 1999 and 2002 Brown sold 60% of the UK's gold reserves at $275 an ounce. It was later attacked as a "disastrous foray into international asset management" as he had sold at close to a 20-year low. The UK eventually sold about 395 tons of gold over 17 auctions from July 1999 to March 2002, at an average price of about US$275 per ounce, raising approximately US$3.5 billion. By 2011, that quantity of gold would be worth over $19 billion. He pressured the IMF to do the same, but it resisted."

 

[jeds]

From Wikipedia on Britain's gold reserves:

"Between 1999 and 2002 Brown sold 60% of the UK's gold reserves at $275 an ounce. It was later attacked as a "disastrous foray into international asset management" as he had sold at close to a 20-year low. The UK eventually sold about 395 tons of gold over 17 auctions from July 1999 to March 2002, at an average price of about US$275 per ounce, raising approximately US$3.5 billion. By 2011, that quantity of gold would be worth over $19 billion. He pressured the IMF to do the same, but it resisted."

And he deliberately sold it cheap to prop up the World economy. Brown literally thought he was saving the World by selling our gold for nothing.

 

[Deleted member 63160]

And he deliberately sold it cheap to prop up the World economy. Brown literally thought he was saving the World by selling our gold for nothing.

How very "Labour" of him.

 

[JBR]

How very "Labour" of him.

Borrowing
Selling the family silver

And for what?

To keep their noses in the trough.

 

[AronSearle]

The figures are there to be seen, or do you have alternative source?

Why not quote the readily available government figures, or a whole raft of easily findable non biased sources, rather than something from a clearly biased lefty blog?

But as to your source.....

From 2002, the graph shows a gradual, managed increase, over a period of 6 years, from about 29% to about 35%. This is the period when Labour – as they had promised to do – started to increase investment in great, beloved British institutions like the NHS, as well as in other public services. This gradual increase was no problem – it was controlled, deliberate, affordable. And it was still lower than it had been under the preceding Tory government.

Really don't care what it was compared to a Tory government, as if that is some kind of sensible economic argument.

Spending increased from 29% to 35%, this is not a small increase in government spending, this represents hundreds of billions of pounds, that saw the deficit increase by several percent before the financial crises.

That is your source.