Be Excellent To Each Other

Poor old Doccy G lol. Still, I won't hear one word against him in the vain hope of a jar of his BBQ sauce!!

See, I'm not actually convinced that's hypocritical. The PM (indeed, all ministers) is somewhat obliged to wear two hats. As PM he has to act in the best interest of the country as a whole, and as an MP he has to act in the best interest of his constituency. Now where those interests clash, I can see that you would end up having to argue two different positions. It makes him look a bit of a donkey, but not hypocritical.

Hypocrisy isn't the right word, I agree. But for a PM to argue repeatedly at a local level about the inevitable effects of their main manifest policy makes them look like one helluva donkey! I am amused he just keeps trotting out the same "just make cuts to the back office" sound bites in these letters as he uses nationally. He doesn't seem to understand that when the fat is gone, you start cutting muscle.

To hark back a little, the Chinese are actually going to be (in theory) leading the way on the reduction of pollution as of the December Big Fucking Polluter meet in France.

It's not hard when you produce that much of it.

"We will reduce our pollution by 75% by 1) running our factories at half capacity and 2) implementing cleaner technologies. Unfortunately, that means your throwaway plastic Christmas trees are subject to a 300% price rise to cover expenditure and wages. Ho ho ho!"

Comforting to see that Cameron is using some of the money he is saving from reducing tax credits on a private plane for himself and the cabinet.

Don't worry about the cost as the Royal family will be able to use it as well!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34864328

If it saves that much money in a year, it strikes me as rather a good idea.

That's how much money you're being told it saves by someone who works for the guy who gets a private jet out of this.

At least we're spared the 'Blair Force One' puns that were abundant when the idea was first mooted during the vicar's administrations.

But they are paying the RAF to do the job rather than bunging all the money to private charter companies so that's better. If only they could follow their own thinking here to it's logical conclusion. But then they're Tories so, not exactly a strong suit.

Cunt Force Cunt is the best I can do.

Well that's 13 and a bit years before you've saved the £10M cost, ignoring any interest on the refit expenditure, and also ignoring the cost of buying the plane in the first place (or replacing it for the RAF).

I'm sure the wags on Twitter are creating flying pig GIFs as we speak.

Your NHS is safe with the Party of Fiscal Responsibility!



Http://gu.com/p/4ecpb

Our national debt is now larger than it was in 2010.

That's to be expected. Don't confuse the debt and the deficit.

I haven't.

Then what's the relevance? The Tory's election platform called for the deficit to be positive by 2018 (was it '18?), so it's still negative now, so of course the debt is greater. This is a non-point.

You sure? Because our national debt was higher in 2011 than it was in 2010, and higher in 2012 than it was in 2011. So that's not exactly unexpected?

It means despite the horrible cuts they've been making left, right and centre, they are still spending more and more money year on year. They've missed every single deficit target they've set themselves. If you think they'll have it in positive figures by 2018 you're going to be a bit miffed.

No it doesn't. It means they are spending more than they are bringing in year on year. You are confusing deficit with debt if you think it means they're spending more and more money year on year.

The deficit has been decreasing since 2010 - still a long way to go though. And obviously we actually have to be in surplus to be in a position to start paying off the debt.

So if your point was "the deficit reduction targets have been missed" you might perhaps have said that, because that's not the same thing as what you said at all.

Of course it will be. The global financial crash meant we went from a small deficit to a huge one. This is regression to the mean.

Also from 2013 onwards those are forecasts, which have all been missed.

Your initial statement is still totally confusing. We're operating at a deficit, albeit a decreasing one. We're not yet at a surplus (if we ever will be). This is news to nobody. Given that, how are you surprised, given that we've been running a deficit for 5 years, that the debt is higher than it was in 2010? The cuts are designed, over time, to reduce the deficit, and that's what they're doing (ignoring the impact of those cuts for the purpose of this). We cannot reduce the debt until we're in surplus.

But how is the overall debt going up not a bad thing? We've not been in a period of huge inflation over the past five years. If we're not bringing in enough in taxes to cover our outgoings as a country then how can the Tories espouse austerity to everyone else?

Ok, that makes more sense now, cheers.

Ah, good - I did think we were dealing with confusion rather than disagreement

So you did confuse the debt and deficit?

I'm permanently confused.

In other deficit news



http://www.theguardian.com/business/201 ... ge-osborne

Further austerity! Music to their ears.

Yeah, just look at that eh guys, just how 'fiscally irresponsible' those cunty old Tories have been since 2010, and weren't things just grate before then...

Gentlemen, I salute your indefatigability, I truly do. Labour: an administration that was inarguably more financially ruinous and inept than *any* that ever preceded it, only possibly exceeded by their even more appalling foreign policy record, and all this a mere <10 years ago.

The same Labour who have by ANY standard have now become a total, shambolic, fractured laughing stock regardless of one's politics. Looking further afield, we have the utterly delusional and discredited SNP and the bombed out Liberals. Thank fuck for the Tories and their grown up politics and party, running the country as against this Belm-tastic backdrop and peers, what with their growing economy, millions more in work, the above graph etc.

I realise, of course, that it truly doesn't matter what they do, or achieve, though - they're always going to be 'the Tory c**ts' around here and that's that. So y'know, knock yourselves out guys.

Now on the other hand, this is very relevant:



The Keynesian idea of government debt is that it doesn't matter as long as you use the debt to grow GDP faster than the debt grows. So debt in absolute terms is irrelevant; debt as a portion of GDP, though, is a key metric. If that goes down, regardless of the actual absolute value, we are richer as a country. If it goes down, we are poorer.

The risk with austerity is that getting the deficit into surplus is really hard (six years and counting of Osborne's plan and we're nowhere near there) but the risk of side effects of austerity fucking up overall GDP growth is high. If that's what happening, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest it is, then this is a stupid plan. Our debt is worse (not just greater but greater relative to GDP) now than 2010.

Saying this over and over again does not make it true. The global financial crisis was caused by American sub-prime lending. Everyone was affected. Labour ran a surplus until 2002 and then a manageable deficit until 2008. In fact the USA recovered more quickly than us precisely BECAUSE they didn't choose the austerity path.

You've just swallowed the Tory dogma, sadly. To give them credit though, the way they've spun it this way is incredibly clever.

-edit- also I'd like to state I wasn't a Labour supporter until this year, so I'm not saying this out of any tribal loyalty to the party. But what you're saying is a whitewash of history.

Cavey, why do you react to criticisms of Tory economic policy by discussing on about the hypothetical failures of a Labour Party that doesn't exist? None of us have any idea what the country would look like if Labour had won in 2010, just as none of us know what would have happened if we'd had a Toey government in 2005. You can hypothesise, but it'll always be a weak line of argument because it'll just be empty words. Or you can fall back into unthinking dogma and beat the "I know how the Labour Party behave because they are all the same" drum, but you surely cannot expect us to take that seriously. It's lazy and it's lame.

And furthermore, even if we had a Parallel Universe Viewing Machine that allowed us to see that things would indeed be worse under Labour, that still doesn't make the Conservative policies the best policies. It just makes them better than one alternative. It doesn't mean there weren't other choices where the 2008 recession wasn't still affecting us.

British politics is bipartisan but that isn't a good thing. We'd all be better off if ideas were debated on their merit and not purely based on where they came from.

Mate, Ed Balls (their then Shadow Chancellor) is on record offering his profound apologies for Labour's abject failure to fulfill their fundamental duty to us all to regulate the banks:





http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... r-failures


Anyway I'm going to leave it there because really, there is absolutely no point, we've all been round this so many times and even I get tired of it, all it does is piss everyone off.

A policy which the Tories backed to the hilt. In fact they wanted LESS regulation, as freemarket rightwingers often do.

But yeah, we've been through this before. One day you'll just accept I'm right about this.

I'm assuming you'll vote for Labour in 2020 as I'm sure Corbyn will definitely regulate the banks more tightly than Boris Johnson.

I would be surprised if Corbyn makes it to 2017.

People were surprised he was nominated, people were surprised he won, etc...

An idiotic piece of elecioneering from someone backed into a corner by the far superior Conservative campaign.

Also, you've made the same mistake: having assumed that *obviously* a Labour victory in 2010 would be worse for the economy today, you've now assumed that *obviously* a Tory win in 2005 (or 2001 if you prefer) would have avoided the banking crisis because the wise Tories would have implemented better regulations. You can't prove either supposition, no matter how fervently you believe or how often you repeat.

This isn't a battle of who's team is better; at least not for me.

To be fair, that was a report published by a subcommitte chaired by John Redwood, and Redwood is a libertarian nutcase. It didn't have any explicit endorsement from the party leadership. This is back into arguing the toss over hypotheticals, which doesn't mean it's wrong but doesn't make it the most convincing line of argument either.

...Seriously?
Ok.



I'm really not. All I'm doing is comparing where we were in 2008-10 and now. That's it.

I'm not saying the Tories would've been better in the years leading up to 2008, although, if you're asking, I would GUESS they would have been, as evidenced by their not letting the financial sector burn into this superheated free-for-all mode during the 80s recession, and plus they're obviously vastly more business-savvy anyway IMO).

Equally, I'm not saying things would not have been better than they are now, had Gordon Brown stayed on as PM in 2010 (although I hope you'll forgive me whilst I have bladder-control issues at that very thought and reach for the "TennaBloke Pants" )

So you're saying that the Conservatives would have ensured tighter regulation in the banking sector? My turn to piss my pants.

Yes. I think the Tories ran a good campaign in 2015, if by "good" one means "relentlessly repeating vapid soundbites in a co-ordinated fashion in order to construct a narrative that results in getting elected." Perhaps "fit for purpose" may be a more apt description. Whereas Labour's messaging was muddled, reactionary, and ineffective.

Oh, well that makes perfect sense, because as we can all agree, Britain's economy exists in a vacuum and is entirely unaffected by externalities beyond the control of our government like the global economy... oh no, wait, it doesn't. You're not comparing like for like.

One man's "so obvious I don't need to offer proof" is another's "unthinkingly parroted rhetoric." Either way, it ain't proven. That's kinda what I'm saying.

Oh, look, my MP is over twitter again. For filibustering. I wish he spent that time on improving the junction coming out of Baildon.

I honestly don't know, it's unknowable.

If we're to speculate, then on the one hand we've got fundamentalists like Redwood who openly talked about dumping pesky regulation altogether, but he wasn't even in the Shadow Cabinet; I don't know how much sway people like him had/have. Certainly, it was never an articulated policy/manifesto requirement, as far as I can see.

On the other hand, we have the empirical example of the Tories *not* doing this as under the 1979-82 recession, with Thatcher famously quipping "you can't buy your way out of recession". Imagine the temptation to replace all that lost industry with "new industries" such as unregulating banks gambling unfathomably on the stock exchange etc. but no-one wanting to kill the golden egg laying goose 'cause the tax receipts kept coming in...? That's basically what Labour did 20 years later.

As a Tory, and one (just about) old enough to remember those days, albeit as only a teenager interested in politics, I well recall the keep the City spivs at arms length caution on the part of most Tories, I must say. Brown positively and idiotically embraced them and their promises as some great economic panacea for all his failures on the balanced, diverse economy and lavish, grandiose public sector spending and expansion (not to mention very expensive wars), but he was, of course, sold a pup. Now we, our kids and their kids are going to have to pay, irrespective of how (relatively) well we are now doing, as recovering from a shockingly low base.

Either way, though, it's entirely irrelevant. If I'm deciding whether or not someone has run a company well (or even if someone has done a good job on my car, house, whatever), I don't obsess endlessly about would it have been better if some other Person (B) or Person (C) would've done it and/or alternative time-streams and outcomes, I just basically compare when it was like before and after. And no-one could deny it was a damn sight shitter "after" (2010) than "before" (1997).

Doc - Ed Balls said that in 2011, i.e. *four years* before any election campaign.