Not quite as simple as you are setting things out:
Firstly the increases in population has put added pressure on both education and the health service. This would have been the case regardless of who would have been in power. Just think how high the borrowing would have been if Labour had continued to fund both to the levels you would deem satisfactory? What do you expect to happen at A&E when you have huge increases in population and life expectancy?

I would still like to understand how come Aids is treated with such high priority within the NHS whilst cancer appears to be very hit miss. Perhaps if the NHS was re-prioitised the service would improve?

The tax cuts to the rich is a straw man and you know it - the increases in personal allowances has reduced taxation to ordinary people far more than the cut to the mega-rich.

I am no defender of the two toffs Cameron or Osborne but I would prefer them to the two Ed's - Balls was a hopeless chancellor, he could even get the baby P decision correct he is man of very poor judgement. Personally I would prefer Theresa May at least she looks up for the job unlike Cameron.

Taxation is not a bottomless pit - I agree extracting more tax from companies who earn their profits here should be a priority. You could dump the whole GDP into the NHS and education and it still wouldn't be sufficient to satisfy your idea of what these services should deliver.

Ah that old tripe. Again.

Even Gideon's own permanent secretary described what happened as a "banking crisis, pure and simple" so what part of this did Brown etc actually cause?

Perhaps if he had heeded the warnings about issues within the banking sector rather than compounding them by relaxing regulations that might have helped reduce the impact?

Running a deficit in 'boom' years left us ill prepared when the downturn came.

What is this stone tablet all about?!

Your mates Camoron and Gidiot were urging Labour to cut regulation of the banking sector even further during the entire period running up to the collapse. Not forgetting Gidiot championing the Irish economy as a model we should aspire to.

Marketing.
Like cornflakes but with a smaller budget.

George Osborne, writing for The Daily Telegraph in June 2006:

[iQuote I fear that much of this regulation has been burdensome, complex and makes cross-border market penetration more difficult. This is exactly the wrong direction in which Europe should be heading and it threatens the global competitiveness of the City of London.[/i



David Cameron, March 2008
[iAs a free-marketeer by conviction, it will not surprise you to hear me say that a significant part of Labour’s economic failure has been the excessive bureaucratic interventionism of the past decade too much tax, too much regulation, too little understanding of what our businesses need to compete in the modern world.[/i

Oh fook, here we go again



I would expect a competent government to anticipate the increase in population and invest in health and education to match those increases. But as we have seen over previous administrations, tories would rather the proles be garaged in hospital corridors and their children educated in leaky "mobiles"



AIDS is relatively simple and cheap to treat these days. Don't believe the Farage rhetoric



Increasing personal allowances makes little difference to the poor, it tends to benefit middle to high income earners most. The personal allowance increases were at the behest of the LimpDems and the benefits have been eclipsed by the increase in VAT, despite the "we have no plans to increase VAT" pledge. Increasing VAT is a regressive tax, it hits the poorest the hardest



Ed Balls has NEVER been a chancellor, Gordon Brown was succeeded by Alastair Darling, both of whom AND Ed Balls are far more qualified than a 2.1 history graduate who flunked maths A level



Now you're talking soft

The question was what Brown could have done to ease the impact of the banking madness not what the Tories would have done. Given you believe Labour to be so superior to the Tories how come they did nothing? Do you really want the likes of Ed Balls let loose again

I think the answer to your question is "not a lot" considering that the musical chairs game that was the international monetary trading system stopped the music first in the USA, not sure how Gordon Brown could have stopped the sub-prime mortgages or the US recession of 2007/09 that lit the fires underneath the whole pile of con artists.

From Andrew Neil on Twitter:

And? It's like the captain of the titanic claiming it wasn't his fault because if the head chef had been driving he'd have hit the iceberg too! Whatever the Tories said is utterly, utterly irrelevant.

Indeed it was, because the banks were allowed to get away with it.

There wasn't a "global crash" like Labour apologists like to claim, many, many countries didn't enter depression, only the ones that "banked" on financial services to grow the economy. Like the UK. All overseen by Blair, Brown, Balls and Wallace.

That is absolute hogwash. Typical right wing apologist reply of blame anybody or anything but do not take responsibility even though you created the situation in the first place.
History and hypocrisy are the right wing watch words.

...so we should have had a bigger manufacturing base to counteract the banking failures then ?

City analysts were warning about the impact of sub prime two years before we started feeling the impacts, the government could have done more to stop the major banks getting in to far. The majority of UK banks were massively over leveraged and when funds dried up their lack of liquidity came back to haunt them. This could have been avoided by tighter controls over their balance sheets.

RBS went bust in the main because it got too greedy and borrowed and paid too much for Ambro. Northern Rock didn't go bust because of sub prime it went bust because it was massively over leveraged. Lloyds got into trouble because Brown persuaded them to take on RoBS/Halifax.Those who say it was all a global crisis and Labour were not to blame in the slightest need to revisit the facts.

What happened to our large manufacturing base? A combination of poor management, lethargic worker attitude and increasing union power made us uncompetitive.

We have a solid manufacturing industry it is just smaller than it needs to be. We are very innovative engineers just not great at huge wigit type manufacturing.

Hi, I'll just give you a quick history lesson. In 1997 the Tories got voted out. In 2008/9 we'd had 11/12 years of unbroken Labour rule. So, even with the best will in the world and whatever fantasies inhabit your mind, you can't really pin the Labour depression on the Tories.

Ah, hypocrisy. Well, look no further than Wallace, Balls and Burnham and their minions.

There's been a steady decline, we now rank 7th on a par with S. Korea, Italy and France. US, China and Japan lead the way. Germany are on 7% of world manufacturing, we're on 3%.

We still make things, lots of things.

Manufacturing output as a % of national output
1970 27%
1980 22%
1990 19%
2000 16%
2010 10%

In 1997 it was 19% by 2010 it was 10%. I think we need to put to bed this myth that the Tories destroyed UK manufacturing.

Thats a bit more than a steady decline over 40 years.

I'm well aware that the UK is still manufacturing things, I visit such places every week in my job, but to give you an example I visited a small (25 employees) engineering workshop a few months ago and found the experience so unusual that I mentioned to the owner that it was nice to smell lathe lubricants again, I hadn't realised just how long it had been since I smelled that distinctive smell but thinking about it so much of my time is spent in huge several acre warehouses where they stock cardboard boxes full of stuff that has been imported - the last very large engineering works I was in was British Jeffrey Diamond in Wakefield on the day that the miners strike was called, when the 2pm shift clocked off they were all saying their goodbyes because they knew it was the end of their business, and they were right.

In absolute terms he is correct. As a %age of GDP (how the national debt is usually measured) he is way off the mark

Absolute (£bn):



%age of GDP

To change tack slightly, I got a leaflet through the door yesterday, the first one for the Conservative candidate in our constituency. Apparently they have little hope in our area although for generations until three elections ago they had held it with a massive majority, so I had a read about him to see what he has to say...

He's a former Olympic rower, a team mate of James Cracknell, his wife is an Opera singer, he works for Bloomberg in the City of London and, heres the thing, he lives in London.

He knows about Wakefield, he's heard of Leeds but his family is firmly ensconced in London and I suspect that he sincerely believes that he can live 200 miles away from his constituency and deal with the minutiae of an MP's business with maybe a conference call once a week.

That was when I stopped reading, I think its fair to say that this will not be a Tory seat any time soon, Sir Donald Kaberry will be spinning in his grave.

Another useful graphic.

The last five quarters of the previous Labour administration compared to the last five of this bunch of chancers

Looks like a tory gain from the LimpDems down here for similar reasons. The incumbent is retiring and the LimpDems have replaced him with a jobbing ex-MP who lost his seat in 2010. The tories have gone for a local bloke, well-known in the area and a mile away from their 2010 candidate Annunziata Rees-Mogg. Yes she is the sister of Lord Snooty and Camoron once suggested that she may like to dumb down her name to Nancy Mogg, hoping to better appeal to the plebs. That's a PR guy for ya