And they have played it appallingly......The other jokers couldn't have done any worse. I mean what could be worse than a double-dip recession?...

Give 'em chance, they've got three and a bit years left yet to make a complete bollox of it. They're probably just pacing themselves

This crisis potentially has a long way to go. Eveythinh that has happened since 2008 was predictible and as I said then will only resolve itself by significant loss of living standards. Sadly, we are only at the start of the austerity - it'll get alot worse. We'll see scenes that those of us born after WW2 will never have witnessed. People need to accept that, get their heads down and work their socks off.

Oh god, not this drivel again.

Banks – remember? [uGlobal[/u financial crisis – remember?

All the fault of Gordy and Tone, was it? Or just a total coincidence that it happened at the same time?

I wouldn't say they "brought" it to it's knees. What they did is proved that they have no idea when it comes to managing the economy though.

No money put aside for a "rainy day". Instead they, like the rest of the country, overborrowed.

Time after time, Labour overspend, screw up the economy and the Tories come in and fix it for the country.

Happened in the 1970's, is happening again.

Could you expand on what is meant by "overborrowed" please? ... and specifically how you manage to apply that term to Labour but not to the Conservatives.
You see, according to the stats, the last Labour administration borrowed LESS (at times no borrowing at all) all the way through Gordon Brown's chancellorship than the previous Conservatives did.
Even after that, just before the banking crisis hit, the level of borrowing was only just ahead of what John Major's bunch left behind.

I also seem to remember that the Tories were promising to match Labour's spending plans before everything went tits up.

I take issue with the idea that the Tories are incompetent. IMO, they seem to have been largely successful at maintaining the dominant social class, pandering to the financial sector and pursuing their political interests as a party and on an individual basis.

I mean, sure, the country is in a mess and the bottom 94% upon the earnings ladder are finding it hard to make ends meet. But these are ostensible concerns at best for the media savvy Tories.

You still hear people describing Reagan's presidency as "incompetent" despite the fact there is ample evidence that proves he not only knew precisely what he was doing when he slashed public spending for welfare whilst granting massive sums to the military, deregulated everything not nailed down, ran up a colossal deficit, incarcerated half of America etc. but wholeheartedly approved of such, too.

Thats true but you have to be fair to John Major's government, he inherited the mess that Maggie had left.

Inflation was just under 10% and the economy had just entered a recession that lasted from autumn 1990 to autumn 1991. Also (although Major can't escape blame for this as he was Chancellor at the time) Maggie had signed us up to the Exchange Rate Mechanism which meant that to keep rough parity with the Deutschmark our interest rates had to match the Bundesbank which was using very high interest rates at the time to stop the reunification investment that the West German government was putting into East Germany, from becoming inflationary. So our interest rates were being dictated by Germany rather than in London.

The result was the British economy was stagnant for at least the first two years of Major's time in office until we fell out of the ERM, unemployment went on a steep rise upwards and Major's government was left borrowing and running deficits from 1992-97 similar to those that the Labour government would run from 2002-07.

The difference was that Blair's government didn't take over from a previous administration that had got us in a mess with high inflation and signed away our own monetary independence to Europe leaving us at the mercy of events in Germany that didn't allow us to get out of our own recession. Major's government did thanks to the disaster that was left to him by Thatcher. For all his faults, Gordon Brown would never have allowed British monetary independence to be sold to the Europeans.

So the Tories do have a fair excuse for John Major's deficit financing.

No, whilst John Major could maybe blame it on Maggie's tenure, it wouldn't be credible as he was her Chancellor (as you acknowledge) and it was he who took us into the ERM.
Either way, I was replying to someone who was saying that the Conservatives always have to sort out Labour's overborrowing.
And both Major and Thatcher were Conservatives.

We could have a complete separate discussion about the similarities/differences between the ERM and the Euro but I'd contend that adopting an exchange rate for the pound based on the exchange rate of the DMark left the pound seriously exposed to the Soros-crowd who had more money to gamble with than any small offshore island could lay hands on ... hence they won that hand of poker.
That couldn't have happened if we'd been in the (as-yet non-existent) Euro.
However, the rights and wrongs of the Euro is a separate discussion really, so I won't go down that road.

Remember that one fella who worked at the treasury, left a note saying there was no money left.

You know you are in trouble.

It's like being in control of a runaway train, jumping off and saying to the nearest passenger. Here you go, you try and stop it now.

Pft! There you go again, using actual real facts to kick a fool's argument up the backside.

Looks like the mother forgetter ((c) Robert Webb on buzzcocks) has been given and accepted £963000 as a bonus. While people struggle to make ends meet this douchebag laughs in the face of taxpayers

I should blinking well hope so!

The last Labour govt were in power in one of the biggest period of economic growth that the world has ever seen.

Remember that idiot Brown claiming, rather smugly that his policy had achieved the "end of boom and bust"? How foolish must he feel now?

So basically, we have a massive Catch 22 situation.....Tories spend a period in power, 'fixing' the economy - Slang for massive under investment in public services.

Labour take back over, have a longish period, 'overborrowing' - Code for re-building the public services (schools, hospitals, public transport, etc) that the Tories screwed over in their previous period in power.

The Tories take back over, 'fixing' the economy, etc, etc.......you get my drift??....



Maybe we need a Tory/Labour coalition??....Somewhere between the two, there might just be a half decent government??

Until May 2010 and selling his soul for a title and a car plus driver, Nick Clegg might have been the leader of such a party.

Now there's nothing

That's pretty much what the electorate voted for, aye.

And if you read Robert Peston on the BBC even though the government as majority shareholder could have vetoed it the treasury accepted the remuneration committees recommendation because they feared if they didn't Hester and the board of directors would have resigned.

What I want to know is did they threaten resignation or not?

If they did and basically blackmailed Cameron they should have been sacked not given a bonus.

If the treasury just thought it was a risk (i.e. there was no outright threat of resignation) and paid it because they [ithought[/i they might resign then that is equally unacceptable and shows incredibly weak government from Cameron (as does succumbing to blackmail).

Either way this demonstrates even when the bank is state run bankers can ignore calls from the majority shareholder to curb bonuses and Cameron is weak or has no desire to deal with the bonus culture.

So what if they all resigned? The shares are worth little as it is and their bluff needs to be called at some point or nothing will change.

Put someone in charge who is salaried. There is no need for bonuses in the first place. If you do your job you take home your agreed wages. That is what the majority of us do. Bankers should be no different. The bonus culture of "if we don't pay it they will leave" is just self serving drivel.

Well, I took him to mean that the economic cycle was then an awful lot smoother than the previous Tory government's huge swings from massive boom to severe recession.
Which was true, if badly phrased.

But, back to your previous wild comment about the conservatives always sorting out labour's "overborrowing"... How foolish do you feel now? Probably not at all, you'll just carry on ignoring half the argument.

I have wondered long and hard about just where this "elsewhere" is that they'd all bugger off to, if they didn't get their divvy.

I have no doubt that just like in the "real world", of which we are constantly reminded on here, there are equally capable people who would be willing to do the job for less.

Spot on.



There was a big piece in the [iFT[/i last year about this – and it was deeply sceptical about how serious the threats were and, indeed, where any such businesses would move to.

My message was aimed more at individual employees than organisations. That was always the excuse: "we've got to pay the best to get the best". What doesn't seem to follow is how much better "the best" keep getting in order to justify the ever spralling remunerations packages.

As a post script to the above:

I had to laugh at last night's QT when David Lammy (lab. Tottenham), suggested a remuneration multiplier as one way of better transparency. Basically the top executives receive no more than a clearly-stated multiple of the lowest paid operative in the organisation. It's always sounded a reasonable suggestion to me but this was then countered by Liz Truss (Con. SW Norfolk), that all any organisation would do is offshore the lower paid jobs and would therefore appear to be complying. Quite how she thinks the sh[ii[/ithouses in UK businesses could be cleaned by someone in Mombai is totally beyond me.

I don't have an issue with performance-related bonuses, per se.
Trouble is, we are all shareholders in RBS and we don't know what the deliverables and amounts in his bonus are/were.

Just outsource the cleaning. Then the cleaner works for a different company.