Adressing your Clinton point; Bill Clinton was an extremely popular President, even after his 'indiscretions' Balls is intrisically linked to the back-biting and infighting of Brown's tenure. I do agree that Cooper has the credentials to be judged on her own merit, even thiough it never works like that, unfortunately.

I couldn't agree more about the tired mantra of blaming Labour for all our current woes. Whilst the legacy of the past cannot be ignored, it is what is being done today that I am concerned with, and lets be honest, the cuts haven't remotely got started. I believe they are being held off for as long as possible, to give the economy chance to show real signs of growth before they really kick-in. I'm not holding my breath on that one though; hello again recession. In fact, when was the last time Osborne was seen in public?

I couldn't disagree more about Ed Milliband, he appears to have no great political acumen, and, unfortunately, he doesn't have the charisma to fill the void created by that. Rightly or wrongly, today's politics is style over substance. Didn't the Tory whips tell all and sundry to lay off Milliband as it was being to hurt them in the ratings, Tories bullying, again.

I don't think David Milliband has the charisma of a Blair, but he more than makes up for it with this intelligence.

Well, the Warrington North Constituency Labour Party preferred Helen Jones to Cooper as their candidate in 1997 when Hoyle went up to the Lords. I'm not sure who this says more about.

Interesting point but under my vision we would still end up with 2 major parties but they would be genuinely philosophically opposed rather than the current liberal consensus - so more of a realignment.
So we'd have a party in favour of pulling out of the EU, smaller welfare state and grammar schools (to pick 3 policies) with a mix of capitalist and state controlled economic approaches. Along the lines of Burkean conservatism.
You'd then have a more metropolitan liberal party - totally capitalist, socially liberal (including law and order), and in favour of comprehensive education. Whiggish type party. (I know Burke was a whig but he lead the conservative strand).

There may then be other strands but I don't see full on socialists winning much electoral approval and the far right has never done anything at a national level. The Labour and Conservative parties would just be a rump with a few seats in strongholds, UKIP would be rendered redundant and that particular bunch of oddities would disappear.

Agree with the point Re:Bill Clinton - and similarities between Bill and Ed Balls are minute. Balls is indeed going to be long tarred with his part in the Brown Govt, but suprisingly he does seem to be rather astute and someone who really rattles David Cameron in PMQ's as he did again on Wednesday. And as you said Osborne is being hidden from public view by Tory Towers, and Balls is relishing this scenario. He may be a bit bafoonish but I'd sum up Ed Balls as a ruthless politician and debater.

As for Ed Miliband - I just don't think we can judge his leadership and chances of winning an election until we are at least another year down the line. And any key Labour figures with leadership ambitions must be careful not to 'rock the boat' too much or risk damaging their reputation within the Parliamentary Party.

For the record - my voting for the Leadership was as follows: 1) Andy Burnham 2) Ed Balls 3) David Miliband 4) Ed Miliband. And Diane Abbott wasn't worthy of a vote.

It's tough to imagine where the Labour Party would be if one of the other candidates was the Leader, but I don't think it'd be drastically different.

Going to be a tough Winter for Cameron and the Tories, and Miliband needs to capitalise.

Andy Burnham? Jesus wept. Please don't tell me you voted for him because he's almost from Warrington

Ha Not quite - known him well for a number of years. Sat near him at Everton and was taught by his brother at Birchwood High School and thought he had some good ideas, but I think his biggest asset was his affability. Someone who the general British public could relate to well: Football fan, normal background, like Music, Loves the NHS and so on.

Tough to imagine he'll get another chance in the near future.

The facts are that if we like it or not we are in the best of a bad position at the moment. If labour had got back in we would be in the same position as Greece now as the labour plan was to keep spending our way out of recession. The Euro problem will cause all our problems over the next 24 months and nobody saw that.
This Government has not gone forward in any way however given the world some confidence that we are at least trying to stop the spending.
Worse it about to come especially in the Public sector where we will have major problems bringing in pension reform which is long overdue to be honest.

So are we better off under the Tories ...but if it was labour we would have been an Ireland/ Spain / Greece now. Look at history over the years labour overspends and the Tories mop it up.

Hard times ahead folks the European situation is on the brink of disaster.

The Tories mop it up?

Have you neglected to remember the way Thatcher and Major had the economy? We keep seeing records broken (highest % of population out of work, most young people out of work etc), records which were generaly from 1992. The country Blair invested in 1997 wasn't in good order and he rode the boom he created, just failed to prepare and regulate against a bust.

Those Labour budgets up till the Lehmann brothers crash in 2008 that set off the world recession were pretty much identical in deficit terms to the Conservative budgets under John Major's government.

Borrowing spiked as a result of the recession because of the lost output and lost taxation revenues. Labour only ran really high deficits for two years. The Tories have run a really high deficit for one.

Sal seeing as you have your finger on the pulse of politics how do you feel this country would have gone if it hadn't been a coalition government? No, better still how would we be if

A) The Tories had been in power
B) Labour
C) Lib dems
D) UKIP
E) Greens
F) BNP

Would it have changed for the better or worse with those in charged, obviously i'd like to think a lot worse with a certain party, but seriously without your usually sarcastic look on life and basing it on their election manifesto how do think it could have gone.

These figures don't take into account the spending Brown hid through devices such as PFI. If they're included then the figures are far worse.
The other issue is that the spending was predominantly on the public sector whilst the private sector as a percentage shrunk. We kept spending but not on projects that would provide us with a long-term benefit as a country e.g. rebuilding the branch railway network. Alot of the hospital and school building projects were funded through PFI so they're not in these figures. Much of the spending was on (activate Daily Mail mode)non-jobs that were essentially unproductive to the overall economy.

PFIs aren't 'hidden' in one financial year, they are paid back over 25 years. It was quite a simple option; continue with the total lack of investment in schools and hospitals pre-1997 or find a viable payment vehicle that made the hospital and schoool build progamme affordable. Let us not forget, PFI was the brainchild of John Major's government.

I would change your reference material from the Daily Mail.

Supporters of PFI - the Conservatives, Tony Blair and New Labourites

Opponents of PFI - Unions, Labour backbenchers, the Guardian

Now it seems the Conservatives have converted to being opponents of PFI and are saying the same things the lefties were saying ten years ago about it 'mortgaging the country's future'. Funny that.

I don't use the Daily Mail for my reference material thanks.

To go back to my point which was the figures Sally quoted don't include the PFI where the repayments are delayed for years down the line. Therefore his point using that graph to illustrate total spending is incorrect. It doesn't give a true picture of the debt built up under Labour.

I've always thought PFI was a bad idea because it just stores debt up which you'll pay over more for over the long-term. The fact that Major's government first came up with it underlines what a bad idea it was.

Yes but although I don't agree with PFI, that PFI was carried out on capital infrastructure spending, which means it is spending that delivers a future return in terms of GDP (ie when you build schools, transport networks etc you get more educated workforce that can travel and distribute people and goods around the country). So whilst it is true that there are future costs of repayment, there are also future benefits. When the PFI payments were set up the projects would have been costed on the net present value (when you discount future payments/costs by a 'discount rate', an interest rate) so that the NPV of the benefits exceeded the NPV of the costs. Whether we end up in profit or out of pocket depends on how accurate those original models were, but when you see figures pointing at the costs alone you get a warped picture, and this is what you get in some press articles about "the true size of the debt mountain".

The other one that is often used to create a scary figure of debt is including the value of future pensions which is huge. But what they never tell you on those is the value of the future assets of the country, which as long as the economy grows in the long run (even though it isn't happening now) will be even huger (otherwise we would not be seeing living standards generally rise over time).

The problem with the present government is their total opposition to any sort of investment in, seemingly, anything.

The theory of 'not spending' is so flawed its ridiculous.....Imagine giving somebody a huge farm field, ready for sowing, and then refusing to lend them any cash with which to buy any seeds?.....The field is useless without the seeds, similar to how the potential of this country cannot be realised without investment.

With these tactics, in 10 years time this country will be dead in the water.

The current government will also start getting criticised in a year or so from people on the right that the "cuts haven't gone far enough".

They will find like Mrs Thatcher found that it is hard to cut public spending in an environment where unemployment is rising because the numbers of people who are net recipients rather than net contributors to public finances increase.

It is ironic that Cameron made a big issue of cutting immigration in the General Election, when on aggregate immigrants are net contributors (although there will be groups within that that are net contributors so you can try to improve the balance), but in the year since being in charge the numbers of native net recipients have been rising to levels higher than they have been since the mid 1990s.

Already Osborne is facing criticism from the right wingers and the right wing press for not cutting the top 50% tax rate. Right wing commentators will always make the argument which sounds fine on paper that if you cut taxes for the rich, you will bring in more revenue because it will increase investment and create more jobs etc. The problem is the empirical evidence when that has been tried generally says that when you cut taxes for the rich, you decrease tax takes and end up increasing public borrowing with no positive employment effects, the only gains are for those at the top end of the income scale. Reagan and George W Bush sent US deficits up when they cut taxes for the rich despite their arguments that it would bring in more revenues. So Osborne has held fire on cutting the 50p tax rate and is asking HMRC to model the effects of reducing it, before he makes a decision on it, because he knows that pandering to his rich mates might end up increasing the deficit and leaving him open to criticisms of mismanaging the economy.

It's easy for us to criticise from the side-lines isn't it? There are no easy answers. Cameron and Osborne are no more stupid or feckless than Blair and Brown, and a lot, lot, smarter that us. Fact is we (individually) don't want to pay enough tax to deliver the services we (collectively) expect. When it is more cost efficient for lazy, bone-idle, UK citizens to stay on benefits than do a days work we are fundamentally fooked. We have made a safety net a life-style choice.

I do blame Blair for the benefit culture and the rise of "rights" over "obligations" and spunking investment (and superb economic conditions) in the NHS and schools without significant results.

I'm with Dr Anthony Daniels (pen name Theodore Dalrymple) on the state of our nation. Take a look outside your window, Britain is ailing.

How can you blame Labour for wanting to dramatically update hospitals and schools that were in a dire state after 18 years of Tory neglect??

The only thing that Labour got wrong with this was throwing the money around like confetti in the direction of unscrupulous contractors, who were sniffing a very fast, and very large, buck when contracts were being awarded for the building and upgrading work.

As for no significant results, I'd suggest hundreds of vastly improved schools and hospitals are ample reward, just a shame that the most simple human instinct - greed - put a massive shadow over those improvements.

With respect, contractors are one, arguably the smallest part of the PFI vehicle and certainly yield the least.

Yes, I agree, but my main point was that once it became obvious that the Blair government were going to invest heavily in public services, then various interested parties began circling like the vultures around a lottery winner.

Certainly, Blair & co made a balls up of monitoring expenditure, but it can't be doubted that their aims were actually both the right and honourable ones.

This is quite useful and shows the gross debt of various countries over the last 20 years (Just press the play button). I noticed the accelerated increase for all countries since 2007.

[url=http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/10394-public-debt-by-country.html#axzz1cohmeEHbLink[/url

Bizarre that you blame Blair for "benefit culture" seeing as the biggest rise of benefit claimants in history came in the 1980s under the Thatcher government.

In 1979 for instance, when the Conservatives fought an election on the campaign "Labour isn't working" with a poster showing the dole queues, about 6% of the eligible workforce was on unemployment benefits. By 1983 this had doubled to 12%. Even in 1993 this was 10%, it had fallen slightly to just under 7% by the time Labour won the election in 1997.

In the whole of Tony Blair's government, the unemployment rate was lower than it had been when he took over, it stayed at around 5% throughout his time in office then under Brown's government following the recession it went back up to just under 8% and now in Camerons government has risen to just over 8%.

The big sea change in a society where most people were employed to having European style high unemployment took place in the 1980s and 1990s, the point in which we had low unemployment was 1997-2007 which was the Blair years. It was the 1980s where a generation of worklessness was borne, in communities that used to have a culture of getting up and doing a hard days work it became the accepted norm to just go to the DHSS office and sign on, if you don't get what you want start riots.

Then under Blair's years people started getting back to work although the scars of long term unemployment were deep rooted in some of those communities so there were some areas that didn't get reached by employment.

Now in Cameron's government it is going back to the days of the past Tory government, a higher claimant rate than there has been since 1996, unions going on strikes, students rioting and attacking the police, inner city areas rioting.

The Conservatives have always been the party that prides itself on supporting the private sector to create jobs its just a shame that their social policies encourage people to sit at home claiming benefits whilst the employers can't fill them.

You are seeming to link numbers of benefit claimants with "a benefit culture". The benefit culture was called by the liberal elite.

Well it's a good place to start.

During the 1960s and 1970s people didn't mind doing a hard days work down the steel works or the coal pits getting their hands dirty but the Thatcher government of the 1980s turned us into a society where we'd rather turn up and claim dole.

You can't blame people though because with such low wages and the fact people would be paying so much tax and lose their housing benefits they were out of pocket coming off benefits, so they stayed on the dole. That was the Britain of the 1980s and 1990s.

At least Blair's government made some headway into tackling this social failure, brought in a minimum wage, cut the starting rate of income tax to 10p, and introduced a tax credit system for the low paid particularly working families, so it meant work paid. So people moved off benefits and came into work. If you look at the ILO figures across the world, through the 97-07 period we had lower unemployment than all the other G7 economies apart from Japan and briefly the US for a period.

That period was one in which living standards and ambition rose, young people wanted to get an education, go to university and then get graduate jobs and get on the property ladder. In opposition the Tories just said that was Blair's fantasy land of sending everybody to university and there are too many graduates etc. This would be a fair argument if they had come in with a plan of saying there are too many graduates and not enough training in skills x, y and z in which we have skills shortages and so are having to recruit migrants from Eastern Europe, so we are going to shift the education emphasis to providing this training. But there is no plan like that at all, they have just made it more difficult to access higher education (and by cutting EMA, further education as well) with no alternative plan in place. So what you will get is kids doing what they did under the Tories in the 1980s and 1990s, leave school at 16 and then go to the dole office, smoke weed, get pregnant, get provided for by the state.