In Brown's debt

Fraser

That's fantastic, and will strike a chord with the public. But surely, in reality, we will only ever concern ourselves with servicing the debt and hope for good bout of inflation/devaluation to take care of the capital.

Jim

Scary, depressing and very sad all at the same time. And done in 11 short years. It could all have been so different.

To think that millions of Brits fought with great courage and honour and died for this country in 2 world wars, and now we have allowed one man to do this much damage to the country they gave their lives for.

Is it amoral incompetence or plain evil? Is there a fine divding line between the two?

Donna

Great video - this needs to be on tv. Prime Time. Every night this week and next. In the middle of Coronation Street.

But back to the question posed; the papers this week have been quoting an excellent statistic: that of Winston Churchill's debt at the end of WW2 being £60 billion in today's terms, compared with £78billion by Darling THIS YEAR ALONE, and more beyond. The reason the papers have been quoting it (I'd imagine), is because, simply, it puts the debt at levels people can understand. Particularly when you point out that we only finally paid off our war debts during Blair's reign. Those are the two concepts I'm going to be reciting when I next canvass.

Random Lurker

I'm not actually sure what a trillion is :( Is it a thousand billion?

As to doorsteps, maybe divide the amount by the approximate taxpaying population of the UK and say it's taxpayers' money, therefore each and every one of us has to pay back x million pounds, or whatever.

Good video by the way :)

BrianSJ

http://burningourmoney.blogspot.com/2008/11/are-we-bust.html has the scariest picture I have seen (the graph not the dinosaur). Do a creditworthiness check on countries the way it is done on people, and this is what you get.

Habib

I think for David Cameron to make Debt an issue, he needs to be able to quantify it. IE we spend more on Interest repayment than we do on Health, Defence.

mitch

Kerry McCarthy MP (Lab) has just called the unemployed "unemployable" on her blog.

she is toast!

strapworld

They should get a new recording of the old song SIXTEEN TONS...you know the one sixteen tons and deeper in debt!

As for the video, it should have the laughing face of Brown like a ghost above each child!!

sandy

The first necessity is to explain just how much one trillion pounds actually is.

Politicians are guilty of assuming that everyone outside the Westminster bubble has the same understanding of issues as they do.

In my experience a great many people don't know how much a billion is,let alone a trillion.

Cameron and Osborne need to find some simple way of getting across to people, the sheer mind boggling enormity of the sums Labour admit to needing to borrow in the next few years,never mind what the final amount will actually be.

Richard Jenkins

Cameron needs to relate the debt to households and mortgages. Divide £500 billion additional Brown debt by the number of households – say £15000 per households. (I don’t have the data to do accurately). “So for people who are struggling to pay off their mortgage, on average £X’000, Gordon Brown is adding another £15000 that you or your children will have to pay off. And for people who think that they don’t have a mortgage – Gordon Brown wants your family to pay off another £15000 too. But don’t worry if you think you can’t afford it. Brown’s going to take it from you in tax.”

Fraser Nelson

Fraser, servicing the debt already costs us more than we spend on defence. And that's before it doubles...

Jim, Churchill needed a £60bn loan from America after WWII - that's £60bn in today's money. We paid it back three years ago.

Herbert Thornton

Cameron can't bring the issue alive - because he doesn't understand the situation any better than does Brown, has no effective solution to offer, and worst of all, doesn't grasp the severity of the approaching collapse.

Britain, as I keep saying, needs at least a Hjalmar Schacht.

Carol-Ann

Wish we could have political Ads on TV like they do in the states. It would help get the messages of all the political parties accross to the public in a more effective way in our media age.

Jonathan T

"Gordon Brown's debt to the British public: £1,000 p.a. for every man, woman and child"

[Calc: £1tn / 60m pop = £16,670 each. At 6% interest (say) = £1,000)]

And obviously, that's before the capital is repaid...

GS London

"Problem is: few new "trillion" was a real word until recently"

No problem. I think that folks know perfectly well that a trillion is an unbelievably vast amount of cash.

Great video.

Oor Willie

Although most of the people who read this blog realise the implications of what is happening, is it possible that many more subscribe to the "buy now, pay later" society which the UK has degenerated into over the last few years?
So the horrendous figures are met with a shrug and no thought for the future. Brown is relying on these people to keep him in power because that's all he's interested in.

geoff

Problem with making debt a major issue is he would need a plan to pay it down faster - that means in the next parliament.

Will people accept higher taxes or lower spending to pay down debt?

If not he isnt going to be able to make it a major issue but rather just something to needle brown with.

autograph

I think this video has the potential to be hugely powerful. It kind of makes me regret that we are not like the US in terms of being able to show political adverts on TV - because something like this could really stick in people's minds (although I understand the arguments against having this).

Judith

you may be interested in the following reality check on what a million means by a US colleague of mine. 'To put the amount of a Trillion into comprehensible terms think about this. If you started counting today, counting as fast as you can to one hundred then adding to the total every time you reached 100, and you limited your counting to a normal 40 hour work week it would take about 18 days to count to a million, it would take 37 years to count to a billion.

Now are you ready for this???

It would take 37,000 years to count to a trillion.'

Coffee Housers should forward this to their email lists.

Herbert Thornton

Cameron cannot bring this issue to life because he has no more understanding of it than does George Brown, has no adequate programme to resuscitate the economy, and does not grasp the severity or consequences of the coming collapse.

As I keep saying, what the country needs is a man who has, in matters of finance,the understanding and skills of a Hjalmar Schacht and to whom is given authority to act at least as wide as that exercised by Schacht after the disaster of the Weimar inflation, and that enabled him to so effectively resuscitate the German economy.

RODEST

I think David Cameron is missing an opportunity to attack Brown for raiding pension funds which is partly responsible for the black hole in household finances. The pension increase that Brown claims as a generous giveaway has been created due to a higher level of inflation that pensioners would recieve as a matter of course. Deceitful Brown at it again.

When inflation returns as this recession deepens it will be the low paid and pensioners who will be hit hardest.

If Brown had genuine concern for pansioners he would refund the tax taken from pension funds, clearly Cameron is right, with Browns it is self interest.

In a previous post on this video, my thoughts were that children were more likely to be pensioners themselves before Browns debt is paid off.

Verity

Jim - I have long said the left as now constituted has morphed into something malign.

Sterence

@ BrianSJ
There are many errors in that blog, both of fact and category. The UK position is pretty dire but it's not what is represented there, as several comments to the blog have pointed out.

Herbert Thornton

Cameron cannot bring this issue to life because he is just as much out of his depth as is Gordon Brown.

To set the British economy to rights requires the intelligence and skill of a Hjalmar Schacht.

As I keep pointing out, his near-miraculous resuscitation of the German economy after the disastrous Weimar inflation is still a classic example of how to deal with the sort of situation that now faces Britain.

Matt

I think the debt argument needs to be part of a wider "he's not as good as he thinks" argument about Brown. That is to say, the Tories need to address head on this idea that Brown is some sort of economic guru. They should do so by appealing to the idea that he's like that colleague at work who thinks he's great but in fact actually gets things very wrong quite often; most people should be able to relate to that in their own workplace.

This could then be accompanied by three simple examples (which I envisage as a bilboard campaign); (1) he sold the gold at the bottom of the mark; (2) he messed up the 10p tax band; (3) his brilliance has racked more debt than the war etc..

Fraser

Tongue was lodged in cheek...

Hereford

How about providing a link to the video itself. Let all Coffee Housers send it to everyone in their address book. Put it on YouTube as well.

Use it as a viral marketing tool.

The Bellman

Pictures of the Dear Leader biting his nails, with dateline.

"It is said that a smile costs nothing..."

Picture of McBogey gurning on the front benches during the PBR.

"... but it cost the British taxpayer £1 trillion to put the smile back on Gordon's face."

You could insert a few words here or there, like 'liar', 'deceitful', 'snot-gobbling' or 'tw6t', although I concede these might be counter-productive.

tory granny

I think Geoff has a very good point. A billboard campaign saying something like "Labour gives you a choice. Do you want a drastic cut in public services or do you want higher taxation to pay off our huge national debt? And by-the-way you are voting on your children's benalf,too."

BrianSJ

Sterence
Had a look at the comments and a think. The 'not wrong not right just different' seemed to hit the nail on the head. It just makes a different set of assumptions about the relationship between earnings and debt e.g. if you had to pay your debts off this year, where would you be -which is a not unreasonable approach. More conventional measures make a different set of assumptions about future ability to pay - generally much stronger ones.

Jim

The Bellman@09:24......

"It is said that a smile costs nothing..."

Picture of McBogey gurning on the front benches during the PBR.

"... but it cost the British taxpayer £1 trillion to put the smile back on Gordon's face."

That's brilliant.....!!!!!!

Absolutely nailed it....!!!!!!

BrianSJ

The scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker sets fire to the money is very memorable. The pile of money that Brown has set fire to must be considerably bigger.

Herbert Thornton

I apologise to everybody for my three repetitious posts.

My computer was acting strangely and I believed that it wasn't sending my postings.

I've now re-formatted the hard drive & re-installed the programs & am hoping this will cure things......