Dwelling on the past will damage Brown

Simon

If GB was so convinced of the risks to the banking sector, he could still have set up proper regulation for the UK banks which would have afforded us some protection.

But he didn't

Why not?

Andy H

Well the simple truth is that Brown is making it up as he goes. It is time to up the ante. Labour always play the man not the issue and so that is what Cameron must do - like the performance on the Today programme this morning. He needs to get this message to a wider audience though.

Chuck Unsworth

“We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes."

Mrs Marr is another leftist loony. Does she seriously believe this claptrap? Where's her evidence for this completely barmy assertion? Maybe a straw poll round her dinner table is all that she needs before launching into this garbage. I'm afraid that her father's intelligence and wit has not been passed down. Tragic, really, that from such promising beginnings she has not developed.

CCTV

Mrs Andrew Marr is deranged. It is the Government that is frightening everyone. It has expropriated the disposable income of those surviving on savings and dividends in the absence of secure public sector jobs and annuities.

Brown is likely to drive us all to soup kitchens with his ignorant grasp of economics. It is after all Government regulators who have failed consistently from Equitable Life to RBS and HBOS. It is falsified government statistics which understated inflation and government madcap immigration policies which drove lower paid workers into the underclass

What we do not need is Government bankrupting a tiny island economy with bank liabilities greater than the GDP of this nation. Just how much did The City borrow abroad whilst on Brown's Credit Binge ?

Just how leveraged are retail chains, PFI Schools, Hospitals, Trains, MoD Projects ? Just how much tax revenue now sits in the Cayman Islands through PFI constructs ?

David Cameron may not have studied Economics beyond Prelims - maybe Hague too did nothing after Prelims - but it is about time they acted in line with the gravity of national decline and starting FIGHTING

John Page

Talking of the past, Yvette Ballsup is quoted on the BBC website harking back to the early 90s for goodness sake. Labour evidently think that will have resonance - which just shows the strange bubble these people live in.

Miked

Petition underway regarding Browns financial incompetence.

Pass this on by email if necessary

Make a statement now and shame Brown.

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Fianance/

Verity

Jackie Ashley fails on many levels, blinded by her leftist authoritarian "vision" (tr. diktats).

"We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes." Given that Britain is already criminally over-taxed and is govered by 3,000 new laws that intrude on every area of the lives of the citizenry, the woman is howling at the moon.

" It would also rob the Cameron Conservatives of their best gambit, which is simply to point, like the child at the naked emperor, and state the bleeding obvious about past mistakes.”

Gratuitous and, if I may say so, faux clever, sixth-former toxin pumped in for no reason other than malice. As David Cameron has not pointed at Brown, like the child (note the emotive word "child"'; doubtless she feels this was rather clever and subtle) at Brown, this was thrown in out of fear that the Conservatives are advancing. When threatened, hiss and spit.

Jackie Ashley has to learn to tone down the hatred that she wears with such childlike malice. "It would give her more authority, more credibility - and make her more interesting to listen to." Well, not really. I just wanted to slap her round the face with a wet fish.

Susan Hill

Did anyone notice the disingenuous passing remark by Hazel Budgie Blears about immigrants ? In a report from a ThinkTank (I think) about the myths among white working class people about immigration, one is, apparently, that 'they get pushed straight to top of the council housing lists as soon as they get here.'
Blears said that was not true because it was a fact that most immigrants go into the private housing sector. They do indeed. At our expense. The taxpayers foots the bill for all the private sector rented accomodation and those rentals are at market rate. Does Blears really really think that everyone does not know that ?

TGF UKIP

"The Tories should be able to convict him in the court of public opinion of gross economic incompetence."

Absolutely, James, the Tories have a cast iron case just, in Osborne's case, a demonstrably inadequate public prosecutor as the polls bear witness.

Nicholas

“We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes."

Are the two mutually dependent then? Socialism as practiced here and in Europe seems to have made a lucrative (for some) "industry" out of concepts of big government (both in size and multiple layers) and big government seems to imply high taxation. But the socialist ideology behind such thinking is by no means vindicated in practice by achievements or experiences. If anything the opposite may be true.

Of course socialists will applaud and endorse big government because a. so many of them depend upon it for their livelihood in terms of both remuneration and meaning and b. because it enables them to impose their political ideology more comprehensively on others. The economic crisis seems to have given wing to leftist concepts of state control which we thought long discredited.

It seems to me that increasing dependency on taxation because of the high cost of big government limits flexibility in its application, as we have already seen with Brown, and therefore may compromise rather than create "fairness". Some socialists, like Ashley, also seem to be confusing "fair" with "high". Is the simplistic "punishing" of high earners with high tax really going to work? Surely this needs to be engineered bottom up by looking at the impact of taxation on the lower earners and especially the long suffering so-called "middle class" who earn too much to benefit from all the benefits but not enough to cushion the impact of tax?

Is the "world" really ready to accept "big government and high taxation"? Well, this member of the "world" is not and I suspect I am by no means alone. Reduce the size of government, especially its multiple layers, and reduce taxation. Do we really need one top heavy set of governors in Britain, another in Scotland and yet another in Europe, never mind the regional layers of bureaucracy and the increasingly "in-your-face" local varieties? The question of fairness is a separate issue and so far (10p tax debacle) the national socialists have a poor record.

sandy

Edmund Conway makes clear in his Telegraph column today that there is clear documentary evidence ,that as long ago as July 2006,The Bank of England and by implication the government,KNEW that the UK banking sector was lending far too much and was on the road to disaster.

That I am hearing nothing about this from the BBC,is unsurprising.

That I am hearing nothing about it from the Conservatives is amazing and disappointing but, sadly, equally unsurprising.

The Laughing Cavalier

If McTweedleDumb is to insist on this then he should be challenged to quote chapeter and verse. When did he say it, where did he say it, where's the transcript? It is high time he was called on these untruths.

Hysteria

@ Susan "Does Blears really really think that everyone does not know that ?"

erm - yup - that's why these mendacious, lying, socialists get away with so much

Murray

Has Mrs Marr forgiven her husband yet? See Guido if you don't know what about.

Hysteria

Sandy - agreed - but the report quoted is a matter of public record - what were the Tories saying about it at that time..??

Andy

No we don't live in a world ready to accept bigger government! Small is beautiful! Fairer taxes? What's fair about doubling the tax on the low paid (and pensioners) for political posturing?

Colin

Andy H @ 12:03pm is on the money.

The Tories need a communication strategy that accommodates and serves a number of different audiences. The strategy also needs to address the reality that a compliant media will not directly take brown to task.

Persecuted Prole

Is the face at the top of this page not the face we all imagined on the telescreen in Winston Smith's apartment when we read '1984' whilst we were still at school?

sandy

Hysteria

Fair point,which illustrates the stark choice in front of us.

Proven incompetence or economic naivete.

Steve.W

Quote -
“We really do live in a world ready to accept bigger government and fairer taxes."

If Ashley on behalf of Brown is saying that fairer taxes means the rich pay more tax she should first speak to Angela Merkel is going for tax cuts.

Minnie Ovens

Oh really, Brown.
Is that why you ignored every warning from the IMF that this might happen.
Seven times!