Stat of the day

Cottage Pie

Isn't it ironic that this is the Prime Minister who, less than two years ago, as Chancellor was lauded by his fellow Ministers and Labour Party MPs as the best Chancellor this country has had for a Century. I wonder whether they still share this view!

bergen

One of the worst?

michael

I squandered, lonely in my cloud
I float on high, now over the hill
At cukoo-land I saw my shroud,
The ghost of golden dollar bills.
Fluttering, my alchemaic wheeze-
frittered quantitativeley...with ease!

strapworld

Mr Forsyth. Not 'One of the worst' most certainly THE worst.

That debt total is frightening.

How on God's earth can Cameron keep on the pretence of promising tax cuts. Aspirational yes definate? no way!

We need a leader with a clear objective, with courage and with the vision to see the job done.

IS David Cameron that man? I do not think so.

Martin Adamson

Since the Second Reform Act? I make it since Ethelred the Unready.

Victor, NW Kent

One runs out of suitable adjectives. Flabbergasting and astonishing are too mild - monstrous, crushing and treasonous are perhaps closer.

Long the UK

Mr Brown should resign, we need a new start. It's about time for the Times of London and the Financial Times to get angry with Mr Brown, these papers have been too soft on the unfolding disaster. Once they turn he is totally toast.

Ian C

Brilliant michael!

Wily Trout

I think the MSM still considers Labour to be in with a good chance of winning the next election, which is why they are still basically Brown-tonguing. Presumably they have placed massive faith in the client state and the constituency boundary bias towards Labour. Is this the last chance we will have to get rid of Labour? If so then some hard tactical voting is needed. I remember reading that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were working towards a state where it was impossible to vote them out.

Denis Cooper

Yes, but potentially that £350 billion could turn out to be £700 billion.

Because Alistair Darling has decided that, rather than removing the "toxic assets" from the banks' balance sheets, instead he'll leave them in place and insure their value through his "Asset Protection Scheme".

It all revolves around whether he's accurately estimated the real, eventual, value of those assets, which as he admitted in the Commons are "hard to value":

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmhansrd/cm090226/debtext/90226-0004.htm

"To complement that, RBS will include £325 billion-worth of assets in the asset protection scheme.

That will include a range of assets in the UK and abroad, most of them including mortgages and business loans that are currently hard to value.

The Treasury, with the help of external advisers, has assessed the assets held by RBS ..."

And based on the Treasury's valuation of these currently hard-to-value assets, we will start to pay if they eventually turn out to be worth less than £283 billion - 87 pence in the pound on their original book value - and then we'll give RBS 90 per cent of the shortfall to compensate them for the consequences of their own past stupidity.

So if their value turned out to be only 50 pence in the pound, they'd be worth £163 billion; so the shortfall below £283 billion would be £120 billion; so then the government would have to give RBS £108 billion of taxpayers' money.

Minus the £6.5 billion "insurance premium", net cost to taxpayer would be £101 billion.

That's just for the first tranche of "toxic assets" held by RBS - they still have some more, and then there's Lloyds.

The Conservatives have nothing to say about this.

They have a lot to say about Sir Fred Goodwin's pension, involving a sum of money about ten thousand times smaller, but absolutely nothing to say about this.

Mark

Day after day, alone in his dreams
The man with the foolish grin saves the world with his schemes
But nobody wants to know him
They can see he’s just a fool
And he never gives an answer.
And the fool in his dreams sees troubles overcome
And the eye in his head sees the election won.

Off round the world, head in the clouds
The man of a thousand cockups claims he’s done us
all proud.
But nobody’s listening to him
Or the speeches he flies in to make
But he never seems to notice.
And the fools in his dreams sees troubles overcome
And the eye in his head sees the election won.

And nobody seems to like him,
They can tell what it is he’s done
But he never says he’s sorry
And the fools in his dreams sees troubles overcome
And the eye in his head sees the election won.

He never listens to us,
He thinks that we’re the fools
We don’t like him. And the fools in his dreams sees troubles overcome
And the eye in his head sees the election won.

cityboozer

“That is more debt bequeathed to its successor than the total borrowed by successive rulers and governments of Britain between 1691 and 1997, the year Labour was elected.”

Erm isn't that just a scary-sounding politicians' way of saying "Labour has doubled the national debt".

JONNY

IS David Cameron that man? I do not think so.

So who is your man then Strapworld?
Have the kindness to name him. And brave our guffaws.

HJ

Possibly the worst prime minister - yes.

But he was an even worse chancellor - and that is what has got us in this mess. Blair should take nearly as much blame as he left Brown with free reign to destroy our economy.

That's what you get when you put a Scottish socialist with no experience of business or finance in absolute charge of the treasury.

Chuck Unsworth

@ Victor NW Kent

'Treason' is exactly right. Brown has done more to damage Britain than any enemy, ever. No wonder HM is consulting with Mervyn King.

Oor Wullie

HJ
So it would have been OK if an English (or Welsh or NI) Socialist with no experience etc etc was in absolute charge of the Treasury? Brown bullied his way into the Chancellorship, but that was because of his peculiar character rather than his race/nationality.

TomTom

Burning Our Money has a pretty chart showing how Brown achieved Take-Off after 1997 with Boom and Bust reflected in comcomitant debt explosion.

Labour has excelled itself this time - looks like Brown will be The Last Labour Prime Minister as this party finally disintegrates.

David Ossitt

Oor Wullie.

HJ
So it would have been OK if an English (or Welsh or NI) Socialist with no experience etc etc was in absolute charge of the Treasury?

Calm down Oor Wullie; HJ was simply defining, who and what he is and also where he is from, Brown that is.

If he gave the impression that being a Scot; was to some small degree, a negative feature of the member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, then it is a little understandable.

We the English; are not given to racial intolerance, we are on the whole a fair minded race and over the years have looked on with paternal amusement at the antics of the Welsh and the Scots with their xenophobic mind set with regard to all things English,(in particular our national sports teams).

Couple this with a number of uncomfortable facts:-

1.Scotland has a disproportionate number of MP's.

2.Scotland has a disproportionate number in the cabinet.

3.Scotland gets a disproportionate share of the cake.

4.Scotland has it's own parliament and so would appear to have a disproportionate say in matters English.

So do tread carefully; we are just getting an itsy-bitsy bit tired of it.

Nick

Of course that debt figure won't include all the PFI/PPP and Network Rail debt that the Dear Leader hid away off the balance sheet. Worse still, it won't include about £1 trillion of public sector pension liability. If the Government was subject to the same laws as it imposed on the private sector, this would have to be in the accounts or the directors might end up in jail. Along with Gordon's tax raid it's another reason that final salary pensions are a thing of the past.

mark

@cityboozer:
“That is more debt bequeathed to its successor than the total borrowed by successive rulers and governments of Britain between 1691 and 1997, the year Labour was elected.”

Erm isn't that just a scary-sounding politicians' way of saying "Labour has doubled the national debt".

---

No - presumably they don't mean more than the current value of the running total, they are referring to the total borrowed which could be, say, ten times as much as the current debt, as it might have been paid back several times over and re-borrowed. Like the total amount you have borrowed for all the houses you have owned, even if the debts have been settled each time.

Andy

Time for a demerger. Split Scotland it's MPs, Brown and the rest off from England. Place Brown's "Darien" toxic debt in the Scottish accounts and build a big wall across the boarder from the state sponsored paradise they foisted on us.

Denis Cooper

"1.Scotland has a disproportionate number of MP's."

That's no longer true.

The electoral quota used to calculate the number of Westminster constituencies that there should be in Scotland is now identical to the electoral quota used for England.

Because of geographical difficulties there are a number of constituencies with well below average electorates, most notably what used to be called Western Isles (21,576), and Orkney & Shetland (33,048). (As it happens, both of those are presently held by opposition MPs, and so their existence actually reduces Labour's overall majority in the Commons.)

Overall, 59 MPs are elected in Scotland, when on a strict population basis it should be more like 56.

On the other hand, Wales is still deliberately over-represented.

"2.Scotland has a disproportionate number in the cabinet."

I'm not sure that's still true, either; it certainly was true, because Thatcher drove Labour out of most of England, except for the inner cities, and when they came back a lot of the leading figures were those who had survived by virtue of holding seats in Scotland.

"3.Scotland gets a disproportionate share of the cake."

In terms of public expenditure per head, that's true; but in terms of the net flow of money, it's debatable whether England subsidises Scotland, or the other way round. With oil prices now so low, probably the net flow is northwards; if oil prices are higher, the net flow is southwards.

Many parts of England can also be said to get "a disproportinate share of the cake".

"4.Scotland has it's own parliament and so would appear to have a disproportionate say in matters English."

Only because the Labour MPs elected in Scotland refuse to do the honourable thing, which would be to recuse themselves from debates and votes on purely English matters.

David Ossitt

Denis Cooper

So I am right in every particular.