Last orders in the last chance saloon?

Vulture

Agreed. But it's still astonishing and depressing that between a quarter and a third of all voters will still support this shower of s**t at the polls.

By any normal standards of Governance Her Maj. should have declared them too imcompetent to Govern and run Bruin out of office months ago. With every day that passes, the bottomless well of debt deepens and we move closer to utter ruin.

Gawain

Its the creepy, clever and all pervading cynicism which is so depressing. The Brownian gloom is in danger of submerging this country for decades to come. Where is the hope, where is the alternative ? Twelve years in government and the vision we have to present to our children is yet another half percent on National Insurance.

Nicholas

Labour governments are simply bad for Britain and this one is the worst.

Dan

I agree with Vulture - it defies belief that this horrific government poll above 20 per cent. This is surely nail in the coffin time though, let's hope so anyway.

strapworld

I see Brown is still claiming for SKYSPORTS! and a servant! Not bad for a socialist. Mind you he generously paid back £500 which he claimed for painting a summer house. I didn't realise Prime Ministers had to paint Chequers!

But whilst I agree with all you have written Mr Hoskin, we shall see if the Tory lead increases significantly or it is just the Labour lead that reduces with Cameron not reaping any real benefit.

moc

The Mirror may think that we have avoided another "Great Depression", but I wouldn't speak too soon.

Markets are off well their highs all over the place (with the pretty much lone exceptions of of the DJIA and SPX - last bastion flight to quality?), UK govt debt attracts the same premium as Portugal's, 3 month US T-bill safe cash equivalents are hovering at 0%, the same panic rate as after the Lehman crash.

Does this sound like recovery to you?

The roll call of shaky sovereign debt grows daily: Dubai, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Ireland, Spain, Italy... UK not far behind?

peter

Unless Cameron comes out and tells it to us straight the Tories will just languish, ahead in the polls, but not becausae they are favoured, but by default.

We know times will be tough for years and we want to hear it straight, not flannelled and dressed up.

If the Irish can do it, so can we. Cameron needs to be as bold as the Irish. They have set an example he must follow. Cut, cut and cut even more deeply - it is the only message which the financial world wants to hear.

Keith D

Opportunity to change the national mood music? That will be the song we all know bar the welfare junkie and third world immigrants then.
Goes like this
New Labour ministers.
My grandchildren wont need history books to know who you were.They will still be suffering the effects of your ugly marxist spirit.That you are merely part of a politburo collective in its guilt will make no difference.

By running off to sign Lisbon denying our democracy.

By mismanaging a vibrant UK economy with your hitherto incestuous relationship with the Banks,condemning us to decades of austerity.

By disarming our forces through equipment neglect and enforcement of a politically correct credo.

By your administrations connivance in destroying our society to replace it with a third world expansionist mass.

Even now you fail to address anything in the hope of clinging on to power over a populace that has had enough.

You have destroyed a valued destiny and that will burn on your collective memory.
You have destroyed the heart and soul of this land.May our children forgive you

chris as usual

The comparison with the Irish budget tells it all.

When are the Irish due for a general election?

Another point. It seems incredible that MP's are not having frozen salaries along with all the other public service workers. They just don't get it.

Austin Barry

I thought The Sun's "Darling Screws More People than Tiger Woods" quite amusing. although, mixing metaphors, I would've added, " and we're still in the bunker."

Ian Walker

Among all the other reforms it needs, it would be good if parliament elected one third of its members every two years. So individual MPs would get a six-year term, but we wouldn't get these damaging bribe budgets.

So, if Labour's poll ratings are expected to go down from here, could we get a snap Christmas election?

denis cooper

I don't know what people, especially editors and journalists, really expected.

Perhaps they'd deceived themselves with their own habitual, easy but totally misleading analogies between the government - "UK plc", "the Finance Director", etc - and a private sector business.

A private company finds that it's running a loss, and must cut costs - so it sheds part of its workforce, cuts the wages, cancels projects, orders less from its suppliers and insists on lower prices as it sees fit.

Apart from those directly affected nobody blames the company for doing what it must do to cut costs; financial journalists applaud the efforts of the managers to get the company back on a sound basis, rather than condemning them for increasing unemployment and causing bankrupties; above all, nobody thinks that they should change the way they vote at the next general election and instal another set of managers.

Having gradually got into the position where so many - too many - livelihoods depend directly or indirectly on public expenditure it would be unrealistic to expect the government to make sudden, drastic cuts, which in the short term would do little to improve its own financial position overall, and could make it a lot worse, and which would certainly damage its electoral position.

The simple truth is that when the government is running such a huge deficit most of the answer must be to increase revenue through tax rises, spreading the pain comparatively thinly across the whole population, rather than to reduce its spending.

I'm more concerned that when I simply extrapolate Darling's schedule for reducing the budget deficit, it's seems that the government would probably still be running a deficit, and wouldn't have paid off any debt and instead it would still be accumulating more debt, when the NEXT recession hit.

But what I hear from the Tories doesn't make me want to vote for them.

John Bell

Oh, it's easy to see why so many people still vote for these scottish failures whose target has been to destroy the English economy. I don't work; I get 2 state pensions; they pay my winter fuel allowance to my bank in Cape Town where we over-winter; we get free bus passes; the govt has just given me £2500 to put in solar panels and is now going to give me over 10% tax free for the electricity they produce; I get 5% tax free on my investments; they are giving me a 2.5% rise this year; Money, money, money. Those of us who don't work are ok thanks. It is you workers who have to pay higher NICs/ 40% tax/business rates etc who keep us pensioners/ idlers/single mothers/asylum seekers/ in the manner that we like. There are 25 million people in this country living off the earnings of 22 million workers. That's why they are happy to vote labour. Someone else may rumble the scam.