Johnson's deceptions and out-of-date figures

normanc

I'd actually attribute all the debt we're going to run up in the Parliament to Labour too. If they hadn't left the economy in such a shambles with an out of control public sector we wouldn't be adding £150bn p.a. to our current debt.

You could go even further and add another couple of hundred billion on to the 2015 debt as Labour think we should be borrowing, printing and spending even more than we currently are.

Maybe they should just abolish the position of Shadow Chancellor? After all, you wouldn't ask a plumber to fix your wiring, so why ask a socialist about finance?

Sterence

This guff about the 'second lowest debt level' needs debunking as well. What other nations have so much off-balance sheet debt? PFI around £100bn? Public-sector pensions? Delingpole in his Telegraph blog has just said that a Channel 4 programme tonight will calculate the current debt level at £4.8 trillion (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100063360/do-any-of-you-realise-or-even-care-just-how-stuffed-we-are/). Obviously a substantial chunk of this has arisen since the financial crisis; but ANY Labour claims that debt was even close to being under control before then need to be howled down.

dorothy wilson

Sterence: Some tables on the OECD web site showing debt levels have a footnote to the effect that the figures should not be used for comparison. The reason? Some countries do not include unfunded liabilities whilst others do. The UK does not.

Greg Lovell

You're not disputing his point about Tories backing Labour's spending until November 2008, though? Or the blatant nonsense of us being anything like Greece?

A little note - you don't pay interest on the deficit, you pay it on the debt. So, the overall debt figure is an entirely valid figure to use for comparison. Real terms value of debt is meaningless too - if you are a millionaire and owe £1000, it's nothing, but if you only have £10K to your name, it's crippling. You can only measure debt as a proportion of GDP if you want to assess how serious it is in context.

Paddy

What did Gordon do with the money?

We have nothing to show for it.

Has he "stashed" it somewhere!

Naomi Muse

I agree with @normanc. The growth in the debt and the growth in the interest having to be paid has to be down to the previous government and no fudging of figures can change that principle.

Colin

"very loose rhetoric"

You mean lies. So, why not do your job and call it as it is? If more of you did, then maybe we could have avoided some of the catastrophes of the past thirty years or so.

Nick

It's all hidden off the books.

1.3 trillion for the small number of civil servants.

They are the real fat cats.

Holly ......

Would the nice Mr Johnson please enlighten us to where all our taxes went?
These idiots have nothing to 'celebrate',
hold up as success or beat the government with.
The left & Labour are idiotic smart arses who go on marches..With a we'll show the public how horrid the Tories are mentality and proceed to smash windows and endager lives.
A spokewoman for the NUS told Eamon Holmes,
under great pressure to sound rational,"NO",
when asked if they will hold another march.
That's how interviews with these bods SHOULD
be conducted.
Meanwhile,in the real world,the coalition proceed with their policies,supported by the public.

GDT

No FBoT yet with his tractor stats...
The Labour Party spent 13 years peddling half truths - why change the habit?

Yam Yam

Please sir, Alan Johnson was reading Pete Hoskin's 'Paying Down The Debt?" graph upside down.

Mark

Omnishambles. No other word will do for these guys...

GDT

@ Greg Lovell
If I'm a millionaire and owe £1000 or if I only have £10,000 to my name it is still £1000 of debt. I don't see what that has to do with it.
Labour like to be economical with ecomonic truths (do you like then pun?). It is wrong that this country pays so much money in debt intrest repayments - it needs to be brought down.

Nicholas

People with the mental reasoning of Greg Lovell caused this mess.

Waffle, waffle, blah, blah, airy socialist claptrap, money grows on trees, Tories to blame. Never mind the sums. Absolute shower.

ollie

I'm not actually sure Johnson even understands properly what percentages are - let alone sophisticated economics.

The man's an idiot.

TGF UKIP

The one certain thing about this is that we won't find any BBC interviewer challenging "Irrefutable."

However, what continues to puzzle me is that the Cameron Tories never mention debt. They didn't do so in the Election, not one mention of the Brown Treasury forecast of £1.4 trillion in 2014, and they don't do so now. Very foolish it seems to me as when debt does pass the trillion mark, Labour will take great pleasure in sticking the figure on Dave & Co. But there again, Labour are take-no-prisoners professional politicians not a gang of refugees from P G Wodehouse.

Fatbloke on tour

PH

You win the "Phil Space Memorial Award" for re-cycling the same old tripe dressed up as news once again.

What you cannot argue with is the fact that KC in 96/97 was working witha deficit of £27bill or 3.4% of GDP. That figure was larger than public sector depreciation charge and both were larger than the total of public sector investment.

That shows that the saintly KC was borrowing money to pay for the running costs of the country and that the genral fabic of the public realm.

Compare and contrast with the situation in 2007/08.

The deficit was £38bill or 2.9% of GDP.
Public sector investment was somewhere north of £50mill and this figure was larger than the public sector depreciation charge.

Consequently we wre running at a surplus vis a vis the day to day costs of government and the public realm was improving.

Those are the facts.

What you puport to be balanced analysis is in fact partisan tripe put up by a journal that cares nothing for the truth but just wants to sell a right wing dog boiling agenda to a worried public.

Dimoto

Labour are still in denial.
Still trying to con the electorate that if re-elected, the same old borrowing binge can restart.
Essentially, they are saying that there will always be savers in some other country to pay our bills.

There is no discernible reflection or reconsideration in Labour ranks. There is no audible voice calling for changes of policy or recognition of the true position.

What there is, is a bunch of Brownite mediocrities still clinging on to the levers of power in the Labour party, and still cleaving to the "thoughts" and policies of the "Great Leader".

Only the brain-dead can take them seriously.
And wideboy blagger Johnson is a prime example.

Mortiboldfilth

An old friend in a v.senior position in an international company in Peking told me, following a visit from the mathematical wizard, that Johnson was the thickest person he had ever met. As we had worked together for the same company for several years and knew idiots when we saw them Mr.J. must be certifiable

NickW

You can see why the PLP is so incensed about the Woolas affair.

How on earth can any Labour MP expect to be elected if they are not allowed to lie?

TrevorsDen

GDP covers all sort of things and is not an ability to pay for expenditure.

Even the BBC's Staphanie Flanders points out
'As a general rule, cash GDP rises by at least 5% a year, meaning that spending can rise by that amount, in cash terms, without rising as a share of the economy. Even in a bad recession, the cash value of output usually goes up a few percent, because prices are rising, even as amount of stuff we produce as a national has gone down.'

The point about Ken Clarke is that the public sector recorded deficits between 1991/92 and 1997/98 before moving into surplus in 1998/99. This is when Brown was following Tory spending planss which clearly were reducing debt. There after deficits have been recorded since 2002/03, when Brown started following his own plans.

My research shows the deficit in 96'97 as £28 billion and in 97/98 just £6 billion. Tory plans had controlled the deficit.
We should not forget the 22.5 billion 3G licence sales - but despite all this we have been in deficit since 2002/3
Once again overweight personages on walkabout are talking rubbish.

Baron Pippin II

Fatbloke on tour @ 5.40:

the only fact that matters is that after the years of salivating growth prior to the near meltdown there should have been no deficit by 2007/08; you get this, no deficit at all, not of 2.9% of GDP, not even of 1% of GDP; prudence called for surplus; the Scottish fruitcake had spent for years not only the massive tax receipts, but borrowed some more and frittered the cash away, too. That’s the only fact that matters.

you stay on tour, my friend you’ll get slimmer and will regain the capacity for thinking clearer.

Baron

Ollie @ 5.25 says: ‘I'm not actually sure Johnson even understands properly what percentages are - let alone sophisticated economics. The man's an idiot’.

Spot on, sir. That’s why he didn’t make it within the Post Office, but is a rising star in politics.

DaveK

Regarding the claim that the debt had been reduced by 14% in the 10 years up to "2007/8 as the crisis hit":

If you take "2007/8 as the crisis hit" being September 2007 which was when Northern Rock sank, Fraser's old friend RUTO (Net Debt as a % of GDP) was 36.2% in September 2007. Whizz back 10 years to September 1997, and RUTO was 42.3%. 36.2% is 14% lower than 42.3%. Is there a prize for decoding this nonsense?

Quite what a comparison of a particular month's debt has to do with the price of fish is beyond me.....

Paul Hawkins

Fatbloke,

'Partisan tripe' Never was there a more apt description of your comments. And no canine cooking reference? You must be slipping

Fatbloke on tour

Failed Blogger @ 6.21

Blow it out your arse.
Love the "your research" patter.
Just what new and original work have you brought to te debate?

I fear it could be written legibly on the back of a stamp in crayon.

Consequently away and throw shite at yersel' ya wa'rmer.

KC said that he would not have followed his own spending plans if he had been in charge 97-99, so you conjecture is rubbish as wells being Tory boy does fairy stories.

The bottom line is TB and GB invested money in the social and physical fabric of the state something that Maggie and the "Curry Shagger" did not.

Victor Southern

Fatbloke

Your natural tendency to be abusive and to ramble appears to worsen as you drink more. As the alcohol takes hold your private code degenerates into simple vulgarity. You obviously come from an inbred dog boiling family and know no better and have never been taught any manners.

leonvestey

Why has the Liebore party not been declared an illegal organization and shut down? It is full of people who do not have the interests of the British people at heart. (To put it very mildly). They allowed unchecked immigration for years in the service of 'multi-culti' ideas which were celarly rubbish, sold our future to the PFI scheme, allowed bankers to ruin us, condoned Israeli war crimes - the list is endless.
Why is Bliar still roaming free? No one can expect government to be taken seriously until these issues are addressed.

Simon Stephenson

Of course, another point that doesn't get much consideration is the extent to which the measure of GDP is distorted by funds flow, rather than being a pure measure of annual output, or income. How much GDP, as measured, was the result of balance-sheet deterioration (borrowing or liquidating assets) rather than current year's production?

I suspect we need to recognise that, in common with many other things in the modern world, the creation of GDP, as defined, has been gamed to look better than it actually is, and that as a measure of ability to repay it's no longer very reliable.

Just like with commercial businesses, annual income statements can be "Madoffed" to read more-or-less how they are wanted to - the key measures are the opening and closing balances, the consistency with which they have been put together, and the degree to which any re-statement is genuinely attributable to the time-period to which it is applied.

So we'd do well to consider that some of the pre-crunch GDP, and an appreciable amount of its "growth", was actually a representation of balance-sheet deterioration, not current-year product. And that using GDP growth as justification for pouring ever more money into public expenditure was as imprudent and fallacious as the economic realists have been asserting all along.

Ivelmike

Maybe a bit off topic, but I have come to the conclusion that we should stop using the word "deficit" and use "overspend" instead. With the first two letters the same as in debt, "deficit" is bound to lead to confusion, given the limited concentration span of most commentators and politicians. Combined with a widespread lack of numeracy, and the "glaze over" effect when people talk about billions and trillions, it is not surprising that there is so much misguided comment on these issues.

Fergus Pickering

Johnson doesn't know the difference between the deficit and the debt, or he didn't when last night's Channel 4 programme about just that was made.

Clear Memories

He's a Socialist and a particularly stupid one at that.

As with all members of the Labour Party, any realtionship between what comes out of their mouths and truth is purely accidental.