Alexander identifies Labour's problem

Holly ......

Labour's dismal record on handling the UK economy,(pick any labour term in office)is not Labour's only problem at the next election.
This time they managed to wreck every other public service. Children being failed by teachers & social workers.Patients dying needlessly in hospitals.Police taking payment. The list is quite staggering.
Labour must NEVER be allowed to govern this country again.The only way to ensure they don't, is to improve the lives of those blighted by Labour...Anything else and we will also fail.
I am probably not the only person who lost faith in everything,from the media,to the politicians....This must NEVER happen again.

Bickers

Labour are still talking hogwash; they would have increased spending which wouldn't have staved off the slow pace of growth we're experiencing, and most likely would have caused a major crisis because the ratings agencies are hammering countries that don't have credible policies to reduce their deficits.

We're in very bad shape because of 13 years of Labour mis-government resulting in high levels of debt, taxation, red tape, immigration plus subservience to the EUSSR

It Government that's the problem and we need radical policies to reduce its size and influence over our lives; only then can Britain grow again so that it can compete with Asia.

Austin Barry

The problem with Alexander is that of the other Blair/Brown night-soil apologists: their overly familiar, carp-eyed, zombie appearances simply remind the electorate of the previous fly-blown administration.

What Labour needs to do is ditch the old crew where even cadaver dogs can’t find them and bring in some new, fresh-faced, piety mouthing, we-feel-your-pain idiots.

Don Benson

‘He privately thought that Gordon Brown’s attempt to fight the last election on a reprise of the investment versus cuts strategy of ’01 and ’05 was a mistake’

Gordon Brown’s use of the word ‘investment’ when he was referring to public expenditure on such things as hospitals or schools was a political spin which ultimately infected his economic policy. Public expenditure in all sorts of areas may well be desirable, laudable, or even essential but unless it results in reasonably definable profit in money terms it cannot be described as ‘investment’; it is consumption and as such will add to the national debt unless balanced by taxation. To regain public confidence the Labour Party must show that it understands this and then demonstrate a coherent vision of how to grow the nation’s productive efforts so that they will be sufficient to yield enough tax to pay for this public consumption

Ostrich (occasionally)

Shadow foreign secretary, eh?

Why are the Eds keeping him away from anything to do with money?

Bob Low

It is extremely difficult to take any of Alexander's public utterances seriously, even the few written in anything dimly resembling plain English. The recent electoral success of the SNP in Scotland has more to do with a desire-finally- to get rid of parasitical zombies like Alexander and his equally useless sister than any genuine hunger for independence. Scotland at the moment is in a very strange place indeed, politically speaking

Robert Christopher

Don Benson on Jan 28th, 2012 @ 4:57pm
"Gordon Brown’s use of the word ‘investment’ when he was referring to public expenditure on such things as hospitals or schools was a political spin which ultimately infected his economic policy."

Unfortunately it has also infected the thinking of many people. They don't know what investment, risk, profit and expenditure mean. Discussions become futile.

JohnOfEnfield

@Holly

Exactly right. They have ruined the country EVERY TIME they have been in power.

This time thy must have exceeded their own expectations.

All the issues de jour, RBS, Hester, Lloyds to name but three are rooted in Labour's economic mismanagement. RBS should never have been allowed buy the rump of ABN, when they did, they shouldn't have been nationalised and if we were not going to pay Hester the "going rate" to turn a bank round then Brown & Darling should not have approved the terms of his employment.

TrevorsDen

'He privately thought' did he?
I bet we can find the entire parliamentary labour party 'privately' though Browns election was mistake. After the leaders election.

Dimoto

If RBS had not taken over ABM-Amro, it would have been taken over by Barclays, and quite possibly ruined that bank also.

At the time, the majority in the city (and RBS cheerleaders in Scotland) were urging RBS on, in it's ridiculous bidding war with Barclays. The Dutch government must have been mightily relieved.

People should wise up about the rotten, corrupt "Davos meeting", with it's smoke-filled rooms, far from the electorate's eyes, and a compliant, star-struck and servile press.
God knows what scams they are cooking up.

The fact that Brown is there, (with who knows what agenda ?) should tell you all you need to know.
Which scheming Eurocrat invited him ?

Both Cameron and Osborne have been saying some rather odd things.

Euro-stitch-up alert !!!

GDS

Jesus H, some of you EU conspiracy theorists really do live on the edge of sanity don't you!! I'm no fan but FFS there's not a conspiracy around every corner!!!

Tom Pride

Boost for the Tories – now there are more Scottish Tory MPs than pandas on display in Scotland. Someone should have told them it’s bamboo shoots not deep fried butter balls.

Frank P

GDS

"there's not a conspiracy around every corner".

No, you're right. It's here! Now! Before our very eyes! And it's multifaceted, treasonous and disastrous. Open your eyes FFS. You're either blind, stupid or part of it.

Frank P

GDS

Btw. The cockeyed Caledonian kunt under discussion is not part of a worldly conspiracy - I'll cede that point. He's obviously from another planet. He makes ET look positively 'ooman. In his case the conspiracy is obviously cosmic.

Clear Memories

Timewasting. He should find himself another Party. The chances of Labour winning the next election is remote. No matter how they seek to twist and turn, they will not escape their recent history. Not until the economy is mended will the elctorate start to forget who f**ked it in the first place.

And by the election after that, Scotland will have gone its own way and never again will Labour see power. Lets us not forget that, effectively, it was Scots (Brown, RBS, HBOS) that ruined the economy.

Wilhelm 1

This wee Jimmy Krankie clone reminds me of the teachers pet, school sneak, sook and snitch.

He's got one of those irritating faces you like to punch.

Labour seems to to churn out these sniveling little creeps like biscuits in a biscuit factory. It's a conveyor belt of endless mediocrity and well, crap.

oldtimer

If, as you say, "Douglas Alexander may sometimes hide the meaning of what he says under a layer of jargon" what is the point of him being in politics? Like MilibandE, he will never convince anyone. The charitable view is that they understand this and take refuge in their jargon.

David L

By any rational argument it's a no-brainer. Labout bankrupted the nation, and had to go cap in hand to the IMF in 1976. As a direct consequence they were chucked out for 18 years, and only got back by marketing themselves as Thatcherism lite.

Having returned to power, they bankrupted the nation for a second time. All reason says that they should never be trusted again. But let's not forget, even at the absolute nadir, 29% of the electorate were still persuaded to vote for Broon.

Some people just don't, and won't, get it. That said, thank the lord that people like Alexander show some sign of learning from previous mistakes: unlike the Eds.

Paul Danon

Mr Clegg has stolen their tax-cuts-for-the-poor clothes, though they could try to out-Clegg him by calling for a higher threshold and/or VAT at 10% for some goods and 0% on energy. Regionalisation of benefits makes sense, given the differences in house-prices. An in/out EU vote would be good.

Simon Stephenson.

Dimoto : 9.32pm

"a sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way with his fellows, so that no-one can really blame him."

JM Keynes

This is why ABN-AMRO was such a disaster - the "race" was about who acquired the bank, and the tunnel-vision was that the market bidding process was a guarantee that the price would never be greater than the value of what was being acquired.

Top bankers are sheep like most everyone else - their sophistication lies not in doing things that the herd hasn't thought of, but in perfecting and glossing up those things that the herd has thought of. So when the herd's wrong, they're wrong.

Cynic

"Strikingly, though, [Alexander] accepts that at the moment Labour’s economic credibility is so shot that bad economic news doesn’t drive the voters towards the party." Given that Labour was in power for the 13 years when the brakes came off spending, the state sector ballooned, GB abolished "boom and bust", the banks were unregulated, the gold was sold off and the population was swelled to unmanageable numbers while the benefits system made it more profitable not to work, it would be hard to see how anyone with an attention span longer than a brain-damaged gnat's could even contemplate letting Labour get its sticky fingers on the levers of power ever again.

Cynic

@Paul Danon "Mr Clegg has stolen their tax-cuts-for-the-poor clothes, though they could try to out-Clegg him by calling for a higher threshold and/or VAT at 10% for some goods and 0% on energy." Without your in/out referendum on the EU delivering an out verdict, reducing VAT on energy is a complete non-starter. Once it was on, the best that could be done was to reduce it to the lowest existing level in the EU.

Sir Everard Digby

A tired party with nothing new to offer -even the 'squeezed middle' was invented by Gordon Brown in 2009 and is now being re-cycled by Milliwit whilst claiming it as his own idea.