It's worth just reminding ourselves occasionally of the complete and utter mess in which Labour left the public finances when they were kicked out of office last year.
This year we'll be spending over £43bn just on the interest on our debts. That’s £830m per week. Just under £119m a day. For that money, we could
- build a new primary school every hour
- buy a new Chinook helicopter every day
- take 11 million people out of paying income tax
- triple the number of doctors in our hospitals.
Saturday 5 February 2011
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I only wish our MP's would use the same argument!!! Last night on BBC News 24, Ed Milibands PPS argued that the the deficit should be considered more alike a mortgage which are typically paid off in 20/25 years - not 4. The UK's problems being no different from anywhere else and it was the fault of the whole political class which gave the banks too much freedom, not exclusively Labour. And, of course, it was just the banks, everything else was just fine; apparently!
ReplyDeleteI don't know, we can give our MP's plenty of ammo but if they choose to fire blanks whilst Labour indulges in economic cleansing, what can we do? Labour are being very "fragrant" about their last 13 years!
@Lorna
ReplyDeleteTalking about debt payments in monetary terms is simplistic and wrong. In reality, £43bn is 3% of gdp which is a lower percentage than we were paying in 1997. The bulk of the national debt on which that interest is charged existed before 97. Labour took the judgement in 2001 to increase public spending to invest in public services, do you believe they were wrong to do so? Should they have left the NHS, schools, etc in the state they were in then and carried on paying down the national debt?
And you libdems seem to suffer from memory loss as your manifestos in 97, 01 and 05 included *bigger* spending commitments than Labour. How were you going to pay for free prescriptions, free dentists and no tuition fees?
@John Minard
You've totally misunderstood what Chukka was saying! Every year the deficit is added to our national debt, i.e. the nations mortgage. By reducing the deficit more slowly you add more to the national debt. He suggested taking the extra hit on interest payments to lessen the social cost of deficit reduction and paid down the extra debt incurred over the next 25 years.
And on this, we agree.
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