Brown's very very close economic advisor resigns..

[omnipleasant]

Well, yeah. But rick's little frothy rant was that we didn't reduce debt so we had room to move when the sh!t hit the fan. Which is just plain bollox.

[omnipleasant]

Italy and Japan went INTO this with debts higher than 100%

[ricklinc]

Oh look, more figures that prove beyond any doubt that Gordon Brown is the most brilliant economic genius ever produced by mating a rubber plant with a fax machine.

Leaving aside the figures that you no doubt brought down from Mount Downing Street on tablets of stone, how can we be expected to take seriously any fcuking idiot who when faced with a recession decides it's better not to scrap his most brainless ideas which were cobbled together on the back of a fag packet and then run through the civil service to make them hideously expensive? Who is stupid enough to spend fortunes on NGOs in the good times and still keep employing them when it turns to dung? How can anybody be so arrogantly stupid enough to push an unpopular, useless and invasive ID scheme when we could only just afford it and STILL want it when we clearly can't? And then add more to it in the form of where people have been for their holidays.

Don't push this silly fantasy that nu labour have been saving money. Just don't. Not ever. They never have, never could and never will.

[moggyonspeed]

Thing is also that gummint debt figures are rendered pretty much meaningless these days, with the increasing number of PFI projects on the go right now. Much public borrowing/investment is taken off balance sheet by rendering it a loan from the financiers who then call it in at a later date at vastly inflated rates - almost a licence to print money. Bottom line is that all these smoke-and-mirrors PFI programs will need repaying at the same time as we're also trying to pay off the debt mountain onto which McCyclops has just led us.

NuLab had it within their gift to kill off PFI in '97 five years after Major introduced it as a concept, but no - they had the gall to keep it going, even expand it and, at the same time, paint themselves as the party of openness and transparency, the tossers.

So my advice is to take any views that gummint debt is falling with a pretty sizeable pinch of salt.

[omnipleasant]

Even if you included all the PFI (which makes political sense for opponents of the government, but no economic sense) it would only add a few % onto debt, Moggy.

I agree with you about the shitness of PFI, though. And of course the Tory plans to accelerate it.

[Scooby Do]

Makes Nick Leeson look like the guy who pinched the Tea money