Listening to the recent budget, I realised that my time as a councillor since 2007 has pretty much been spent attempting to recover from the “Great Labour Recession”.
I know Labour can’t be credited for creating the global economic crisis but they certainly should have spent less during the booming economy they inherited from the Conservatives.
If Labour had run a balanced budget in the 2000s, debt would have been lower and the UK would have been prepared when the recession hit.
Instead, when this happened the UK needed to borrow £180,000,000,000 every year. An almost incomprehensible amount of money.
Research from the International Monetary Fund concluded that Britain set an example to other countries when the Conservative-led coalition government rightly slashed the deficit by cutting public spending, rather than raising taxes.
The result was faster UK growth than Switzerland, Austria, France and many other European countries.
It has been a difficult time, but the hard decisions Britain made after 2010 have worked.
Labour always over-promises, without the money to deliver, but we now find employment at record levels – with unemployment down by a third in the south east since 2010, youth unemployment at an all-time low and wages rising faster than inflation.
In last week’s budget, the Chancellor rewarded the British people by reducing income tax, so people can now keep more of what they earn, as well as pledging massive investment in our vital public services, schools and the NHS.
Philip Hammond is spending an additional £1 billion of funding for adult and children’s social care and improving our roads from the scourge of potholes.
I was particularly pleased to see real money allocated to save our dying high streets, by slashing businesses rates: invigorating the heart of our local communities.
It will be up to the people of Brighton and Hove to elect an administration in May next year but, given Labour’s miserable record over the years, I hope they will agree that the Conservatives are the only ones who can be trusted to provide a dynamic city of the future.
Councillor Tony Janio is the leader of the opposition Conservatives on Brighton and Hove City Council.
The gall of this man is quite astounding. Does he think that people are actually that stupid to believe this utter fabrication of tory economic success? Quite incredible that he should suggest that his party has done anything other than reduce our country to poverty and ruin.
“I know Labour can’t be credited for creating the global economic crisis but they certainly should have spent less during the booming economy they inherited from the Conservatives.”
Your then shadow chancellor was happy to spend the same:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6975536.stm
But the Conservatives can be blamed for deregulating the Financial Industry in the 1980s and both Labour and Conservatives for not understanding the consequences!
See this from wikipedia on the consequences of the “Big Bang” in 1986:
“The effects of Big Bang were dramatic, with London’s place as a financial capital decisively strengthened, to the point where it is arguably the world’s most important financial centre.[3][4] The boom resulted in the relocation of institutions into new developments in the nearby Isle of Dogs area, particularly that of Canary Wharf.
Although the “Big Bang” eased stock market transactions there is a debate in the UK about how far it affected the 2007–2012 global financial crisis.
In 2010, Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s Chancellor at the time of the Big Bang, appeared on the radio programme Analysis to discuss the banking reform.
He explained that the 2007–2012 global financial crisis was an unintended consequence of the “Big Bang”.[5]
He said that UK investment banks were previously very cautious, as they operated with their own money, but after merging with major retail banks, the depositors’ savings were put at risk, and according to the programme this led U.S. banks to follow suit.[5]
In 2011 Gordon Brown said that deregulation of the banking sector by the incoming Labour Government of 1997 had also contributed by failing to understand how interdependent the banks were.
Speaking at the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s annual conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA, Brown, Chancellor from 1997–2007, reviewed his changes:
“We know in retrospect what we missed. We set up the Financial Services Authority (FSA) believing that the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution,” he said. “So we created a monitoring system which was looking at individual institutions.
That was the big mistake. We didn’t understand how risk was spread across the system, we didn’t understand the entanglements of different institutions with the other and we didn’t understand even though we talked about it just how global things were, including a shadow banking system as well as a banking system. That was our mistake, but I’m afraid it was a mistake made by just about everybody who was in the regulatory business.
— BBC Article: Gordon Brown admits ‘big mistake’ over banking crisis.[6]”
So not really fair to blame either Labour OR the Conservatives, when it was in reality BOTH PARTIES FAULT!