In time of war, and that iswhere we are now Osborne would have been declared a traitor.

... don't be daft - he is telling it like it is and, hopefully, may make Brown avoid a run on the poung - although it is frankly a little late for that, when the pound has already fallen so far agianst the Euro, our closest currency.

And to fall against the dollar, when the USA's economy is in freefall ...

... Pound

#2 - spot on. However, Osborne has a credibility problem since the yacht-gate issue. Cameron should bring back Ken Clarke as shadow chancellor, who has been saying the same thing but has the necessary "gravitas" for the situation.

Osbourne is telling it as it is? He is so little trusted in his own party that as shadow chancellor he is not allowed to raise party funds, and so can hardly be classed as have any credibility in things financial.

pound down to 11 year lows Labour in power --- 11 years?

Washington did you see the photo opportunity:

Brown and Bush

One man sends his nations youth to die in Iraq and Afganistan while his own country is overrun by illegal immigrants and houses thousands of terror suspects, his country's economy is the worst since WWII,thousands of jobs are being lost every week, children are shot and stabbed to death every week and even infants are being murdered, his country's currency is in freefall ----

and the other one is George Bush

6-Bring it Off-Such is the nature of recession I’m afraid, and this foreign created recession has been the first recession since labour took office, whereas when the tories were in power there were two, the first one widely acknowledged as being started by the Thatcher government of the time.

osbourne was quite right. the pound is heading for parity with the euro. that would be a good time to adopt the euro.

BRITAIN’S debt is rocketing by almost £2,000 a second, saddling every family with the equivalent of £70,000 second mortgage.

But PM Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling are still vowing to SPEND, SPEND, SPEND their way out of recession.

7-Bring it Off- It can be said with some justification that much of this recession we are facing is down to tactics used by psychological terrorists such as yourself, and looking at the things you over inflate with connections which are tenuous at best, and no more than malicious gutter politics, I can see you have a very delusional and furtive imagination.

10-Bring it Off-Economists have suggested that the G20 countries who have been meeting have a duty to take the place of the private sector in pumping money in certain areas of the economy, and so spend spend spend is likely to be the only way this can be achieved.

If you read some expert international economists you will find that their prediction is that if the £ falls much further in relation to the $ and €, the government will then freeze all bank accounts.

This was predicted some weeks ago by a poster on these forums and it appears it may well come true very shortly.

Time for putting your money under the floorboards.

Is the weak pound a by-product of Brown handing billions of pounds (which will eventually have to be paid for by the taxpayers) to his masters?

It would be comical if it wasn't so tragic.
The pound has crashed against the euro and dollar. House prices are in freefall. The national debt is at record levels.
All due to Broon.
And he warns the shadow chancellor about talking down the pound.
At least Wilson resigned when he knew he had lost his marbles.

15# I was in the pub earlier on tonight and it was business as usual with the non working cwass having a good bevvy. I have to admit that one guy did say he was going to vote SNP next time wound as he had only managed to throw 10 William Hagues doon his thwoat, normally it would be 11. The man had a point to make. The kwedit kwunch is hitting every Bwitish Blowke.

#16 Just back from the pub myself surprisingly.
Everything looks the same right enough.
Although more folk getting tanked up before going out.
Not sure who to vote for myself now. Tried Lib Dems and SNP but not sure who to go for next.

17# Nothing tae worry aboot then 17. A big con this kwedit kwunch. Jist get a big kerry oot in jist in case. You do not want to get caughtoot dae ye. Whit wid we dae withoot it.

Who are the, "Conservatives"?

This is more like the,...'State-of-Play'!

19# Och aye the noo Chawles ye ken fine the Con- Servatives.

#18
Agreed
Big kerry oot. X factor on telly. Free chat courtesy of SoS.
Everything is cushty ! Oh no Utd Lost to Killie !

#1 truthsleuth

So Osbornes a "traitor" then eh?

Not like Cynthia Roberts, Labour candidate, who was spying on behalf of the Soviet Union while joining "peace" groups like Labour Action for Peace.

Protest friend of Alex Salmond, Tony Benn was also a member of this group that claimed to be against nuclear weapons while supporting a regime in Moscow that was stockpiling enough nuclear weapons to blow us all to kingdom come.

She was given a commons pass by Scottish Labour Party MP Wiliam McKelvey.

As the Daily Mail puts it in today's issue "The disclosures are a reminder of how close some members of the Labour Party were to the Soviet Union before the fall of communism 20 years ago".

Aye - and some of us haven't forgotten.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1086187/The-traitor-headscarf-How-Czech-spy-Agent-Hammer-worked-secretly-inside-Parliament-years.html

BTW
Anti-NATO Salmond can't make an issue of it seeing he has been demonstrating against Trident with the Trots from Britains Labour Party.

Then, of course, is Salmond's association with the pro-Soviet Union 79 Group.

Like some of the nutcase Labour supporters, anti-Trident Salmond would have us believe he didn't know the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons.

YOU THINK I WAS BORN YESTERDAY ALEX?

#22
I think you've been hitting the sid too much.
Why attack Salmond for being against Trident ? What possible use is it to Scotland ?
Tony Benn is a rich middle class aristocrat with a son called Hilary ( sic) with no connection to working class people. Why would you give anything he says credence ?

Its all the fault of the treachorous traitors of Glenrothes.

Can anybody name a currency against which the £ is rising ?

Sour grapes from Tory boy. The housebuying public like the low bank rate and are impressed with Gordon the international financial action man. If we are to vote for toffs in short trousers we would need to have a truly panic-ridden and desperate situation, so Cameron Jnr. tries to create one, complete with ultra-high interest rates, rising prices, and joblessness.

If we expected better from those who expect to rule as of right, regardless of consequences for the poor, it would be a disgrace.

he's only stating the truth which the lefties are in denial over
At Aberdeen Uni in the 70s Darling was pro IRA

Spare at least a little thought for the poor pensioners in spain who have just watched their money drop by 25% inthe last year. We do not need irresponsible talk from some tory twatt!

comrade broon attacks osborne for speaking the truth about the facts he is in denial over,the £ is in free fall against the dollar and the euro,the country is bankrupt,
employment will hit 3 million
the banks are bust
the financial sector is bust
businesses are going bust at a record rate
we are being ripped off by energy companies
house prices are in freefall
the list of liebours failures is endless
and comrade broon the babblibg eejit of the liebour sleaze and corruption stasi partys answer is to roam the world with his begging bowl asking leaders of the worlds top economies to follow his advice to borrow more and follow britian in to the debt abyss.
WE ARE DOOMED WITH BROON, DOOOOOOMED

And yet we are still one of the richest nations, go figure.

There is no doubt that Gordon Brown is personally to blame for Britain's desperate economic situation. He is a complete charlatan as he postures about the UK and World stage seeking to position himself as leading a one-man campaign to bring in tougher regulation of the financial services industry when there is overwhelming evidence in his speeches and writings over the past 11 years that he wanted little or no regulation.

Since Gordon Brown took control of the UK economy in 1997, debt for individuals (as opposed to government debt) has almost trebled to £1,580 billion which is more than the UK’s total economic output. It is the highest household borrowing that Britain or any G7 country has ever seen. The lending nevertheless carried on recklessly under Gordon Brown. The tripartite structure of regulators he set up did not properly monitor how such financial institutions might find the money. Under Gordon Brown the UK recklessly allowed its own banks to become the most leveraged of any in Europe other than Iceland.

Gordon Brown has also repeatedly claimed that the crisis to the UK economy and banking system had been imported from the USA, but these are the IMF warnings which give the lie to his protestations of innocence:

1) Dec 2003 IMF gives Brown borrowing warning

2) Sep 2005 IMF report warning over £1 trillion mountain of debt

3) Sep 2005 Brown besieged over growth and borrowing plans

4) Dec 2005 IMF fires new warning over Britain's finances

5) Sep 2006 IMF warns over possible UK property crash

6) Oct 2007 IMF report UK house market is 'heading for crash'

7) Apr 2008 IMF: UK vulnerable to US-style housing slump

This October, the IMF said that the UK was worst placed of all the major economies to weather the coming recession.

For the truth about the real state of the UK economy read http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2545296/sterling-plummets-on-the-back-of-browns-debtfuelled-economy.thtml

Quote:- “The sterling crash has now begun in earnest. The pound has today (today!) fallen 9% against the Yen and is off 4% against the dollar to a lowly $1.56 with forecasts of $1.40 or lower next year. Against any other currency you may mention, it’s now plunging. The proximate cause is news that the UK economy is shrinking far faster than expected, and there's talk about a 0.75-point interest rate cut - sooner rather than later. But on a wider prospective, this is the markets commenting more articulately than the Tories on Gordon Brown’s “scorched earth” economic policy. It is becoming clearer that Britain is perhaps in the worst position of any developed economy in this crisis. Markets are not fooled by Brown’s mendacious claims to have reduced the national debt to 37% of GDP, and will be alarmed to see a Prime Minister use debt concealment methods that would shame the most spivvy merchant bank. Official national debt was 43% before the bank bailouts of two weeks ago, and will be well over 100% if one counts PFI, B&B and the pension liabilities.

Debt is how Brown governed. It was his dope. It’s the key to understanding the UK economy in the last decade and the reckless nature of Brown’s short-termist policies. Debts are steroids to unscrupulous policymakers as debt-fuelled asset bubbles give a fake feeling of prosperity, which usually translates into votes for the ruling party. That’s why Britain started this credit crunch with the largest household debt ever seen in any G7 country. Brown gambled the UK economy on a hunch that interest rates would stay low. It has failed, and now the UK public finances are going to hell in a handcart. We’re being led by a Prime Minister who ran up a 3% deficit in the boom years and we’re now looking a deficit hitting 7% by the 2010 general election – terr

continued.....

Debt is how Brown governed. It was his dope. It’s the key to understanding the UK economy in the last decade and the reckless nature of Brown’s short-termist policies. Debts are steroids to unscrupulous policymakers as debt-fuelled asset bubbles give a fake feeling of prosperity, which usually translates into votes for the ruling party. That’s why Britain started this credit crunch with the largest household debt ever seen in any G7 country. Brown gambled the UK economy on a hunch that interest rates would stay low. It has failed, and now the UK public finances are going to hell in a handcart. We’re being led by a Prime Minister who ran up a 3% deficit in the boom years and we’re now looking a deficit hitting 7% by the 2010 general election – territory not seen since the IMF bailout. There is a serious prospect that Brown will try and inflate his way out of this debt problem, a prospect which terrifies currency dealers. I have heard serious people talking about parity with the dollar.

I would love to hear Brown explain why sterling’s crash is a problem that started in America. It’s a problem that started in 11 Downing Street – when he decided to conceal debt, leverage up the British economy and personally design a banking regulatory structure that allowed UK banks to be literally the most leveraged out of any outside Reykjavik. Britain is, in many ways, becoming the new Iceland. So the fall in the pound will have some time to run yet.”

In their defending of the mishandling of the UK economy, New Labour and their media class stooges appear to have adopted these infamous words by Dr Josef Goebbels, Hitlers's propaganda chief, as their guiding principles:-

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

However the truth is these are the guiding principles of a political party in terminal decline who have nothing to offer the electorate but spin and spin again to try and delay the inevitable demise of their leadership and political party.

He raised an important point.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-fD78zyvI

Warden etc....you're trying, I'll give you that! The fact is that UK plc is down and out and it's the fault of Brown and the City of London!

As for a "foreign created recession," I'm afraid that all spectators seem to think that the recession was started by toxic lending in the US, an action that the UK and a few foreign banks bought into with alacrity!

Brown is a loser and UK plc is a loser. Hopefully, your average Scot will see this at the next election and dissolve this unequal union.

This current 'global' financial crisis was caused by people borrowing beyond their means. Why on earth does is this labour government blindly repeating this mistake on an even bigger scale with the country's finances?
I hold not brief for the Tories, but it seems to me that on this Osbourne is right. Don't shoot the messenger.

easy answer join the euro, remeber the tories have the connections to ensure a run on the pound, be afraid.

oh and Osborne = irresponsible upperclass imbecile
It would be irresponsible of Brown to spend like this if it was to be done on UK only basis, but thats why he has reached agreement with the other major economies to do the same, the only worrying part is as soon as the USA recovers they will unilateraly stop thus leaving the rest of us in the Kak, these actions must be co-ordinated worldwide

After Michael Forsyth's disastrous time at the old Scottish Office, when he led the Scots Tories to the edge of political extinction, you would think David Cameron
had better sense than listen to the opinions of this serial failure?

Taking advice from Michael Forsyth must be like buying the wreck of a Zero fighter aircraft from a crippled Kamikaze pilot!

#39 FTH22inarow

You write "It would be irresponsible of Brown to spend like this if it was to be done on UK only basis, but thats why he has reached agreement with the other major economies to do the same".

No Brown has not reached agreement with anyone. (1) US President-elect Obama wasn't there. He isn't bound by anything Bush says. (2) Regardless of summits each government will do its own thing. Canada and other cautious states have made it clear that they are not going to borrow large sums of money for tax cuts.

Osborne's upper class manners may get up people's noses, but on sterling he is right. Ken Clarke said much the same thing on question time a couple of weeks ago, before the cut in the bank rate.

Something needed to be said. On Friday the £ was only 15 pence away from being at 1 to 1 with the € !
As someone else has said on here, name a currency against which the £ is strong and gaining?
Anyone??

I also not BG only berrated Osborne for the comment itself and NOT for the content of the statement....very telling. The £ is in the toilet, it only remains for the chain to be pulled.

They should turf him and bring in Clark. The Tories should be thrashing ZNL on the opinions polls , instead the gap is decreasing. They should be attacking Brown's debt tsunami and the reasons for the recession.

Gordon Brown is the villain of the piece.

Sterling is falling because this idiot is inflating the currency and recklessly overspending.

When Cyprus came into the Euro currency you got 1.31 Euros to the GBP. Today it is 1.11 Euros and that is the Tourist Rate at home. 1.14 can be achieved here in Cyprus so bring your GBP's with you and get a few cents more.
Anyone fancy being an ex-Pat then.?

#11 this recession is due to government idiocy.

It was Brown who bled us dry with taxes, strangled us with regulation, saddled us with debt and is inflating the currency as we speak.

and NO .....Do not blame Gordon Brown for the mess we are in. He has done nothing to cause this situation. Sure alls well when we can all buy exactly what we like with the money ALL the Banks lent us. But anyone with any sense knows even the Banks had to borrow to keep up with all the daft borrowing that went on, and you know what happened then. Gordon as shown extreme statesmanship, and the Tories have no idea where thy are going except to allow the Shadow Chancellor to show
extreme traitorous tendencies. Well that says it all, doesn't it.

It is difficult to believe that anyone, without a vested interest would defend Gordon Browns record.

The only thing that can save a Broon manufactured economy which is dependant on over-inflated house prices...is rampant inflation of all the other stuff.

Inflation is already running much higher than his apologists would have us beleive...Broons "shopping list inflation calculator" has things in it like;


26" colour TV price 1968=£300 ; price 2008=£300

and omits thing like mortgage repayments for three Bed semi -

cost 1968=£30 p/m

cost 2008=£1,000 p/m

Broons Borrow! Borrow! Borrow! mantra will delay the final decline into destitution not experienced here since Charles Dickens' days...but will also make it more widespread and less likely that any of us will live long enough to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Anyone with a functional brain can tell that the Son of a Preacher Man...is a Snake Oil Salesman.

But Hey!...He is a better bet than Cameron as Saviour of the Union, hence...

Let's be clear shall we. Under Brown's watch household debt rose to a record £1.4 trillion. House prices are also at record highs. The trade deficit on goods is at record levels whilst manufacturing fell to an all time low. The number of UK companies sold off to overseas owners also increased whilst investment in new companies decreased.

If you want to talk treachery then No's 10 and 11 Downing Street are where you should look. Brown and Darling have managed the impossible in that they've actually done more damage to the economy than Thatcher.

Osborne is ,of course,quite right !!whoever heard of anyone borrowing more money to get out of debt,?even the children at primary school must be bewildered at a prime minister who by the looks of things, has to take of his stockings of to count past ten,
brown should go back to school I'm sure some of our young children would be quite pleased to give brown a help with his homework
him and his labour pile will not be content until they have destroyed this once great country,it seems the labour have this irresistible compulsion to throw money down the lavvy pan ,as they have done here in Edinburgh through the maniacal tram system,that nobody wants except a few trampots

Even though the oil price has fallen, Broon will be hopeful that our "Commonwealth" of Scotland's oil and gas, will be a sufficient asset to help buttress the falling Pound Sterling.

I have never voted tory but i'm afraid ,sadly, Osborne is telling the truth and so far the pound has been devalued by more than 25% so far which is the biggest devaluation in history.
We can now look forward to the pound and the euro achieving parity, and that £10000 in your piggy bank will be worth about £6000---Happy days, thanks Mr Brown.

#22 You might also have added that Tony Benn (and others) also once campaigned to have the length of a government in power extended from 5 years to 10 while he ALSO campaigned for the House of Lords to be abolished with no suggested of there being a second chamber .... to check the House of Commons legislation.

Now, imagine a House of Commons run by an over-confident majority party (ANY party) without a House of Lords, a second House, to stop it legislating and extending its term in office ... sounds a bit like Germany in the 1930's ... And some folk reckoned MI5 was out of control for (allegedly) trying to undermine a few people in the Labour Party?!?

You lot have short memories. May I suggest you read "Gordon is a Moron" by Vernon Coleman. There you can read the facts about our "beloved" Chancellor/unelected sub-prime minister and what a mess his legacy is. George Osborne and many others north and south of the border are telling like it is. For goodness sake wake up!

#43 The gap is getting decreasing due to the English they are happy at our he is managing the crisis. I fear the Scots are going to come of worse Mr Brown is hell bent on keeping the English happy as he knows what way the English vote will be who gets in power.

I reckon that Peter Mandelson is a Soviet sleeper.

Think a bit about it and everything adds up.

Now ther is A conspiracy theory and a VERY plausible one too!

The U.S. fiscal stimulus plan worth $150 billion went into play in February with bi-partisan support.
The Chinese stimulus package is a $586 billion public works acceleration plan announced last week.
The German Cabinet approved a stimulus package weeks ago, as did the French.
Australia's second stimulus package was announced last month - though they have the advantage of a massive budget surplus after a decade of Conservative economic policies.
Spain's fiscal stimulus package was announced in April.

Conservative run Canada also has for years run a budget surplus and remains determined to balance the budget and cut taxes.
Japan has been doing fiscal stimulus for two decades.

Now that is interesting!

Pound in freefall, pension schemes ruined, house prices dropping like a stone, UK personal debt at an all time high and public debt at ridiculously high levels. Who is to blame - Gordon Brown To hear the government say that the Tories have ended the bi-partisan agreement is stupid. Such an agreement assumes that both parties will listen to what the other is saying. Gordon Brown doesn't do listening.

Britain the sick man of Europe, the Treasury facing going broke, unemployment set to hit the three million mark, house prices falling, young couples unable to find homes to rent or buy, etc, etc...

Who said the UK economy was a house of cards built on sand?
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/counciltax/Treasury-delivers-400m-blow-to.3341786.jp
#144 livilion,livingston 29/01/2007 01:49:36


Told you...

No.43- There were two polls this weekend. The Independent on Sunday gives the Tories a lead of 11 points up three AT 43 from last poll in oct.

It has obviously government policy to devalue the Pound.

In January 2007, I received just over €150 for 100 Pounds. Now, today, thanks to New Labour, I only get €117 for 100 Pounds.

The government is devaluing the Pound just as it did in the 1970s.

Then, Old Labour borrowed from the IMF to pay the wages and then devalued the Pound so they had twice as much to pay back!

'Daphne Broon' studied the History of the Labour Party at University. He knows what he is doing. He is ruining the economy believing that the Tories will win the next general election and inherit a completely ruined economy.

I recommend everyone read Ros Altmans' expose of Gordon Browns smoke and mirrors economy in todays Sunday Post. T

36 Mikey

You really ought to get your facts right.

Most of the senior positions in the British government are, and have been since Blair's takeover, held by Scots.

A greater proportion of the English are in favour of Scottish independence than are the Scots.

I agree on your basic premise that the Blair/Brown gang are primarily to blame. When criminals are at the top then the ordure of lawlessness and deceit trickle down over the rest of us.

Chancer Broon is like the gambler who having lost everything has borrowed more money to put on another race in the hope he will win everything back. Remember who is behind all this Goebbels style spin Mandleson!
For Christs sake wake up people !!!

Of course Scotland will be left with nothing other than the suit it was born in ,before the Empires powers will stop stealing from the Scots but I will vote independence all the same. Walk away and start again. Independent from a dictatorial power which creates misery for anyone it desires to. We have a toothless population. Poor who wish to remain on handouts and rich who align with the leaders who made them so. To all the people of the British Isles who revel in the misery the rest of the UK will face just to keep the rich happy, you know who and what you are.

Don't really like the bloke but I sympathise with Osborne. He's damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't - he's damned if he warns of us of a bad decision by the Government, and he'd be damned if it goes wrong and he kept quiet! What's the bloke supposed to do? Stand by and watch? Brown rabbits on about how "we should all pull together" but pulling together the Brown way means keeping your trap shut and following whatever he says! THAT is not what an Opposition party is meant to do - it's meant to try to hold the Government accountable, to test Government's decisions and policies, and testing them should help improve them.

So, what do kind of Opposition parties do we want? One's that test the Government or those that roll iver and do whatever the Government wants?

#56. Yeah, and Tony Blair was a Tory Party mole!

Actually, back in the 1970's a Trotskyite "moled" his way into the Sunderland Polytechnic's Student Conservative group and went to far as to get himself elected as their Chairman! Laugh? The Your Tories cried!!!

67
Nellie,
Liverpool 16/11/2008 12:59:21
#56. Yeah, and Tony Blair was a Tory Party mole!

Spot on


Tony Bliar is the love child of Maggie Thatcher

Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, Many of the Major Banks and Hedge funds, with the hel of Mervyn King, Alistair Daling, Triche... All knew this supposed credit crunch would happen when the put up interest rates... Then they sat on their thumbs and watched the melt down start.

The so-called melt down is blatantly the richest ofloading cash from the poor.

Mervyn King, Brown, Bush, Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, and and their accomplices should all be arrested on charges of financial terrorism, if found guilty, they should be forced to live on the streets the rest of their days.

Osborne should have been pressurising Mervyn King to cut interest rates before Northern Rock shareholders were ripped off.

Instead he made a continuous Political fool of himself and the Tories, destroying Credibility as a viable alternative to Brown/Darling

The pound Vs the US$ and Euro have traded up and down for decades... why is he trying to scaremonger people into thinking the economy is worse than it is.. "there will be a run on the pound".. If he carries on scaremongering.. this could happen.

People are losing Jobs because Mervyn King did not cut interest rates; because the government in the UK and US allowed hedge funds and Banks to ramp up the price of oil to $150... it is now below $60.00

The financial markets were taken down maliciously; Mark down and forced selling.
All just a transfer of wealth from the poor and our pension funds to the cartels running the markets.

#70

How very wrong you are. In fact Mervyn King should have raised interest rates some ten years or so ago in order to stamp out the house price and credit bubbles before the banks had the opportunity to contaminate the entire economy with their appalling behaviour.

Unfortunately, in his determination to keep his chums in the City smiling the Dear Leader decided not to include house price inflation in the overall inflation figures. This piece of economic stupidity is now coming home to haunt us... Remember Gordon said people were much wealthier under Labour because of their houses were worth so much more!

I have read all the above with interest. It seems that most Scots, like most Americans, suffer from an acute and chronic visual disturbance known as parochialism.

The worst sympton this condition produces is an inability to look beyond their own borders and, sometimes, an inability to look beyond their own regions.

The whole of the world is on the verge of economic meltdown, but the myopic can see no further than the end of their own noses to find someone to blame for this.

Such a diagnosis is a positive indicator or the presence of partisanship taken to the extreme, causing the victims of this dreadful and loathsome disease to look for the nearest person, thing, or insitution with which they disagree on in regard to either cultural, national, or idealogical grounds, ior any combination of all three.

Gordon Brown did not create the failure of confidence in the worlds' stock markets, nor did he contribute to the present credit crunch, nor did he engineer the fall in the GBP against the Euro and the USD.

The present dismal state of the British economy is reflected in every other industrialised country in the world. It is not a local phenomenon, and should not be viewed as such.

This is probably the worst time to fall out among ourselves, and playing the blame game is both infantile and counter-productive.

#72
You say Gordon Brown didn't contribute to the credit crunch.

There are a few things he did that contributed.

1. Allowed house price inflation to go unchecked.
2. Ignored warnings that our debt was out of control. claiming he had ended boom and bust
3.Gave up control of monetary policy to the BofE.
4. Sold off our gold at a quarter of present value.
5. Took £5bn a year out of private pension funds by removing tax relief.
6. Increased the public sector employee numbers to disastrous proportions lumbering us with billions in pension payments.
7. Bailed out the banks with our money without giving us any control over them.
8. Sold our utilities to foreigners who now increase prices at will.
9. Determined to continue with expensive schemes like ID cards, PFI, Trident, Wars, NHS computers, secret surveillance computers etc.
10. Bankrolls corruption in the EU and happily pays benefits to all and sundry around Europe.

##72## Please remove your rose tinted specs and face rhe facts---the u/k/ is in a worse position than any other country (including u.s.a.) due to Brown's incompetence

#72 Yep, that just about sums it up! He might not have caused the overall problem but he sure made a BIG contribution to it on this side of The Pond.

Osborne is right, brown the clown and his idiotic policies and financial mismanagement are a major contributing factor in this whole sorry mess. He is after all the chancellor that loudly claimed to have ended the "boom and bust" cycle, which added to the belief that an economy founded on ever increasing debt, offset by increasing property prices was the way to go, idoit!!!!

#75
Nellie,
Liverpool 16/11/2008 17:49:37

He is in it right up to his oxters.

10 years at the financial helm shoveling the money up towards Tony Bliar against the received wisdom from the OECD and IMF, living on a credit card. Now he wants to borrow on another one.

Guilty as charged.

Take the prisoner down!

TONY Blair was a great leader. He trashed the unelectable looney left. He got rid of the block union vote. He got Labour elected. He stood up to Islamic Fascists. Besides his wife he did a good job.

78 shame-us

Rubbish - he did not stand up to anyone - he got others to do his dirty work for him.

Bremner , Bird & Fortune, tonight Spot on !!!

79# You are probably one of the idiot lefties that thought Adolf and Stalin were socialists. Shame on you ya numptie. Leaders always get others to do the dirty work. That is why they are leaders.

80# They are only entertainers making a living. Do not give them any more credence than they deserve. They will change the subject when required.

#81 Hitler was a National Socialist and Stalin a Soviet Socialist.

Brown is an incompetent buffoon and deserves his cards ASAP.

#78 Tony Blair was also George Bush's lap dog. I shall never forget that accidental recording of their conversation, where Bush is calling Blaire "Tony" and Blair is calling Bush, "Mr President". What a sycophant!

#81 and #83. Worth also remembering that Oswald Mosley, the infamous British fascist leader, had formerly been a Minister in a Labour government.

On an earlier post I commented: "We had the $2 £ not long ago. How long before we have the £2 $?" Given Brown and Darling's approach to debt, I stand by that.

I was brought up to keep out of debt and not spend on what I could not afford. As a result I have a reasonable lifestyle and NO personal debt. How long before Brown targets me to pay for his follies?

Those who remind us that Peter Mandelson is back have it spot on. His fingerprints are all over Labour's comments.

Has Darling given up on his Trotskyist beliefs? On present showing, NO.

All my life I have heard people saying "This country is finished." I'm beginning to think that this time they may be right. We need another Maggie Thatcher to sort it all out.

86# In the good old days a Quid was worth 20 shillings. No one cared about the dollar or the euro. The country is finished. Bring back Maggie from the deid. I remember when you could buy a pun a mince. Now it is about half a kilo. Aye bring back the good old days.

Marian #31-34
You are absolutely correct about all you have asserted. Maybe it's all even worse? The Brown/Darling 'junta' are possibly busy shredding papers as I write, they are a disgrace to their own children, the nation, and to every other yet unborn child, who will now face the long term cost of their self-centered vanity and inadequacy, for many decades to come.

87 Seamus
One of the depressing things about the present situation is that the nearest thing to an opposition that Labour have (the Tories) seem quiveringly unable to stand up, say what they stand for, and look like a viable alternative to the present lot. The reaction to Osborne's comments says it all. I shall probably vote UKIP at the next election. They won't win, but strong support might wake a few people up, including those who think breaking up the UK - the most successful union ever - would solve all their problems.