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National debt as a % of GDP more than doubled between 1997 and 2010? Fiscal balance went from a net surplus post Major to almost 10% of GDP? Invented BTL?
Gordon Brown didn't create the US subprime crisis but he was a cheerleader for leveraged casino banking throughout his time in government. In a sense, the banking boom was New Labour's version of the North Sea boom that propped up Thatcher.
NickCJ-
National debt as a % of GDP more than doubled between 1997 and 2010?
I wonder which giant global economic event outside of Labour's control could possibly have contributed to the need to borrow money?
The state of some of the charges levelled at Labour is unbelievable.
People talk about the bank bailouts nearly bankrupting the country. Simply untrue. The final cost to the taxpayer was less than one pandemic track and trace.
The selling all of the gold claim is bullshit too. It was the right thing to do at the time. It was there to be used in times of need and pales into insignifance compared to the amount of gold sold by other administrations.
And the war...well yeah. A million innocent people died. But people seriously over egg how dishonest Blair was in his persuit of it. Not many people seem to be aware that one of the reasons we were so certain they had WMDs is that we (along with Germany) sold the expertise, eqiupment and chemical precursors to build the things in the first place so that Hussein could "defend himself" from Iran. Massive systematic intelligence failures sure. Blair overreached in his desire to go to war and misled...sure. Blair did not believe that Iraq had WMDs? Nonsense.
Edit: Who was most at thought for the Iraq WMD clusterfuck? The government that sold them to him (Thatcher/Kohl) or the government that did not believe that he would paid us billions of dollars to build them and then destroy them without telling anybody?
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Invented BTL?
Also...wut? Pretty sure that it was Housing Act 1988 that opened the doors for BTL even if the first products didn't start to appear until the mid 00s. Afaik BTL only started to be firmly regulated in 2016 or so. Really can't see how Labour take the blame for that one.
Stonehedge
go on....