General Election 2010

And my point was, do you literally believe that? Do you really truly believe that were it not for a Labour government (or 2, or 3) the entire global recession and the knock-on effect would not have occurred and that Britain would not have had a recession anyway? This isn't "Do you think it would have been as bad?", it's taking what you're asserting (that Labour caused the recession, nothing else) and holding that up to the light.

No I didn't mean there would not be a global recession just not the mess we in Britain are in now. We're only voting for a British government after all. It look New Labour, and Brown in particular to leave Britain in a worse economic state than any other industrialised country, having mismanaged the economy to such an extent that while everyone else was saving money during the good times in order to have something to spend during the recession Brown was spending and wasting it left right and centre and instead leaving us with a trillion pound budget deficit about as great in GDP terms as that of Greece.

Snowy: In between Thatcher deregulating the City and Blair becoming PM the city institutions were regulated by a number of bodies. There is a list of them here: http://www.fsa.gov.uk/Pages/Information/rule_books.shtml. These were all of which were abolished and replaced with the FSA. Which didn't spot or didn't care about the problem and didn't prevent it, possibly because it was a monolithic beast in the wilds of Canary Wharf, rather than a group of small bodies in the City. Quite possibly some of the older individual regulators may well have been as useless, but it's fair to assume that not all of them would have been, so someone somewhere would have raised the alarm.