Should a Prime Minister know the state of the economy?

[Obelix]

Now hang on a moment, didn't Labour claim there was no such black hole before the credit crunch.... Are they in fact doing a Grecian on us?

 

5.2pc structural is a rather large amount - were they really spending that much propping up thei public sector to buy themselves votes? If so then we are in some deep do-do and it's going to be even longer before we can get back to sensible growth.

[Magilla]

Now hang on a moment, didn't Labour claim there was no such black hole before the credit crunch.... Are they in fact doing a Grecian on us?

 

5.2pc structural is a rather large amount - were they really spending that much propping up thei public sector to buy themselves votes? If so then we are in some deep do-do and it's going to be even longer before we can get back to sensible growth.

 

Quite, you couldn't make it up!

[Mr Prime]

In answer to the original question, the PM should know but we shouldn't expect him to be Rain Man either.

[Vague_Boy]

“Now I know you are asking whether the plan is working. And here’s the truth, the damage was worse than we thought”

 

I heard this before from Nick Clegg when he got into power and had to justify some of his policy changes, and without being political could anyone explain to me why the PM didn’t know the true state of the economy.

 

Which PM? Gordon Brown?

 

(How could The Boy Cameron have been expected to know the full facts until he got into office? His Labour opponents were hardly likely to be passing on Treasury secrets were they?)

 

But yes, you're right. Gordon Brown was totally clueless.

 

Britain is well placed to weather the "first financial crisis of the new global age" thanks to Labour's handling of the economy, Gordon Brown has said.

 

The prime minister mounted a defence of the government's record in a speech to business leaders in Liverpool.

 

He said the UK could avoid the worst of the crisis thanks to a flexible labour market and low interest rates.

LINK

 

Oh dear.

 

Then of course was his fawning praise of the banksters

 

Today’s speech will no doubt include a section about how he for many years had, with great insight, been calling for global financial regulation. His speech in 2005 to the CBI however was pure New Labour neo-liberalism, praising enterprise, free markets and globalisation. He promised the corporate class deregulation, a “new risk based model of regulation” for financial services

 

“no inspection without justification, no form filling without justification, and no information requirements without justification, not just a light touch but a limited touch.”

LINK

 

The same light touch and lack of regulation that was blamed for the financial crisis in 2008.

 

Of course Gordon then got a bit confused, poor love, and claimed that he'd wanted tougher financial regulation all along

 

Gordon Brown claimed today that he had been warning for ten years that the international financial markets needed to be more strongly regulated.

 

The Prime Minister said that it was a decade ago in Harvard that he first called for an international early warning system to alert countries to developing crises in any part of the world, because the huge global growth and reach of financial systems meant that all markets, all economies and all banks were now interdependent.

LINK

 

Course you did Gordon. Course you did.