Laws

[Bruce Banner]

I'm watching David Laws, LibDem Chief Secretary to the Treasury on BBC Parliament now.

Impressive, he knows his stuff and is an able and authoritative speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laws

[Guest happy?]

I'm watching David Laws, LibDem Chief Secretary to the Treasury on BBC Parliament now.

Impressive, he knows his stuff and is an able and authoritative speaker.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/David_Laws

He'll need to be as he sells a whole load of cuts which weren't in the manifesto. The challenge for the Lib Dems is how do they remain a distinct political party capable of keeping their supporters on side. There are rumblings already...

[Bruce Banner]

He'll need to be as he sells a whole load of cuts which weren't in the manifesto. The challenge for the Lib Dems is how do they remain a distinct political party capable of keeping their supporters on side. There are rumblings already...

Did the Coalition have a manifesto? I think not.

Deep cuts are desperately needed and the sooner the better.

[Guest happy?]

Did the Coalition have a manifesto? I think not.

Deep cuts are desperately needed and the sooner the better.

Your first point it too juvenile to deserve a response - so I won't dignify it with one.

The latter of course is a long, slippery, self-deluding slope. It failed in the 1980s and it will fail again - hopefully though the likes of Vince Cable will be able to have an influence to mitigate the effect of your schoolboy economics so beloved by George Osborne.

[RichB]

Your first point it too juvenile to deserve a response - so I won't dignify it with one.

Really? Why?

Seems like a valid point to me, without one they can't be held to account for their pre-election promises. Don't you find that odd?

Mind you labour had a manifesto and still ******ed us into the ground with no comeback, so I suppose it is irrelevant.

[Bruce Banner]

Your first point it too juvenile to deserve a response - so I won't dignify it with one.

The latter of course is a long, slippery, self-deluding slope. It failed in the 1980s and it will fail again - hopefully though the likes of Vince Cable will be able to have an influence to mitigate the effect of your schoolboy economics so beloved by George Osborne.

Wow, it took you an hour and twenty two minutes to come up with that reply .

NuLabour Party HQ drone support department on lunch break? .

[Guest X-QUORK]

NuLabour Party HQ drone support department on lunch break? .

Bruce, you can't keep accusing anyone with a different political viewpoint of being party drones, not if you want to be taken seriously yourself.

[Bruce Banner]

Bruce, you can't keep accusing anyone with a different political viewpoint of being party drones, not if you want to be taken seriously yourself.

Labour are known to post on forums, through party activists, we have half a dozen of them here .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

[hilltop]

Laws made £6bn of real cuts affecting lives and jobs.

We had been told that £6bn was achievable through efficiency savings.

Two different things, one lie.

[Riedquat]

Laws made £6bn of real cuts affecting lives and jobs.

We had been told that £6bn was achievable through efficiency savings.

Two different things, one lie.

What do you think efficiency savings would involve other than stopping paying people to do things that don't really need doing?

[oracle]

I'm watching David Laws, LibDem Chief Secretary to the Treasury on BBC Parliament now.

Impressive, he knows his stuff and is an able and authoritative speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laws

indeed.

self made millionaire at aged 28.

knows the banking industry a bit,and what will be do-able.

I live in hope that this coalition may actually work!

early days yet,and the jury is still out,but not made too bad a start.

£6Bn in cuts is stil a bit light,needs to be a couple of orders of magnitude higher to really get to grips.

the next bit they need to concentrate on is not the fiscal deficit,but the regulatory straight jacket.

...sort that out,business will come back and start generating some wealth.

this is probably the most important inhibitor to setting up small businesses.

they need to adopt "football league" rules to business.

ie,the match officials at sunday pub league are not quite at stringent as they would be in the championship.

basic tenets are there,but a bit of leaway in how they are applied.

however,there would still be penalties for outright dangerous/improper conduct.If your business is successful enough to achieve promotion,then the letter of the law will be more strictly enforced next season.

[Bruce Banner]

indeed.

self made millionaire at aged 28.

knows the banking industry a bit,and what will be do-able.

I live in hope that this coalition may actually work!

early days yet,and the jury is still out,but not made too bad a start.

£6Bn in cuts is stil a bit light,needs to be a couple of orders of magnitude higher to really get to grips.

the next bit they need to concentrate on is not the fiscal deficit,but the regulatory straight jacket.

...sort that out,business will come back and start generating some wealth.

this is probably the most important inhibitor to setting up small businesses.

they need to adopt "football league" rules to business.

ie,the match officials at sunday pub league are not quite at stringent as they would be in the championship.

basic tenets are there,but a bit of leaway in how they are applied.

What impressed me most was his confidence and authority.

He was the only Coalition cabinet minister present and he happily took on Darling, Byrne, Cooper et al.

Darling was annoyed that Osborne wasn't there, but Laws dealt with his questions with ease. Byrne was on the back foot after the letter gaffe and Cooper just looked uncomfortable in opposition.

[oracle]

What impressed me most was his confidence and authority.

if we were going on photogenics,then yes.I would agree.

Mr Laws does have the persona of the "traditional" english gentleman.

got the "firm but fair" look about him.

(looks a bit like my dad did at that age!!.....but laws is a bit shorter )

[hilltop]

This thread is the most abject promotion of presentation over policy !

[Bruce Banner]

This thread is the most abject promotion of presentation over policy !

As you may have guessed, I am a Labour Party member and supporter.

I do not believe that the Libcons deserve to be in power and fear that they are already leading us into worse trouble than we had.

Let us not forget that the financial problems we have came from the failures of the finacial system which the Conservatives supported without demur. The Liberals, greedy for influence, have subsumed what values they had into the Right Wing project.

Policy options will have been worked out by the Treasury civil servants, the job of the minister is to decide which option to run with and present it in a coherent manner.

[EUBanana]

Bruce, you can't keep accusing anyone with a different political viewpoint of being party drones, not if you want to be taken seriously yourself.

It's not "anyone", it's happy?.

I think your political views are miles from mine, Quorky, but you ain't no dalek.

[EUBanana]

Yup, it's another one.

[swissy_fit]

The latter of course is a long, slippery, self-deluding slope. It failed in the 1980s and it will fail again - hopefully though the likes of Vince Cable will be able to have an influence to mitigate the effect of your schoolboy economics so beloved by George Osborne.

Happy - please can you elaborate on this? (You were referring to expenditure cuts)

Intrigued.

[OnionTerror]

I'm watching David Laws, LibDem Chief Secretary to the Treasury on BBC Parliament now.

Impressive, he knows his stuff and is an able and authoritative speaker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Laws

Yep...He's my constituency MP. I met him about a year ago for one thing or another. He's well thought of. His majority at the last election was much larger that what Paddy Ashdown could achieve when he was in parliament.

They had a "story" about him in the MoS - when he went for his first job at Lib Dem HQ, he apparently turned up in a chauffeur driven car - at 28! He's also the co-editor of "The Orange Book" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orange_Book_-_Reclaiming_Liberalism although I've yet to read it..

[Guest happy?]

Happy - please can you elaborate on this? (You were referring to expenditure cuts)

Intrigued.

The economy - most sensible people would agree - is vastly out of kilter. It is structurally unstable. We have for the last 30-50 years failed to address the problems which we face. In the late 1970's these problems were exacerbated by the oil crisis. The poor industrial relations were a symptom of a long-term failure to re-invest - in both industry and the labour resources which we had.

At the time we were told that the industrial problems were preventing re-investment as the strikes were a disincentive to money to come into the economy. Ergo what was needed was laws to 'break the unions'. This analysis was flawed in many ways - the most obvious being that much of the industrial action and strikes was unofficial and the reaction of working people refusing to accept the social contract imposed on them by their own leaders in concert with the minority Labour government.

The 1980's saw three main streams of activity under the Conservative government - privatisation of state-owned assets; repeal of existing labour laws; and the monetarist experiment. These activities were undertaken we were told to make Britain a competitive economy. Whilst privatisation and the labour law changes can be debated I don't want to focus on these issues in this post.

The Monetarist experiment in my view rather than achieving the dynamic economy we were promised simply caused massive damage to our manufacturing capacity which has never been repaired. At the time it was lauded as the pre-requisite to a new industrial age. Poor and inefficient business would go to the wall whilst new, sunrise-industries would move into replace them creating a new economy with a flexible, skilled labour force producing high-quality jobs for a revived Britain.

It didn't happen.

We ended up with massive disinvestment. The destruction of viable businesses whilst protectionist-lite policies across the EU and the US ensured that France, Germany, Japan, America (and most other industrial nations) cherry-picked what was left standing at the end of it. Throughout this period successive Chancellors (but particularly Geoffrey Howe) run large budget deficit in the mistaken belief that it would lead to a new economy. This economic policy lead to a massive rise in inflation and unemployment. Inflation rose to 18% and unemployment to 4 million - the numbers are significant not because of the absolute numbers but because they were an exponential increase on the numbers under the previous economic policy. This is best illustrated by Labour isn't Working - at the time of Maurice Satchi's famous poster 1978/79 unemployment had peaked at 1 million and was falling to 900,000 within 18 months of Howe's ideological rampage it had quadrupled.

We were told at the time that this was a price worth paying. It wasn't. More importantly, it didn't lead to the necessary re-building of industrial capacity necessary to a stable economy. Instead Thatcher's government abandoned monetarism and sought growth in the city. Following Reagan's lead de-regulation was the order of the day. And future governments have followed the same policies - both Major and Blair/Brown. This has led to a grotesque distortion in the economy with high dependence on the banking sector and service industries, closely followed by dependence on employment in the public sector.

The collapse in casino banking (despite all the noise on here to contrary) was not the fault of the Labour government - it was the logical conclusion of an economic trajectory followed in both the UK and the US for the last thirty years. That it happened on Brown's watch was his bad luck - he'd made the mistake of swallowing the views of the city - like his predecessors both Conservative and Labour. It's impact was the more keenly felt in the UK because so much of our economy had been dependent on milking the city to re-distribute wealth to those on the lowest incomes. Laudable aims in my view but with hindsight too high a risk.

After the collapse of casino banking, the strategy to pump money into the economy was the right one. It would undoubtedly have been better to have a counter-cyclical policy in place but there wasn't one and we have to live with the consequences of that. Darling was dealt a sh1tty hand but played it well - honestly stating how dire the situation is and taking corrective action which has brought Britain out of recession - with the deficit now £12 billion lower than reported last month. Whether people on here like it or not Keynesian policies are demonstrably working.

Which brings us to where we are now and how we respond to the current situation. Osborne - extremely quiet during the crisis - has a simple-minded idea that cutting and cutting again is the solution. After all, if your in debt it's obvious you stop overspending. Common sense tells us stop spending - common sense of course is wrong when it comes to economics, and hopefully wiser heads (Vince Cable in particular) will prevail. National economies do not run in the same way as household economics - they're more complicated. For a start I can't raise revenue by taxing my neighbour nor can I create my own currency.

Simply slashing spending does lead to a death spiral, lower activity in the economy means lower revenue for government, which means spending cuts which means lower activity in the economy etc. It also leads to social disruption and breakdown in those intangible qualities of society. The damage to these latter has a long term effective - which is both real but difficult to measure directly in economic terms. We see a generation of people for whom work is irrelevant and education meaningless. Such people become divorced from society and spend their lives unproductively - an underclass dependent on benefits and back-handers but whose impact is not felt for 10-20 years after they become detached from the rest of us, and their legacy is children with no sense of responsibility but a strong sense of their rights.

What is needed now if we are to tackle both the current deficit and the long term debt is a sophisticated economic response which deals with the immediate problems and the economic re-development which was overdue forty years ago. We can't continue to pretend we can take money from casino bankers and employ each other as hairdressers and beef-burger vendors with maybe a cousin working in the town hall. We need to re-structure our economy to make it balanced and resilient. We need to stop giving handouts to the rich in the hope that it might trickle-down - it's a lie it never does.

We clearly need to reduce public spending - but both the timing of this reduction and the speed of this reduction are crucial to the effect on the economy. Its popular to cry "slash the public sector I want them to feel pain": it makes an easy headline in the Daily Mail but it won't revive the economy. We need to grow the economy and as has been demonstrated in the 1980's simply cutting public spending on strategically important parts of the economy is not a recipe for a bright new tomorrow. More importantly, that option isn't open to Osborne (there's no more oil, and there's no more family silver).

What's needed is a response which recognises that we can either re-build the economy or we can go on an orgy of slash and burn. It's tempting to slash and burn (especially when the markets have built up a head of steam on it, and more so when the Conservative party conference wants it, and the siren voices of Fleet Street are screaming for it) but we need to resist it. We need a chancellor who has the vision to recognise how we must re-balance the economy, how he must resist the usual claque within his own party, and how long a task it will be. I genuinely hope he takes counsel from the Lib Dems within the government.

As for Bruce Banana and EUBanner two individuals with nothing to say and the vocabulary to prove it.

[Guest anorthosite]

He'll need to be as he sells a whole load of cuts which weren't in the manifesto. The challenge for the Lib Dems is how do they remain a distinct political party capable of keeping their supporters on side. There are rumblings already...

They managed it in Scotland for eight years. Political parties manage it all round the world.

[Bruce Banner]

As for Bruce Banana and EUBanner two individuals with nothing to say and the vocabulary to prove it.

No substance .

[hilltop]

The economy - most sensible people would agree - is vastly out of kilter. It is structurally unstable. We have for the last 30-50 years failed to address the problems which we face. In the late 1970's these problems were exacerbated by the oil crisis. The poor industrial relations were a symptom of a long-term failure to re-invest - in both industry and the labour resources which we had.

At the time we were told that the industrial problems were preventing re-investment as the strikes were a disincentive to money to come into the economy. Ergo what was needed was laws to 'break the unions'. This analysis was flawed in many ways - the most obvious being that much of the industrial action and strikes was unofficial and the reaction of working people refusing to accept the social contract imposed on them by their own leaders in concert with the minority Labour government.

The 1980's saw three main streams of activity under the Conservative government - privatisation of state-owned assets; repeal of existing labour laws; and the monetarist experiment. These activities were undertaken we were told to make Britain a competitive economy. Whilst privatisation and the labour law changes can be debated I don't want to focus on these issues in this post.

The Monetarist experiment in my view rather than achieving the dynamic economy we were promised simply caused massive damage to our manufacturing capacity which has never been repaired. At the time it was lauded as the pre-requisite to a new industrial age. Poor and inefficient business would go to the wall whilst new, sunrise-industries would move into replace them creating a new economy with a flexible, skilled labour force producing high-quality jobs for a revived Britain.

It didn't happen.

We ended up with massive disinvestment. The destruction of viable businesses whilst protectionist-lite policies across the EU and the US ensured that France, Germany, Japan, America (and most other industrial nations) cherry-picked what was left standing at the end of it. Throughout this period successive Chancellors (but particularly Geoffrey Howe) run large budget deficit in the mistaken belief that it would lead to a new economy. This economic policy lead to a massive rise in inflation and unemployment. Inflation rose to 18% and unemployment to 4 million - the numbers are significant not because of the absolute numbers but because they were an exponential increase on the numbers under the previous economic policy. This is best illustrated by Labour isn't Working - at the time of Maurice Satchi's famous poster 1978/79 unemployment had peaked at 1 million and was falling to 900,000 within 18 months of Howe's ideological rampage it had quadrupled.

We were told at the time that this was a price worth paying. It wasn't. More importantly, it didn't lead to the necessary re-building of industrial capacity necessary to a stable economy. Instead Thatcher's government abandoned monetarism and sought growth in the city. Following Reagan's lead de-regulation was the order of the day. And future governments have followed the same policies - both Major and Blair/Brown. This has led to a grotesque distortion in the economy with high dependence on the banking sector and service industries, closely followed by dependence on employment in the public sector.

The collapse in casino banking (despite all the noise on here to contrary) was not the fault of the Labour government - it was the logical conclusion of an economic trajectory followed in both the UK and the US for the last thirty years. That it happened on Brown's watch was his bad luck - he'd made the mistake of swallowing the views of the city - like his predecessors both Conservative and Labour. It's impact was the more keenly felt in the UK because so much of our economy had been dependent on milking the city to re-distribute wealth to those on the lowest incomes. Laudable aims in my view but with hindsight too high a risk.

After the collapse of casino banking, the strategy to pump money into the economy was the right one. It would undoubtedly have been better to have a counter-cyclical policy in place but there wasn't one and we have to live with the consequences of that. Darling was dealt a sh1tty hand but played it well - honestly stating how dire the situation is and taking corrective action which has brought Britain out of recession - with the deficit now £12 billion lower than reported last month. Whether people on here like it or not Keynesian policies are demonstrably working.

Which brings us to where we are now and how we respond to the current situation. Osborne - extremely quiet during the crisis - has a simple-minded idea that cutting and cutting again is the solution. After all, if your in debt it's obvious you stop overspending. Common sense tells us stop spending - common sense of course is wrong when it comes to economics, and hopefully wiser heads (Vince Cable in particular) will prevail. National economies do not run in the same way as household economics - they're more complicated. For a start I can't raise revenue by taxing my neighbour nor can I create my own currency.

Simply slashing spending does lead to a death spiral, lower activity in the economy means lower revenue for government, which means spending cuts which means lower activity in the economy etc. It also leads to social disruption and breakdown in those intangible qualities of society. The damage to these latter has a long term effective - which is both real but difficult to measure directly in economic terms. We see a generation of people for whom work is irrelevant and education meaningless. Such people become divorced from society and spend their lives unproductively - an underclass dependent on benefits and back-handers but whose impact is not felt for 10-20 years after they become detached from the rest of us, and their legacy is children with no sense of responsibility but a strong sense of their rights.

What is needed now if we are to tackle both the current deficit and the long term debt is a sophisticated economic response which deals with the immediate problems and the economic re-development which was overdue forty years ago. We can't continue to pretend we can take money from casino bankers and employ each other as hairdressers and beef-burger vendors with maybe a cousin working in the town hall. We need to re-structure our economy to make it balanced and resilient. We need to stop giving handouts to the rich in the hope that it might trickle-down - it's a lie it never does.

We clearly need to reduce public spending - but both the timing of this reduction and the speed of this reduction are crucial to the effect on the economy. Its popular to cry "slash the public sector I want them to feel pain": it makes an easy headline in the Daily Mail but it won't revive the economy. We need to grow the economy and as has been demonstrated in the 1980's simply cutting public spending on strategically important parts of the economy is not a recipe for a bright new tomorrow. More importantly, that option isn't open to Osborne (there's no more oil, and there's no more family silver).

What's needed is a response which recognises that we can either re-build the economy or we can go on an orgy of slash and burn. It's tempting to slash and burn (especially when the markets have built up a head of steam on it, and more so when the Conservative party conference wants it, and the siren voices of Fleet Street are screaming for it) but we need to resist it. We need a chancellor who has the vision to recognise how we must re-balance the economy, how he must resist the usual claque within his own party, and how long a task it will be. I genuinely hope he takes counsel from the Lib Dems within the government.

As for Bruce Banana and EUBanner two individuals with nothing to say and the vocabulary to prove it.

Very sensible.

[Bruce Banner]

Very sensible.

[geoffk]

Anyone who is not on Bruces page is a troll......how sad....His anger shows through in every post and must be eating him up inside..

lighten up before it kills you!!!!!