Luke Bozier at Labourlist wises up:
Hat tip to Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home for pointing out that Luke Bozier has been writing some surprisingly sensible things on the Labourlist blog.
"Labour says the reason it created this fiscal mess was to save the country from a collapse of the banking system. But let's get real – the reason there's a deficit is because tax income didn't cover the high public spending before the credit crunch/banking crash. Had the Labour government had a spending review mid 2000s, and reduced public spending, the deficit today would have been smaller. We must begin to admit that we were fiscally irresponsible for years, in order to gain the trust of the public again, at least on the economy."
He continues:
"It's a shame Ed didn't include a single book on boosting growth or economic responsibility in his summer holiday reading list. It's clear we can't leave this job to the shadow chancellor – he's made hardly any effort (nor has Ed Miliband for that matter) to take responsibility for the economic mess we're in, or to develop the policies required to re-gain fiscal credibility. We need a more vocal group of 'fiscal realists' within the Labour Party... In a way, we need our own kind of Tea Party."
My word. You can read the whole article here.
"Labour says the reason it created this fiscal mess was to save the country from a collapse of the banking system. But let's get real – the reason there's a deficit is because tax income didn't cover the high public spending before the credit crunch/banking crash. Had the Labour government had a spending review mid 2000s, and reduced public spending, the deficit today would have been smaller. We must begin to admit that we were fiscally irresponsible for years, in order to gain the trust of the public again, at least on the economy."
He continues:
"It's a shame Ed didn't include a single book on boosting growth or economic responsibility in his summer holiday reading list. It's clear we can't leave this job to the shadow chancellor – he's made hardly any effort (nor has Ed Miliband for that matter) to take responsibility for the economic mess we're in, or to develop the policies required to re-gain fiscal credibility. We need a more vocal group of 'fiscal realists' within the Labour Party... In a way, we need our own kind of Tea Party."
My word. You can read the whole article here.
Comments
you tell 'em Gordon,
"We know in retrospect what we missed. We set up the Financial Services Authority (FSA) believing that the problem would come from the failure of an individual institution, So we created a monitoring system which was looking at individual institutions. That was the big mistake.
"We didn't understand how risk was spread across the system, we didn't understand the entanglements of different institutions with the other and we didn't understand even though we talked about it just how global things were, including a shadow banking system as well as the banking system." - Gordon Brown apr 2011
Facepalm