Ed Balls: Tories taking us back to the 80s
12:51 am - March 7th 2011
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At the the TUC Yorkshire & Humber region’s AGM, Labour’s shadow chancellor Ed Balls attacked the Tories for ‘taking Britain back to the 1980s’.
He said:
Across the north, south, east and west of our country we are starting to see the devastating effect of this government’s reckless plan to cut too deep and too fast.
David Cameron and George Osborne are trying to take us back to the 1980s – not just the hike in VAT and deep spending cuts, but trying to provoke confrontation with Labour councils like Liverpool and now with Thatcherite enterprise policies too.
The economy should be growing strongly this year, but instead thousands of jobs are being lost in both the public and private sectors and our economic recovery has stalled.
George Osborne just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t seem to understand that without strong economic growth and with unemployment now rising again, you cannot get the deficit down. And he seems to be in denial about the state of the economy he is responsible for.
When Labour left office our actions to support the recovery meant the economy was strengthening, inflation was lower and unemployment was falling. That’s why the deficit ended up being £20 billion lower than forecast last year.
Now we have the worst of all worlds – a stalled economy, consumer confidence collapsing, rising unemployment and rising inflation. But this Chancellor has no plan other than to carry on regardless with cuts that are too deep and too fast and aren’t working.
George Osborne needs to get his head out of the sand. He has just two weeks until the Budget to come up with a plan for jobs and growth that gets people into work and gets our economy moving again.
He should start by heeding Labour’s call to repeat last year’s £3.5 billion bank bonus tax and use that money to support the jobs and growth Britain badly needs this year.
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Reader comments
Personally I’m convinced that this government is going further than any Thatcher government ever dreamed of going. If it goes a full term and gets even half of its proposals enacted it will mark a major defeat for the Labour Movement in Britain and not just for the Labour Movement but for the British people as a whole as there will be no British economy just pockets of exporting industry, the City Banks all surrounded by a wasteland of inactivity.
Special Economic Zones where health and safety, corporate tax and effective trade unions are banned and the minimum wage a distant memory? That is a major step backwards from which it would take years to recover if recovery was in fact possible given the amount of capital in the form of public sector assets and human knowledge this Coalition is set to destroy.
There are times when I think this Tory-led government wants to take us back to the 19th century. Many of them, Gove in particular, have a hankering for the Victorian era, but they aren’t much concerned with the materialism of history, it’s a particular narrative that they’re interested in. Naturally, they ignore the fact that the Tories did rather poorly compared to Gladstone’s Liberals. Life wasn’t simple or easier in the 19th century but the Tories want us to think it was.
if only we could get back to those glorious days of the 80s…the UK seemed to have a future then
An excellent article criticising the Tory spending ‘cuts’ here:
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article26765.html
It is a lengthy article focusing on inflation, but the first section criticises the Tory led Governments spending cuts.
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Liberal Conspiracy
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