And they also finished paying back our war debts from WWII which governments of every hue failed to do in the 60's. 70's and 80's.

Which two were they - Cameron inherited a mess from Brown and Thatcher inherited a mess from Callaghan!!

It also smacks a bit of Keynes' 10 year economic cycle?

Politicians of both major parties have done nothing but mess things up (and not just the economy) during my lifetime. They are inept.

On a wider point, I don't hold out much hope for the UK's medium term future for many reasons.

1. Extremely indebted.
2. Ageing population.
3. Becoming a low-wage economy, causing lack of demand.
4. No sign of being able to develop new, strong export creating business.
5. Property prices too high to enable efficient movement of labour or to permit businesses to flourish (look what's happening in retail with their city centre shop rents).
6. The fact that the country is wedded to high property prices in order to support our overly large financial sector and so a downward correction in prices is the last thing any policy maker wants.
7. The fact that interest rates will rise and some point and almost certainly before the economy picks up. If and when that happens, unless any rise is modest there will be mayhem - huge number of business failures, job losses and people unable to afford their homes. All of which will hammer the banking system, which has not been shrunk back sufficiently.

As I said when the financial crisis kicked off and Gordon Brown said we were better placed than most of our competitors, no, we are actually desperately poorly placed. In fact, I would say worse than Greece, Italy or Spain. At some point reality will bite unless the policy-makers can pull a rabbit out of the hat.

Interesting http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ramesh- ... 07552.html

Interesting http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ramesh- ... 07552.html

Almost as predictable as Liverpool fans singing "You'll never walk alone" or West Ham singing "Bubbles".

Just answer the question - it wasn't difficult, especially to someone with such self belief in your own opinion.

Exactly - they aren't coming in to office inheriting recessions. It's after they've had chance to bring in their first budget, that the recession happens.

The Conservative party works hard to push the line that they always come in having to clean up the mess after an inept Labour government, so that they have a line 'its Labour's fault' to cover themselves. The facts are quite different:

The time when a government came into office having to clean up a mess, was the start of Harold Wilson's second term, in 1974.

There was a recession at the end of Ted Heath's Conservative government in 1973-74. This is when there were energy shortages and the government had to go to a three day week to conserve energy. The miners were on strike and the country was in disarray. The Tories got voted out. Harold Wilson inherited a country in recession with double digit inflation. Two years later, we had to go to the IMF for bail out money. Of course the Tories always use this as a claim that "in the 1970s, Labour ruined the country and sent us into the arms of the IMF", they don't tell you that what they left Labour 2 years earlier was a recession, double digit inflation and having to be on three day weeks because of energy shortages!

Wilson resigned in 1976 and handed over to Callaghan who had a three year term like Gordon Brown later did. This was a turbulent time with union strikes following the IMF bail out but in the final year of Callaghan's term the economy grew 5.4%. It was not an economy in recession - far from it. That is well above the UK normal growth rate of about 2.5%.

I expect the next guess will be "put I bet Callaghan left a big budget deficit". The budget deficit the Tories left in 1974 was 5.5% of GDP, the budget deficit Labour left in 1979 was 4.7% of GDP, so the deficit had fallen slightly.

The recession didn't come till a year later, from 1980-81, after Thatcher had taken the reins. She also left a country in recession when she left office in 1990, as John Major took over at a point the 1990-91 recession had already started.

In more recent times, the financial crash was 2008. The recession under Labour was 2008-09, but the economy was recovering after that - a point which is often forgotten. It's only since the Coalition has been in office that we have had the story of 'stagnation' and 'flat growth' or 'double dip recession'. The last year Labour were in office, which was the year after the recession, the economy grew at 2.1%. This is approaching the UK's normal growth rate.

We went back into recession from 2011-12 under the Coalition.

The irony is, now, the Conservative line is 'of course we are back in recession because we had to cut back on public spending to deal with the deficit'. But at the time of the election, they argued that Keynes was a myth, and that cutting public spending wouldn't damage growth. They said that cutting public spending would free up resources to the private sector and allow the private sector to grow. But the private sector isn't growing.

Your statement was just a line from your club anthem - sooner or later the current government has to stop blaming the one who went before and start giving us some evidence that their plan was better.

Can you imagine a business being run on the same terms as GB PLC ?

A business where half of the board of directors diametrically oppose the other half and will vote every single plan down, even if they agree with it, just because its the other half that suggested it - and then every four or five years they all re-arrange the seats and the fighting starts all over again (even granted that you yourself worked in such a business in the past )

Can you imagine such a business surviving in a commercial world ?

Sooner or later this current government has to wake up to the fact that in 2010 they told the electorate that they had a plan and that they knew what to do with the economy because in two or three years time they are going to have to come around knocking on the doors and asking "How do you think we've done then ?" and when they do, blaming something that happened seven years ago (as it will be) isn't going to help them one little bit - its time to stand up and tell it like it is right now instead of blaming someone else all the time, if they thought the job was impossible then they shouldn't have stood up for it in the first place.

An example of how statistics can be used to give a view that doesn't present the whole picture.

To begin with as a Tory voter I think the coalition are a total disgrace and completely out of their depth. I have always Tory but I will not vote Tory at the next election.

To just take the data and suggest that is the definitive answer is far too simplistic. The mix of private to public sector is different, the role of unions is very different, the idea the Labour was going into a period of sustained growth in 2009 is simply not believable

In very simplistic terms though do you think that had the "austerity cuts" of 2010 not been as deep, and had not promised much deeper cuts in future years, that the ground made in 2009 could at least have been maintained rather than slipping backwards ?