I could say the same thing about Biden. His choice for VP, Harris was flawed, his choice for Attorney General, Garland, was flawed. He himself was a good man who just didn’t know when to quit.
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How may of those 100 items simply come down to writing cheques, which then had to be paid for by increasing taxes.
Just spending money without any idea how to grow an economy is not good government.
Actually the government writing cheques automatically grows the economy
GDP is calculated as GDP = C + I + G + (X - M)
where C=consumption(total spending by households), I=investment(business spending on capital), G=government spending and X-M is the balance of inport/export payments (value of exports minus value of imports).
So government spending increases GDP £ for £
But it gets better - if the government spends wisely and makes sure that what it spends reappears in its tax revenue (and doesn’t get sequestered by shareholders or otherwise removed from the economy) it gets to spend the same £ more than once, increasing GDP even more.
National economies do not run like household ones, whatever Mrs Thatcher wanted you to believe.
It’s (for example) why benefits for people on low incomes is not “money wasted” - it mostly circulates in the economy because the benefactor needs to spend what they get to survive - food, energy, rent and much of it locally as well, the government gets £ back in VAT, they skim the landlords profit, the local authority gets council tax.
It’s money hoarded by the wealthy who do not need it and just save it and take it out of the economy which is money wasted.
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Yes, the Grantham grocer’s shop has a lot to answer for…..not to mention the “magic money tree” later on.
Our economy used to be more defined by the balance of trade, but all that went out the window with our new service-based substitute for industrial production and our Empire, tied to the debt culture. The EU membership helped paper over the cracks.
We haven’t really overcome our manufacturing industry decline. Neoliberalism and the rentier economy aided by wholesale asset-stripping of publicly and even privately owned assets has run its course.
We are now bumping along the bottom.
New ideas are required not just “change” mantras. The Green economy is there to be fully taken up but vested interests and cultural and populist inertia are stopping it.
Maybe the hot spell will sharpen a few minds….
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Bang on, your whole post, Billy. Especially now that natural government-provided monopoly assets in the UK like water boards and airports, and at one point was all trains too, have been handed to shareholders ie private equity.
Private equity, which is the new form of asset strippers, then proceeds to privatise the profits, avoiding necessary re-investment, and in so doing, leaves all the costs still to be borne by users and taxpayers.
And the big private equity trick is tbat just in case there really could be enough profit to reinvest for the future of the business as well, and there should be as the privatised businesses are oligopolies with unlimited rent collecting potential, uh oh no they make sure there’s not enough profit to do anything other than pay themselves by having the business take on and service continuing large amounts of debt (which are increased, miraculously, to soak up profits).
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Private equity does not have to be evil. In fact the much derided PFI did, at least, get quite quite a few hospitals built that probably would not have been otherwise (admittedly the terms vastly favoured the private equity firms which was not great).
Even asset stripping of a failing company is honest compared with the more nefarious tricks that are played (such as leveraged recapitalisations).
Thatcher sold off the silverware to pay for the 80’s feel good factor, that itself might have been excusable but the profits did not go to fundamental infrastructure but “boiled off” - generally overseas. the privatised utilities in particular have been draining the UK economy one way or another since (isn’t it some £72 billion in dividends that the water industry has paid out while neglecting infrastructure and resilience).
Blair/Brown are just as much to blame though as Thatcher. We could have done so much better.
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Thats an understatement, just look at the costings to date, could have built twice the number of hospitals for what we have paid.
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It was an absolute con.
Blair just didn’t want to be a proper socialist and increase taxes to pay for infrastructure.
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Reclassifying you mean Peter 
I thought at the time it was inspired. I thought he realised he was a one term president, that he had vision and that he thought a woman of colour president could be transformational, and that he would nurture her, coach her and groom her for the next election. But he turned out to be just another self centred ego instead, supported by a delusional first lady.
He deserves a large part of the blame for Trumps second term. That’s his legacy.
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Google “problems with PFI hospitals” they were, are and will continue to be, a disaster. Thanks Tony! now f…
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It may have been, but Harris didn’t seem to have the right stuff. Perhaps a Susan Rice or Keisha Lance-Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta had ‘it’. But Biden never nurtured Harris along either.
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Turns out that drilling for oil in the North Sea is not as awful as Milliband originally thought.
That’s the Milliband who’s angling to replace Rachel Reeves in the Burnham cabinet, coincidentally.
To be honest, I’ve no clue who the VP should have been, and I bow to your greater knowledge of the contenders. But he chose the VP. It’s all down to him when it blew up.
Trump is what he is, an arsehole from beginning to end, Biden, who is not an arsehole, delivered his nation into the hands of an arsehole. That’s a dreadful thing to have done.
Roger that, Roger.
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Should have been Elizabeth Warren.
You are joking, aren’t you?
Re. selling the family silver. Many people are unaware of the massive ongoing sale of publicly owned land since 1979.
“If my estimate of approximately 2 million ha of public land having been sold through all mechanisms since the early 1980’s is broadly correct, then approximately half of the public estate in existence at that time, which spanned around 4.2 million ha (incl. land owned by the nationalised industries), has disappeared. If the half that is left is worth around £400 billion, what of the other half that has been privatised?…”
The New Enclosure p250 Brett Christophers (2018)
Around 10 000 school playing fields were sold…….from
“Is it game over for school playing fields” G. Lean The Daily Telegraph 12 September 2014
“At the height of this disposal frenzy, up to 1000 acres of playing fields were being sold every month…..” Brett Christophers
Fat lazy kids eh?
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PFI hospitals certainly have problems - but so do non-PFI hospitals. the important metric is whether they have more and I don’t think there is consistent evidence that they are worse either in delivering care or in terms of construction problems. Indeed they were delivered on time and within budget as, or more often, than non-PFI builds.
This is not to say there are no problems. They are more expensive to run because of the debt burden that they carry and some of them have turned out to be poorly constructed which is then expensive to fix (but some non-PFI builds have done that).
As I have said before they were not a “con” - I am sure the government of the day knew exactly what they were buying (cf the myth that Robert McCulloch did not know what he was buying when he bought London Bridge).
The alternative was generally not to build new infrastructure at all and PFI very successfully did what it was supposed to - move capital investment onto operational budgets.
The financial price was too high but the government was in a weak bargaining position. To say that they work less well as hospitals is questionable.
They were a con because Blair’s government presented them as a legitimate way of building infrastructure, and the only alternative (which plainly convinced you!) was not to build. You’ve already pointed out that, contrary to what Thatcher said, a government economy is different to a household one.
They were bad because they had massive continuing costs.
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