Seven lost years for England

The irony is that the current conservative government was elected on the basis of reducing government spending on the basis of a reduced deficit (Seven lost years for England, December 6). They promised that by following this path the economy would improve (Seven lost years for England, December 6).
It proves the folly of not sticking to Keynesian principles in full by having the opposing effect of a contractionary fiscal policy working in tandem with a expansionary monetary policy. You need both policies heading in the same direction.
Sadly, in this country we're doing the same thing but we're at a different stage of the economic cycle. Hopefully after the next election who ever is in control can go back to an expansionary fiscal policy and forget about running the economy on political imperatives.

Dear Stephen, is it not coincidental that the UK is also a financial basket case after years of Labour Party governance, with the conservatives trying to now clean up the mess (Seven lost years for England, December 6). Much the same as here in Oz. eg NSW, QLD, and next year the Feds. I am constantly reminded of the old saying "Labour is great until they run out of spending other peoples' money". I suppose at least here in Oz we will be able to give them the boot before they totally screw up the place; imagine if we had 5 year terms and had to suffer them for another 3 years - heaven forbid !

The amounts transferred to the European Union annually dwarf all the economy measures that the Conservatives have so far enacted (Seven lost years for England, December 6).
If the UK's ever more likley In/Out Referendum on EU membership gets up, I expect that following an out vote, the amount of money available once the UK stps propping up the Euro-bureacracy will make a measurable improvement to the UK's bottom line, for little real loss.

For Jim:
People who have actually read Keynes know that he would be horrified that any country would consider deficit spending when it had a debt to GDP figure of 79% (Seven lost years for England, December 6).

I agree there are some encouraging patches for the UK economy unfortunately they get overshadowed by the magnitude of the legacy from Labour’s 13 years of imprudent actions, which by 2010 had knocked the competitive stuffing out of the country (Seven lost years for England, December 6). At least we in Australia can learn from the UK’s experience that throwing more and more money at Government services doesn’t necessarily improve outcomes, without major change it just makes things worse. Regulating and taxing the hell out of the productive bits of the economy in the process of paying for it all does not create new competitive businesses and new well paying jobs either; and neither does giving old transnational businesses some ‘don’t go away money’. Consequently its not the running down of its colonies that caused all this, it was the flawed idea that they needed more of an overbearingly big, centralised nanny state, with imprudent politicians who could continue to aggravate things through their own unwillingness to vigilantly govern and transform a wasteful and ineffective public sector. Subsequently, what the UK and Europe is teaching voters in Australia is that we should not judge our own politicians by the good intentions of their promises, which they break with impunity anyway, “there will be no price on carbon” … etc. etc. But rather we should judge them by the actual results of their policies; like a big new national debt, high exchange rates, 4 years of rising power bills and mining investment in decline because of high input costs. So the lesson we should take from the UK’s experience is the solutions of the “progressive” thinking left don’t work, in fact they’ve never worked, even when someone new and with the best of all intentions implements them; so perhaps its time we went back to the idea of small, decentralised government and some freer market capitalism. But I for one won’t be holding my breath.