Wednesday 18 August 2010

There WAS a structural deficit

In spite of the efforts of the deficit-deniers in Labour (listed by Guido Fawkes here) with the honourable exception of Alistair Darling (also noted by Guido), the public do realise that there is a difference between the acute difficulties caused by the banking failure and the chronic condition of dependence on borrowing initiated by Labour budgets from 2000 on.

To use an admittedly gruesome medical analogy, people with a long-standing condition like AIDS are more susceptible to infections, like TB. Brown and Darling tackled the TB of the credit drought (rather too slowly, in the opinion of Vince Cable and others) but it is left to George Osborne and Danny Alexander to administer the painful anti-retrovirals.

It is also no use complaining, as Labour speakers are wont to do, that MPs then in opposition said nothing. Just a few minutes searching the Web on the term "black hole" reveals warnings such as this, dating back to the early years of New Labour.

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