The NHS Bill

[strummer77]

South west England, constituencies with large student populations, Scotland, a lot of Wales, northern Ireland.

There's large areas of the country where it plainly isn't the case

[strummer77]

AV (and certainly PR) could of lead to more colialtions... I still can't make my mind up if thats a good thing or a bad thing...

This government is hardly a great advert for it...

[eFestivals]

South west England, constituencies with large student populations, Scotland, a lot of Wales, northern Ireland.

There's large areas of the country where it plainly isn't the case

and most of the South East, where the only chance of defeating the tories is by voting LibDem.

[eFestivals]

AV (and certainly PR) could of lead to more colialtions... I still can't make my mind up if thats a good thing or a bad thing...

This government is hardly a great advert for it...

I'd say that this govt is a great advert for coalitions, even if it's not a coalition I want to see.

Slag the libdems off all you like for the things they've allowed themselves to move from their manifesto on, but the fact remains that they're stopping the tories from doing very many things that they'd otherwise be doing, and the country is all the better for it.

[eFestivals]

So they watered down a couple of bills and a couple of small changes to the NHS bill...

over 1,000 changes to the NHS bill in fact, which is hardly "a couple".

I can't get away from the fact that the Lib Dems are actings as nothing more than an enabler for this stuff to go through....

At best they are weakly watering down bills and at worse wasting Parliamentary time during a period that cause for quick and targeted action... Its been a fucking disaster... And we are still shitting jobs, not growing and heading slowly towards another recession....

Yep, they're enabling stuff they really shouldn't be .... but that still doesn't detract from my point, that the tories would have a 100% free hand to do everything what they want if there was no coalition. If the LibDems had refused to go into coalition with them there would have been another election within a short space of tine and the tories would have got a clear majority.

There's absolutely nothing that the LibDems are doing within the coalition that is wasting any parliamentary time at all. All of thew coalition stuff is done outside of parliament.

The NHS bill is not a part of the coalition agreement. Fuck knows why the LibDems agreed to go along with it, but there you go.

As for the so-called debt crisis, as has been pointed out to you very many times, it's a myth. UK debts and the ability of the UK to service those debts are nearer a historical low than they are a historical high.

[eFestivals]

Nor is it true that Britain has record public debts. It did have a record annual public deficit in 2009/10 as the budget papers say. But that is not debt. Debt is an aggregate figure, the consequence of cumulative deficits over decades. Expressed as a proportion of GDP, debt has been higher than current levels for most of the last 250 years. Indeed, with the cost of servicing public debt at the lowest since the 1890s there have been very few decades since the 1760s when the cost of servicing public debt has been so low. Britain, despite the Orwellian attempt to misuse language, does not have a debt crisis.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/24/george-osborne-budget-disgrace-will-hutton

[eFestivals]

http://www.ukpublics...k_national_debt

I guess this is what the guy means ?

Our debt was massive after the World Wars...

yep - but along with the proportion of debt as GDP what also needs considering is the ability to service the debt, which is related to interest rates.

With interest rates at a historic low, we could (for example) have the same level of debts as we had due to the wars but at a fraction of the cost to the country as it was at that time.

As things stand, with interest rates much lower than inflation, we don't (in theory) even need to service the debts - the debts decrease all by themselves. And that's a fairly standard economic 'trick', for a govt to inflate its way out of debt, which is a huge part of the current govts plans.

The public version is that the BoE's inflation-at-2% is still in place, but it's been obvious for a very long time that it's not. If it were then interest rates would have increased a long time ago, but it's exceedingly obvious that the govt is not going to allow that to happen until after the next election at the earliest.

So they print money to help inflate the debts away, but ensure that it's done so only the richest benefit by it (by printing money only for the benefit of the banks), and while doing that ensure that there's zero chance of the UK being dragged into any debt crisis.

Edited March 26, 2012 by eFestivals

[eFestivals]

What that means is that the govt debt is transferred to the UK population as a whole (thru higher prices) - which means that the poorest get poorer but the richest do not, as the amount of debt transferred to an individual is lesser for the rich than the extra they are earning.

This is why what is going on is the greatest robbery in history, and nothing that can be factually called us "all being in it together".

It is a VERY deliberate plan for the rich to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. Nothing about it is anything to do with managing the country's economy.