I just feel he lacks essential leadership qualities from what I have seen of him.
Labour years were great from my point of view, but look at the state they left the economy in. Is it worth 5 years of great for 5 years of cutting to balance the books from their overspending.
I recall being told in 2010 to vote for the party I don't want in power in 2015 due to the amount of cuts they'd have to make to recover the overspending by labour that whoever won in 2010 would have no chance of winning the next election.
In my view, Labour left the economy in a rather better state than it was in in 1997.
The problem with this debate is that, thanks to some rather clever propaganda, largely by the Conservatives, the economy has been equated in the public eye with 'Government deficit'. As if the sole aim of a good economy is to have the Government spend no more than it takes in taxes. And then to add to that, that narrative conveniently forgets that there was a *
world* recession starting in 2008, which the Labour Party in the UK was, strangely enough, not solely responsible for, and which you would expect to lead to a deterioration in most countries' finances. Instead, the narrative makes out that Government deficit is both solely responsible for the UK's economic woes and solely the fault of Labour. And frankly, both of those propositions are rubbish.
In my view, what's much more important than the deficit is how much a country is producing - whether it is it's actually making enough goods and services to provide for the population, and whether it's investing enough to make sure that can continue into the future. I would say Labour in 1997 inherited a country that was in an appalling state in that regard, and did manage to turn that round to some extent (although not enough).
The deficit can be important, but set against that, a country's economy doesn't work the same way as a single household. For the economy as a whole, money circulates around in a somewhat circular fashion. Money the Government spends isn't necessarily lost - a lot of it comes back to the Government in the form of taxes. For that reason, the kind of austerity policies the Tories so love can be counterproductive. The Government spends less and the result is less economic activity, and less taxation revenue. And, most significantly, less of the production and investment that is the thing we really need for the future. For that reason, I was completely unsurprised when it turned out that George Osborne has completely failed to meet his deficit reduction targets. He shrank the economy. What else do you expect?
The Conservatives are, on the whole, ideologically opposed to 'big Government' and for that reason it's convenient for them to find economic reasons to justify more and bigger cuts. But the human cost of many of those cuts is in my view appalling and the supposed economic justification is, when you look at it in more detail, very iffy.
)
