Hannah Fry on austerity

BoroMart said:
Not sure that they didn't know, I think they more likely chose to leave key information off it. Cherry picked data that would support the end goal.
Click to expand...
That's what I was about to say.

It always was a flawed ideology, the figures in reality never stacked up - and most "sensible" economists agreed on this.

Sadly we are still suffering from Dave & Gideon's immovable policy.

What was the debt when Hammond "eased" austerity measures - up from £900bn in 2010 to about £1.8tn in 2017?? (Ish)

Worked a treat, yeah......the party to be trusted with the countries finances.......🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️
 
Ideological attack on society by the Tories all based on flawed research and subsequent policy. This flaw was highlighted a few years ago by Grace Blakeley - of course none of the UK media organisations gave it much coverage.

The Tories went on a campaign of smear and lies to justify their austerity measures. That alone should make the people of this country never vote for them again.
 
BlindBoyGrunt said:
Austerity was never necessary and will never work. Any politician who says otherwise is lying or doesn't understand how the economy works. This country would be totally goosed without dept.
Click to expand...
And the number of voters the Tories seem to be able to frighten into voting for them despite austerity using the phantom of 'the national debt'. There was a woman in the Question Time audience apopletic that Labour were suggesting borrowing to invest in infrastructure and services etc. You'd think it was her personally who was going to have to pay it back.
 
h_m_boro said:
That's what I was about to say.

It always was a flawed ideology, the figures in reality never stacked up - and most "sensible" economists agreed on this.

Sadly we are still suffering from Dave & Gideon's immovable policy.

What was the debt when Hammond "eased" austerity measures - up from £900bn in 2010 to about £1.8tn in 2017?? (Ish)

Worked a treat, yeah......the party to be trusted with the countries finances.......🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️
Click to expand...
No, you don't understand,it's Labours fault that the economy is in such a mess, it was only this month that Rish! was telling us this 👍
 
There was a regular poster on here many years ago shouting about how it was what we needed. A wealthy chap, had a place in the Shard. Absolutely clueless with regards to the economy away from his own pocket. He wanted to see wages tumble.

Number 9 was his nickname. What a ****.
 
Sorry folks, austerity wasn't based on that report by rienhart and rogoff. It was used, certainly, as an excuse to shrink the state.

Austerity was an ideological choice by the tories to begin erosion of state funded safety nets that are built not-for-profit. The NHS and social secuirty mechanisms.

Our social security systems were designed to protect the most vulnerable in our society. The tories eroded that safety net a little at a time, to cull the most vulnerable in our society. It was by design.

There is a white paper from Glasgow university, peer reviewed that attributs 300K premature deaths to austerity. You can read it here:

University of Glasgow - University news - Over 300,000 ‘excess’ deaths in Great Britain attributed to UK Government auster

www.gla.ac.uk www.gla.ac.uk
 
In my experience, as someone who produces data, I would be very surprised if it was an error rather than what was needed by the person making the request. The amount of times I get a request along the lines of "this is what we are going to do, I need some data to support it" are very common. Cameron and co had a plan, they'll have asked for the data that backs it up and ignored any that doesn't. Then it's just about selling it and hoping nobody digs too deep. If they do it's passed off as an error. If you ask very specific questions then you can get very specific answers from data even if they are not representative of the whole picture.
 
BlindBoyGrunt said:
Austerity was never necessary and will never work. Any politician who says otherwise is lying or doesn't understand how the economy works. This country would be totally goosed without debt.
Click to expand...
As a concept though, "a balanced budget leading to debt as a % of GDP falling through substantial reductions in public expenditure" plays as 'no brainer commonsense' with a certain demographic.

All the soundbites & metaphors that went with it 'make do & mend', 'repair the roof while the sun shined', 'no money left', 'millstone for future generations', a shop ran this way would soon go out of business, profligate public sector, were all dog-whistles that didn't have to stand up to any scrutiny, once uttered it gave those in charge carte-blanche to cut spending and cut taxes.

By any of their stated measures the Conservative austerity plan has failed (the unstated ones of crippling the public sector and driving wealth to their friends, paymasters and donors has of course been a roaring success) but the one that sticks out for me was to retain our AAA credit rating. We lost that 10 years ago and despite Osborne et al ushering in continued public sector cuts in a bid to regain the AAA rating we have been slowly drifting down the rankings & according to one agency could lose AA and slip in to A+ this year.

Come the revolution, these financially illiterate f***ers should be the first against the wall.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top