Originally Posted by
Ganpati's Goonerz--AFC's Aboriginal Fertility Cult
That data says that's not even true of Atlee even though we had a fully employed semi-command total war economy up until VJ day.
Anyone who thinks that Atlee, Cripps and that govt were in any way economically reckless, or left the economy in any way worse than could have been hoped for is simply being disingenuous or thick.
A quick google shows me that the unemployment rate in 1970 was about the same as in 1964, while inflation was slightly lower.
Do you want the links? So basically your assertion is simply a myth.
The economy was screwed by the unions in 1979, just like they were in 1974. But that Lab govt had had to deal with the 1973 oil crisis. Inflation rose from 8% in 1973 to 22% c.75/6 and had fallen back to 8% by '78/9, meaning it was lower when Sunny Jim left office in spring than it was when Wilson came in in 1974.
Not a too shabby performance, which is why he was 5% ahead in the polls in autumn '78 before the fückwitted Stalinists like Jez called the WoD and condemned us to 18 years of Thatcherism.
Yes, unemployment rose from 2% at the time of the opec crisis, and was around 6% in 1977/8, but was falling slightly under Lab from then on.
So you want to be really careful about causation vs correlation. (Except you don't, do you, because you're simply trying to troll lefties knowing full well none of them can stop work for an hour to google the data as I have.)
But under Maggie, unemployment went up to over 12%. It was higher when she left that when she entered (despite her having had a decade, despite the north sea oil, and despite Lab having had to deal with the full blast of the oil crisis.)
It was still 8% when the Tories left power in 1997, while under Atlee it stayed at about 2%, and under Wilson in the '60s, it was between 2-3%.
Again, if we want to try to separate causation and correlation, let's look at just Blair's decade, which means we don't skew the figures with the final 2-3 years of Brown dealing with the sub-prime crash.
Blair reduced unemployment from roughly 8% to 5% while inflation hovered at around or under 4%.
Oh, and the debt/gdp ratios fell under Atlee 45-51, under Wilson 64-70 and under Blair '97-07 and was basically the same at the end as at the start under Harold and Sunny Jim '74-9.
While it's gone up from 40% to 80% under your mob since 2010.
What's that you say? Down to the crash? In which case you need to make allowances for the oil crisis {and the last 3 years of NuLab}, and if you do that, you'll see that Lab actually left the econ in a similar or better shape than they inherited it.
So basically, B, you're just speaking bøllocks.
Out of interest, what the fück did you study at uni?
