Remember the Soviet five-year plans?

[Workingman]

Red Ed wants to go one better. He wants us to give him a ten-year plan. He says that is how long it is going to take him to fix the UK.

He is going to do all this on the back of the Tory measures currently being taken to fix his earlier thirteen-year plan, and which he has blocked at every turn. Ed's new plan is going to be done without borrowing any more money or making any more cuts, but spending on things like welfare and the NHS is going to go up.

Sorry Ed, you might have ditched New Labour's 'borrow and spend' policy, but you are certainly going back to old Labour's 'tax and spend'. Your numbers do not add up, and I suspect that a lot of your worried back-benchers know it. We, the public, certainly do, and I bet the back-benchers have a feel for that.

If I were a betting man I wouldn't put a used luncheon voucher on Ed being Lab leader for much longer. An election defeat will see to that.

[victor]

is'nt it funny how politicians know what is best for the country when they are in OPPOSITION but not actually in office !

[medsec222]

I suspect Ed might be long gone before the ten years is up.

[Suff]

They're going to put up business taxes. Because, we all know, businesses are raping the country, making obscene profits (like Phones4U) and basically taking the mickey.

Of course the "rich" will have to pay more. 60% tax on already overextended budgets. The poor, of course, will get even larger tax breaks. Perhaps no tax up to £15,000. Of course they'll have to raise the minimum wage again to make that viable on most counts.

Naturally business and money will flock to Britain standing in line to wait to be fleeced.....

I noticed that Cameron and Osborne had managed to get the deficit down to 90bn. I know they wanted it down to 60bn by the next budget but I see they're overshot their target again. Downside of coalition with the Lib Dems, but still better than another round with Labour.....

We're still spending more than we can afford and the net debt has got to be hanging like a millstone around the neck of the country. By next year our net debt has got to be somewhere close to total GDP. Which means, in real terms, that the whole country is paying 3% of everything it generates, let alone earns in income, before we ever see 1 new pence of tax revenues.

So, in this environment, Labour is going to spend more money, borrow less and make the whole country a paradise for.........................

I thought I just woke up at 04:30, I didn't think my dreams had turned into a nightmare.....

[pederito1]

Ten years of him and I think we really would qualify for Third World status.

[JoM]

I don't think the country would be safe in his hands for 10 minutes, let alone 10 years

[KateLMead]

Ten years of him and I think we really would qualify for Third World status.

We have reached third world status pederito. The decline of this country has been magnified each and every day and the general public are complacent they are in denial, excluding of course the thousands of immigrants joyfully being placed in luxurious hotels owned mostly by foreigners as the indigineous struggle to survive. And to boot the poor immigrants are given £150.00 a month to keep them happy.

[Suff]

Kate, that's not 3rd world status, that's first world idiocy.

Whilst having the Miliband idiot and his cohorts would certainly damage the UK, it would not remove our 1st world infrastructure or our 1st world wealth (in the short term). Saying that doesn't help because nobody who looks at the poverty in India and Africa would believe about the UK becoming a 3rd world country.

However, if we are talking about running the risk of being treated as a 3rd world country on the financial markets, then perhaps you are right.

However I have a different thought. Perhaps if we lost our AA+ rating and had no chance of going back to AAA, for borrowing money, then perhaps we might be forced to stop spending more than we earn and make us live within our budget.

We could start by ceasing all overseas aid and pull our military back to our borders until we have our budget balanced. Of course, then, we'd be bucking the trend as virtually all 1st world countries are living a credit card lifestyle.

It happened to France under Mitterrand in the 80's. He started this crazy borrow and spend regime and the markets closed him down when he ran well over GDP with his deficit. It can happen again but the markets seem to be running scared of another Lehman's. Everybody in the market knows that the entire system is unsustainable but everybody is scared of shouting "The King is naked" for fear of bringing down the house of cards...

[Workingman]

Ed 'forgot' to mention the deficit during his speech! When pressed on how he would deal with it up cropped a few ideas: a mansion tax on homes over £2m; and a windfall tax on tobacco companies.

Talk about making up policy on the hoof. I would like to say that the man is a disaster waiting to happen, but I would be well behind the curve; he already is a disaster.