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  Interesting comments there Mark.
  
  You see there are a number of sides to this equation.
  
  You refer to a 'credit culture' developed under Mrs T making this worse but she also had very strong feelings about living within your means and on the capital owning democracy. Savings and investment was a large part of this should we look at it in the round, she introduced tax incentivised savings to encourage that, PEPs and TESSAs helped the UK savings ratio to a record high. Such savings offer a buffer to people when times are hard and also means that they are less vulnerable to debt issues.
  
  Her deregulation of lending had massive beneficial effects and helped boost the economy and increase jobs and wealth. Some people of course did abuse it and go into excessive debt without taking care of the other side of the equation, savings but then there is a matter here of personal responsibility. Mrs T certainly is not someone who approved of living on borrowed money and certainly did not encourage it.
  
  Then we had those 13 years of Labour and that is where things really went wrong. First of all one side of the equation was demolished, the savings and investment side. One of Brown's first actions was to make changes to the savings regime that was devastating to savings and the savings ratio fell to a record low. This was accompanied by his flawed inflation brief to the Bank of England that ignored levels of indebtedness in the UK economy. The result was that interest rates were held down too low too long further discouraging savings and investment while encouraging more borrowing. This also created the massive housing bubble and that is a major factor now holing the economy back.
  
  But then Brown did lead by example - with his massive borrowing and deficit spending from 2001 when he should have been balancing the current account and paying off debt.
  
  So Mark - It is simply wrong to blame all this on the changes to the credit culture in the 80's. It is far too complex than that and Brown's ill considered reforms destroyed the important balance between saving and borrowing. We are suffering from 13 years of a disastrous economic mismanagement on a whole range of fronts by no less than Brown.

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