From #84
"Every single Labour government has ended in a financial crisis right from the very first time it was in power."
From today's Guardian...
"Charles Moore claims that Thatcher saved the country (Report, 20 April). But she herself defined Thatcherism as "living within your means". During 1980-2005, private household debt soared to £1.5tn, equal to total national income. Financial debt rose to £7tn. After the banking crash of which her policies sowed the seeds, public debt will reach £1.4tn by 2016, equal to GDP. These are the highest levels of indebtedness in British peacetime history.
"Living within your means" implies buying only what you can afford. In 1980, her first full year in office, the UK balance of trade in goods was in surplus by £1.3bn. By 1990, it was in deficit by £18.7bn, and because of her laying waste UK manufacturing industry it has steadily eroded ever since then till last year it reached £106.3bn, nearly 8% of GDP.
She set great store by "sound money" - that the currency should hold its value through restraining inflationary credit creation and giving priority to productive investment. Money supply, broadly stable in the 1960-70s, escalated five-fold by 1990 and then continued to rise exponentially to 2011, a 20-fold explosion after Thatcher dismantled all controls over bank credit. The money supply ballooned at a 12% annual rate when inflation was averaging only 3%-4% - an era of unsound [
we'll have to wait to discover what actually was at the end of this sentence:Money/thinking?]
Thatcher also claimed to have made Britain strong again. In fact only 8% of this hugely increased bank lending went into productive investment; most of the rest went into inflationary housing and credit bubbles.
Michael Meacher MP
Lab, Oldham West and Royton"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/21/thatcher-era-not-seamless-whole