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  LOL - that is a very carefully selected time period Tom.
  
  Mrs T did indeed believe in living within your means, but she agreed also that borrowing for the right reasons within your capacity to service the debt was a good thing. Indeed it is.
  
  If you look at borrowing trends you will see that debt spiraled out of control during the post 1997 period often to pay for the wrong type of borrowing. This was a result of two things:
  
  1/ The discouragement of investment. One of the first things Labour did in 1997 was to reduce significantly the amount of tax free savings people could make. Indeed they also reduced the tax free benefit though the end to the dividend tax credit.
  
  This sent out the wrong signals to the public and with less savings, if any, to fall back on they had little or no cash available for emergency spending. As a result the public resorted to the wrong type of borrowing. An example, holidays on credit cards without repaying it before the next holiday.
  
  2/ They kept interest rates down too long too low, enouraging further borrowing and discouraging further savings. It was at exactly the wrong part of the economic cycle for this. The long period of boom should have seen an increase in interest rates to cool down the debt boom,but Brown did not include that in the BoE interest rate brief so this problem was ignored. This, along with the government making the same mistakes as many of the public was a major reason for the mess we are in now.
  
  It is absolutely absurd to blame Mrs T because of the stupid mistakes made 7 plus years after she left office. She never sanctioned BoE independence and certainly would not have approved of personal and government debt being allowed to spiral out of control as it did.
  
  Worth adding that I was at the sharp end during that period seeing the direct effect on individual of the changes to savings made in 1997 and thereafter while regularly recommending people to clear down debt and save. I could often, it seemed, be talking to myself on that and more recently have found myself trying to help people pick up the pieces where they ignored that advice.

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