Labour passes the buck on recession

The BBC is reporting that government will fight the recession with “every weapon at its disposal. However, they have been slow to react and they have not put in place the building blocks for economic stability – they have a decade in which they have achieved very little. 

Figures published on Friday showed that UK economic output contracted by 1.5% in the last three months of 2008 compared with the previous three months. This was the steepest quarterly fall since 1980.

The UK economy has now shrunk in each of the past two quarters - it fell 0.6% between July and September - providing official confirmation that the UK is in recession for the first time since the early 1990s.

Unemployment has been rising sharply with the total number of people out of work now at its highest level since 1997.

Friday’s figures confirm what everyone in Britain has seen coming for a long time.

It’s a sad commentary on a decade of Labour government that they have succeeded in producing an almost exact replica of the boom-bust cycle we had under the Conservatives.

The recession cannot be blamed simply on problems overseas. In blaming everything on the US, Gordon Brown is desperately seeking to pull the wool over our eyes and distract attention from his own failure.

For a decade he presided over an overheated housing market and a City of London gambling with the nation’s future. The Government must now urgently clear up the confusion over its bank bail out plans.

Gordon Brown must deliver big, permanent and fair tax cuts for people on low and middle incomes and use the money wasted on a pointless VAT cut on a huge green job creation scheme instead.