[voicereasonish]

You obviously don't remember the 70s.

Do we have rubbish piling up on the streets, dead people piling up not being buried? Do we have rolling power cuts due to strikes? Are we all on a 3 day week? Massive inflation and interest rates?

The UK is turning the corner after the disastrous spend spend spend! Socialism of the last decade.

[disputin]

I'm interested to see what's around that corner. What is the average price of a London home at the moment - 12x salary? Foreigners are still flocking in, and the market mania seems to be increasing with sellers increasing prices 7% a month. I find it hard to believe this isn't leading to some sort of catastrophe. This site keeps track of the UK housing market: http://www.housepriceviews.com/

[josephlord]

The disastrous spending of recent decades has been private spending funded by borrowing not public spending (although arguably the government should have tried to be more counter-cyclical than it was). The recovery happening at the moment is due to borrowing restarting and accelerating and is also the first steps towards the next crisis.

[mseebach]

> (although arguably the government should have tried to be more counter-cyclical than it was)

That's a very polite way of acknowledging that the UK government ran a massive deficit-funded spending campaign throughout one of the fattest and longest boom cycle in history.

[josephlord]

Public borrowing was small compared to private borrowing, it would have been better to take action to limit bank lending to cool the housing market than to drastically cut public spending. And I don't think many political leaders would have borrowed much less, under the Tories I think both spending and taxes would have been lower which wouldn't have produced better results.