Verbal

So can YOU answer tim's point? I've given up with grandad.

Your accent is terrible.

As ANYONE who lived through the dark days of 80s knows all too well, income tax cuts were matched - and more - by backhanded tax rises, in everything from VAT (almost DOUBLED), to national insurance and the poll tax.

delldays é um tolo.

The point I keep coming back to is that tim has highlighted the contrast in government debt between 97, when it was proportionately HIGHER after eighteen years of Tory 'competent' governments, and 07, when it was LOWER after ten years of 'profligate' Labour governments. It rather undermines the received wisdom trotted out repeatedly here and elsewhere...

Compare like with like. Putting the UK economy in the same bracket as Hong Kong - now the 'City' for China - is pointless. If LD's point were to be true, Germany would be poorer than us. A simple response to a singular point.

On that basis, Germany would have a weaker economy than ours.

The credit crunch was a liquidity crisis. Liquidity comes from the international banking system. The banks themselves got hooked like cheap junkies on derivatives. You could have an argument about what 'caused' the sudden flight from derivatives - but not that derivatives and similar financial instruments were piling bad debt on top of bad debt as they spiralled ever upwards in international trades. A bank-stoked bubble. Not one of those links you quote demonstrates the point you keep pushing beneath the surface, that Labour's 'overspending' substantially caused the crisis. So let's get back to tim's comparative point about debt in 97 and 07.

No, not the one which enables you to disappear into voodoo economics, but the comparative point about 97 and 07.

You can't just ignore tim's point though.

You sound like one of those soothsayers in CNBC. There is no guarantee of anyone 'cashing in nicely'. It's wishful thinking - especially with a government hellbent on double-dipping. The National Audit Office - a rather more reliable judge than you or me - puts the paper loss to the taxpayer, in December 2010, at £90bn. Most of these losses are bound up in toxic assets, much of it in disaggregated and now busted mortgages in the American West and Midwest. The ghost towns and dereliction (have your SEEN Detroit recently?) are as good an indication as you'll ever get just how long a crawl out of the hole it really will be. Recovering taxpayers' 'investments' is going to be a long, painful, fraught process. There is no light at the end of the tunnel yet.

Who'd have thought there could be so many persnickety posters in one place. Well done everyone. Keep the philistines at bay.

You're being VERY economical with the truth. £137bn went on actual bailouts, but the British taxpayer's total liability for the bailout is £512bn - the remainder (and obviously the far larger amount) having been committed in the form of guarantees to prop up the creaking banking system. Interest payments alone on funds actually committed is currently costing the taxpayer about £5bn a year. All of which is why I assumed you were joking when you started this thread. Bankers are the state-handout spongers nonpareil.

Behind the sneering, leering references to 'trolley dollies' is a misogynistic, condescending, narrow-minded peevishness - characteristics found only too frequently here within a small, self-selecting group of oafs presumably in denial of their own inadequacy. I'd avoid joining this pathetic little gang if I were you.

Did you really mean to write that? Hilarious. Well at least we're agreed on something.

Even I never thought you could be this clueless. What have women done to you exactly?

Stop it!

I admire your gift for understatement. Breathtaking.

I'll have to take your side on this one Johnny Bog. A few years ago, I met Peggy Oginowski, the widow of the captain of American Airlines Flight 11. She was herself a purser in the same company. She helped us piece together the order of events before the plane struck the North Tower. I also talked to the families of Flight 11 attendants Betty Ong and Madeleine Sweeney, both of whom were left to struggle alone to deal with what they only knew at the time to be a hijacking. They had been extensively trained in responding to the violent takeover of a plane, and acted, bravely, accordingly. Almost everything we know of what happened on that flight came from calls to the ground from Ong and Sweeney. While channelling as much information as possible - which quickly revealed the identity of the attackers - they had to deal with distressed passengers, thrown into a panic by the sudden dives and turns made by the cretinous Atta and his fellow 'jihadists', now at the controls of the 767. At least one of the attendants made repeated attempts to get into the cockpit, having to find her a way past a stabbed, probably dead, passenger (Daniel Lewin), the stabbed, dying flight purser, and through a cloud of Mace. A pretty extraordinary act of bravery. So, yes - dismissively calling people 'trolly dollies' is a mark of smug stupidity. I suppose you just have to make allowances...

So you will be voting Labour next election?

You surprise me.

Are you scared trousers? Are you?

I think the random chaos is MUCH more fun. If only we could combine it with a tube strike...

I'll vote no then.

Are you thinking of a Confederacy of Dunces?