Tefflon Tony Blair

[AMGeed]

Leaving aside his political career, if you really want to know the kind of guy Blair is, just Google " Anthony Charles Lynton Blair". There are plenty of hits but I won't post them as they'll be removed, but you can read all about him yourself.

 

[prwales]

TB obviously feels responsible for the dire state the Labour Party is in today and not without cause the TB/GB era left the country in massive debt (just in case people don't remember) and with no discernible long term improvement for the most disadvantaged in society

It was actually the banks that caused the crisis; Labour with all party support chose to bail them out. The irony is that as the Banks and collective spivs, shysters and charlatans of the City of London own the Tory Party.
We all know with hindsight that apart from indemnifying savers these Banks should have been allowed to go bust.

 

[AMGeed]

Leaving aside his political career, if you really want to know the kind of guy Blair is, just Google " Anthony Charles Lynton Blair". There are plenty of hits but I won't post them as they'll be removed, but you can read all about him yourself.

Update, google....... "Anthony Charles Lynton Blair + Miranda" for results.

 

[Frontstep]

Are you talking about the same pair that presided over in excess of 130 tax rises, hitting the poorest hardest (fuel for example or maybe the 10% tax rate) yet still managed to spend all the extra and borrow close to £1tr and spend that as well while actually not improving anything (do not go down the NHS route)?????

And yet they got through it all with wry smiles and an arrogance never seen before in politics while telling us that throwing money at a problem will indeed solve it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes indeed its fact I didn't say I liked them and Blair had me swearing at the TV yesterday much to the amusement of our household.

Gordon Brown was an excellent Chancellor and is revered abroad for his economy saving prowess

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/william-keegan-gordon-brown-saved-britain-may-even-have-saved-world-1476333

 

[redjules51]

Blair is and always was, PURE 100% EVIL.

 

[malcolm E53 AMG]

Are you talking about the same pair that presided over in excess of 130 tax rises, hitting the poorest hardest (fuel for example or maybe the 10% tax rate) yet still managed to spend all the extra and borrow close to £1tr and spend that as well while actually not improving anything (do not go down the NHS route)?????

And yet they got through it all with wry smiles and an arrogance never seen before in politics while telling us that throwing money at a problem will indeed solve it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Don't forget selling the family silver dumping our gold reserves at rock bottom prices.

As far as tax was concerned GB at a stroke put 90% of Pension schemes into deficit by his tax grab on share dividend tax the outcome of which we are still paying for and will be for generations to come

He single handedly within a generation complicated the tax system twofold and left so many loopholes even HMRC struggled with the complexity, now it doesn't take a genius to know that the best systems are those that people understand and therefore are praised for their simplicity

He may have 'saved the world' but it was his watch that nearly destroyed it

 

[JohnArnoldBrown]

"Running the economy" is just like playing pool when you're drunk. The skill lies in taking credit when things go well, and blaming unforeseen circumstances when they don't. Neither one side nor the other are ever really in control of the economy, it is steered by the invisible hand of the market, with a bit of interference now and again from the likes of George Soros, or the cheating bastards who rigged the LIBOR.

 

[Frontstep]

One of the benefits for me of no political allegiance is I can be more objective about Governments performance.
Brown was good at his job,
the Labour Party did throw more money down the Conservative PFI blackhole and Brown didn't guess the future price of Gold correctly but anyone who knows where its going over the next year needs to invest or request sectioning.

 

[JBell]

Brown didn't guess the future price of Gold correctly

NO

What Brown did was announce he was going to sell the Gold on a specific date, this sent them market into freefall and he sold at the low price which he was responsible for causing.

What he should have done is not sold it at all and we would be £bns better off

 

[Frontstep]

NO

What Brown did was announce he was going to sell the Gold on a specific date, this sent them market into freefall and he sold at the low price which he was responsible for causing.

What he should have done is not sold it at all and we would be £bns better off

How can it possibly be no ?

I wrote;

"Brown didn't guess the future price of Gold correctly"

 

[Xtractorfan]

Tell me how we would be billions better off if we still had the gold reserves.
Brown was smarter than most people gave him credit for.. He kept the pound and knew that with or without gold reserves our economy would still remain the same.
An economy as big as the UK does not need Gold reserves to bolster or maintain its currency.

 

[JBell]

How can it possibly be no ?

I wrote;

"Brown didn't guess the future price of Gold correctly"

It's a no because the price of gold went down as a direct result of him announcing the sale because everyone knew on which date several tonnes of gold would be sold.

Had he just sold it off gradually without announcing the sale the price would have been much higher

 

[prwales]

the price of gold when stratospheric as the crisis of 2008 unwound; people lost faith in fiat currencies, if that hadn't happened this would be less of an issue over the gold sale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sale_of_UK_gold_reserves,_1999–2002

 

[davemercedes]

Tell me how we would be billions better off if we still had the gold reserves.
Brown was smarter than most people gave him credit for.. He kept the pound and knew that with or without gold reserves our economy would still remain the same.
An economy as big as the UK does not need Gold reserves to bolster or maintain its currency.

Brown was so smart that along with knock-down price of OUR gold (just something else the taxpayer paid for the losses) he wiped away most of the regulations that had kept bankers and finance houses under at least some level of control.

He also introduced taxation on pension funds - see wikipedia

"Documents subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act showed that civil servants warned at the time that the move, which generated £5bn in tax revenue, could lead to the closure of many occupational schemes, which subsequently came to pass. In 2008, a biographer of Brown, Tom Bower, claimed that Brown had originally sought a larger sum from pension funds, but backed down in the face of opposition.[7]

Yeah, dead smart(ar$e).

 

[Frontstep]

It's a no because the price of gold went down as a direct result of him announcing the sale because everyone knew on which date several tonnes of gold would be sold.

Had he just sold it off gradually without announcing the sale the price would have been much higher

Are you answering another question then ?

To reiterate :

"Brown didn't guess the future price of Gold correctly"

Are you now saying he did guess the price of gold correctly ?
he either did or he didn't or shall we just leave it ?

 

[Craiglxviii]

Are you answering another question then ?

To reiterate :

"Brown didn't guess the future price of Gold correctly"

Are you now saying he did guess the price of gold correctly ?
he either did or he didn't or shall we just leave it ?

He didn't guess that the gold rate would increase 1000% no.

What he did was to deliberately ensure the worst possible conditions to sell, wait for it, 380 TONS of gold. And that was done to spread the risk of government- owned futures. To say that it was badly managed is an understatement, the loss on the sale from the market rate the day before, to what was achieved throughout the various auctions made us a nett loss of £118m versus if we had just done nothing but continue to use it as collateral.

 

[Frontstep]

Yes he called it wrong, his theory I suppose was cash in the economy worked harder than gold in a vault.

 

[Craiglxviii]

Yes he called it wrong, his theory I suppose was cash in the economy worked harder than gold in a vault.

The whole thing originated in a Treasury study that identifies a number of different government investments that contained risk of devaluing, and suggested that the risk should be mitigated. We also needed to raise our dollar reserves so it was decided to sell off half (!!) of the gold reserve, held in Ft. Knox.

None of that was necessarily a bad idea without hindsight. What was just batsh*t CRAZY-mental was the way in which (Broon) decided to inform the markets two months in advance of the first round of auctions. That was seen as very strange at the time by the brokers spaffing their kecks over buying Special Large Reserve bullion at 15% below the then- current futures rates. Because, of course, it's not like brokers and traders do t actually talk to one another now is it? Apparently Broon and his Treasury team thought the opposite.*.

Of course 2 years later the same brokers had used the gold to electroplate their second and third Ferraris after the market rate skyrocketed.

*(Now, this is a guy who would not allow for any dissenting opinion, he surrounded himself by yes- men and wondered why things didn't always go his way. )

 

[Painter16]

There is no-one on this planet I despise more than Blair, he personifies everything wrong with politics, he is a self serving, odious, deceitful man who milks the very system he said was corrupt.

He signed us up to the very agreement we have rejected, gave everything away and removed way too much of our soverign rights thinking it would make him friends and help him when he got deposed, he was right and has gone on to become a multi millionaire with a role of peace envoy to the very place he waged war on, the hipocrasy of it staggers me.

I hope he vanishes into the ether again never to trouble our doorstep

So you don't like him then

 

[JBell]

So you don't like him then

Not a fan, no