Man in a Shed: Chancellors debate

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Remember its Red Vince

Vince Cable has to do a lot of pretending.

He's and ex-Labour politician and was at Glasgow University at the time Brown was there. His time at Shell is far less impressive than he makes out - and as we've seen Vince isn't above letting people come to the wrong conclusions.

His party is very left wing and anti-UK pro-EU, but Vince has to sit on that Lib Dem fence to win votes in Twickenham, but we know its not what he really believes.

No Vince is red in tooth and claw, as his amazing outburst of class hate at the end of the TV chancellors debate shows. He's one of those Labour guys who left for the SDP but wishes he hadn't and can't find his way back home.

And lets not forget that signature Lib Dem hypocrisy that Vince so ably represents.

See also Paul Goodman coming to the same conclusion over at Conservative home.

Update: David Cameron gets this spot on - "the great thing about being Vince Cable is that no one asks you tough questions" quite !

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman