It really pisses me off when people blame Gordon Brown for causing the current economic recession. It doesn’t take a genius to know that he didn’t.

This is a worldwide recession. Gordon Brown, as prime minister of a country that is far from economically powerful, could not cause a recession that has affected just about every developed nation on the planet.

It’s the economy, stupid! We live in a free market economy, wherein businesses are generally unregulated and can charge what they want, pay what they want, etc. It’s one of the reasons why bankers can pay themselves huge amounts of money, because they’re not regulated.

The problem with the free market however is that it works on a cycle of boom and bust. There are periods of inflation and periods of recession - continually. Regardless of who was in power, the recession would have happened anyway.

And you can’t say Cameron would have managed it better either. Recessions have historically been overcome by increasing public spending, while the Conservative policy promises to cut public expenditures to bone-dry levels. Including the loss of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs. And having more people being dependent on government benefits is NOT what you want in a recession.

Get the money back from the banks. A solution that has strangely not been mentioned by any party. We gave the banks several billion to stop them from going under (like they did in Iceland, which caused the entire country’s economy to collapse), and now the parties are planning to get this money back by raising taxes and cutting services - all while the bankers of the free market pocket salaries in the millions for not running the banks properly.

Why don’t we get the money back from them? Is it really not that obvious?