Re: UK loses triple A rating : Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:50 pm  

JerryChicken wrote:

The other fascinating thing is the automatic assumption that the LibDem vote will be non-existant the next time around - based on what ?

There is the tuition fee promise of course, played a blinder there did Clegg in an archetypal "I don't care what we said, this gets me five years sitting at the top table", but other than that can anyone think of anything that the LibDems have done or said since 2010 that will cost them in 2015 ?

They will almost certainly lose the student vote and the left of centre want-an-alternative-to-New-Labour-because-of-the-Iraq-War vote. But they won't go to the Tories.

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Sun Feb 24, 2013 6:46 pm  

sally cinnamon wrote:

They will almost certainly lose the student vote and the left of centre want-an-alternative-to-New-Labour-because-of-the-Iraq-War vote. But they won't go to the Tories.

If Clegg hadn't sold his soul for a Ministerial limo, they might have gone with the Lib Dems

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 7:31 am  

General point about these ratings is they are more important for private firms than for governments. The idea of a credit rating from an agency is to solve information problems for potential investors, if you want to lend to sally cinnamon enterprises you might not know much about its financial viability so an independent credit rating agency giving a rating of Aaa or Ba3 etc tells you whether it's investment grade (safe) or speculative grade (take your chances).

However if you want to lend to a government there is much more information available about the viability of a government to allow you to assess the risk of whether or not the government is going to default. Potential investors will be guided by this rather than the credit ratings. Hence it hasn't hit the US.

The main problem for Osborne is a political one, he is the only chancellor that has ever gone on about the importance of protecting our AAA rating and has used this as justification of his success "credibility in my strategy has been endorsed by us keeping our credit rating" and also as an attack on Labour because under Labour the AAA rating was put on 'negative watch' but never removed. Now of course he has egg on his face because the UK has lost its AAA rating for the first time since 1978 and he has to try and argue that 'credit ratings aren't that important anyway'.

Osborne has to change his position on things all the time, up to 2007 he was pledging to match Labour's spending plans, after 2008 he changed his position to "Labour spent too much". In 2006 he was writing an article in the Times saying that the UK should model its economy on Ireland, in 2011 he was warning that if we didn't follow his approach the UK would end up in the same position as Ireland.

These kind of inconsistencies mean he doesn't even have much credibility from his own side, right wingers see him as a light weight. He is a Chancellor out of his depth.

[DaveO]

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:38 am  

sally cinnamon wrote:

They will almost certainly lose the student vote and the left of centre want-an-alternative-to-New-Labour-because-of-the-Iraq-War vote. But they won't go to the Tories.

No one is going to vote in the next election with reference to the Iraq war.

[DaveO]

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:49 am  

JerryChicken wrote:

The major point being that those who are most affected by the student fees, this years intake, were 14 or 15 years old at the last election, do they hold a grudge, do they recall any of it at all - the students of 2015 will have been 12 or 13 years of age when Clegg made his promise, do you know any 12 year olds with an interest in politics enough to form their allegiences at that age ?

The election was in 2010 and my son who went to Uni in Sept was 16. So you should ask my son. Of course he holds a grudge. He is affected now and he knows what went on before in terms of fees and what was said at the election. It's naive to think this years students do not know who put the fees up and who said they would scrap them but them didn't.

By 2015 student fees will be the norm, no-one blinks even now when signing up for £27,000 worth of education and the idea that the postman should not have to pay for your further education seems to have won over a self-centred electorate.

The propaganda may well have worked outside of the student population - and their families but not within it.

And as to £27,000, where do get that figure from? After three years on the minimum maintenance loan the debt ends up as over £56,000 due to a real rate of interest being charged and it compounding.

If you think people seeing their indebtedness going up like that is going to be ignored by those affected I think you are mistaken.

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 11:56 am  

Osborne was daft to make a statement about protecting our rating in the first place since the decision on what our rating will be is out of his control. So far it is only one company that has downgraded us isn't it?

I doubt money will be flowing from London to New York since the US had their rating downgraded months ago.

I'm sure I read on the BBC website that only Canada and Germany now have a triple A rating across the board? But maybe I got that confused with something else.

Also, we are hardly in junk status.

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 12:34 pm  

DaveO wrote:

And as to £27,000, where do get that figure from? After three years on the minimum maintenance loan the debt ends up as over £56,000 due to a real rate of interest being charged and it compounding.

If you think people seeing their indebtedness going up like that is going to be ignored by those affected I think you are mistaken.

Its a very simple nett figure of 3x9000, however I am well aware of how The Student Loan Company and the whole student loan thing works as my eldest (luckily) completed her degree two years ago on annual tuition fees of £3k plus a maintenance loan - its when you see the annual statements coming in now that you realise how much she potentially owes.

To hear Ministers speaking of student loans being irrelevant to the individuals is crass and irresponsible, whether or not they ever earn enough to pay them off is not the point, its only a matter of time before credit rating agencies start to take into account the £50/60k student loans and suddenly you've got a lot of graduates who'll struggle with future finance.

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 12:46 pm  

Kosh wrote:

Labour wouldn't have cut public services as far as this Government has. They wouldn't have tripled University fees. They wouldn't have wasted money on back-to-work schemes that aren't working. They wouldn't have siphoned off vast sums of public money to their mates in the private sector. They wouldn't have public money funding private schools. They wouldn't have a nutjob busy trying to turn education back 50 years. They wouldn't have screwed over the NHS. They wouldn't be contemplating the privatisation of emergency services. They wouldn't have wasted money on elected 'crime commissioners' that nobody wants.

That's just off the top of my head, and just the things affecting 'middle England'. If you add in the disgraceful actions of that scrotum IDS, demonising the disabled and the unemployed, it's hard to see how the majority of people in this country wouldn't be better off.

And I neither voted for the last 2 Labour administrations nor for Labour at the last election.

Is this the same party that 'invented WMDs'?, so you have said what they would not do - now in you view what would they have done?

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 1:32 pm  

Sal Paradise wrote:

Is this the same party that 'invented WMDs'?, so you have said what they would not do - now in you view what would they have done?

Nice try at a deflection from the issue there Sal.
They said they would aim to halve (not eliminate) the deficit in one parliamentary term.
They said they would concentrate on growth as much as cuts.

We'll never know whether that would have succeeded.

All we can go by is by looking at what has happened, not what might have happened.

Before the election, Osborne was warned by Labour and LibDems that by cutting too deep and too early he would stifle the growth that would contribute to recovery and ultimately to the reduction of the deficit and debt.
Nonetheless he set his stall out on two main planks.
1. Eradicate the deficit in one parliamentary term.
2. Preserve the UKs AAA rating.

Epic fail ... even by his own measure.

His tune changed every year in opposition (see Kosh's earlier post) ... in government he has made his case and shown that he can't fulfil it and has also shown he is totally out of his depth.

Re: UK loses triple A rating : Mon Feb 25, 2013 1:45 pm  

Osborne will now be under extreme pressure from the right-wing Tory backbenchers to lower taxes and to slash public expenditure. We have already seen, over the EU, that the current Tory leadership buckles under pressure from those back benchers when push comes to shove.