You are right the Tories have made an incredible job of not finishing Labour off. It would be like us going into the last 5 minutes of our Challenge Cup match against Featherstone, leading 12-10...people would be asking questions.

IMO if the Tories were going into this election with David Davis as leader and Ken Clarke as Shadow Chancellor they would have the election sewn up because even if they were being attacked by traditional Labour voters and Labour media, they would have the traditional Tory vote mobilised behind them and they'd have the City and business community onside as well. Cameron and Osborne's biggest problem isn't that their opponents are trying to paint them as out of touch Etonian Tory boys, its the fact that their own core support is so lukewarm towards them and the City isn't convinced. They have not had any coherent strategy or line of attack on Labour, they've been shifting their economic position from opposing Labour's interventionism during the recession and stressing the need for austerity measures, to saying that they would ring fence the NHS and increase spending on the military campaign in Afghanistan, then saying that Labour's 'efficiency savings' were a drop in the ocean, and now saying that those savings would finance reversing the 1% rise in NI. They now seem to have landed on this NI issue as being their main line of attack in the election campaign...but a 1% reverse is a minor policy detail not a headline campaigning point. They have not convinced anybody.

Cameron as well has made some embarrassing gaffes and looked out of his depth politically, when there was the story of Gordon Brown being alleged to be a bully, Cameron gave a news conference the next day saying "there has got to be a public inquiry on this"....which just made him look stupid because obviously there wasn't going to be a public inquiry and Cameron had to drop his call for an inquiry quietly else he'd look like nobody took any notice. Then when Stephen Byers and Geoff Hoon got stung into that cash for lobbying row, Cameron was at it again, demanding a public inquiry, again nobody took any notice.....these kind of elementary errors are embarassing and not something which a leader like David Davis, or in the past John Major, would have made.

Yes, I agree, but my main point was that once it became obvious that the Blair government were going to invest heavily in public services, then various interested parties began circling like the vultures around a lottery winner.

Certainly, Blair & co made a balls up of monitoring expenditure, but it can't be doubted that their aims were actually both the right and honourable ones.

This is quite useful and shows the gross debt of various countries over the last 20 years (Just press the play button). I noticed the accelerated increase for all countries since 2007.

rlLinkrl

Bizarre that you blame Blair for "benefit culture" seeing as the biggest rise of benefit claimants in history came in the 1980s under the Thatcher government.

In 1979 for instance, when the Conservatives fought an election on the campaign "Labour isn't working" with a poster showing the dole queues, about 6% of the eligible workforce was on unemployment benefits. By 1983 this had doubled to 12%. Even in 1993 this was 10%, it had fallen slightly to just under 7% by the time Labour won the election in 1997.

In the whole of Tony Blair's government, the unemployment rate was lower than it had been when he took over, it stayed at around 5% throughout his time in office then under Brown's government following the recession it went back up to just under 8% and now in Camerons government has risen to just over 8%.

The big sea change in a society where most people were employed to having European style high unemployment took place in the 1980s and 1990s, the point in which we had low unemployment was 1997-2007 which was the Blair years. It was the 1980s where a generation of worklessness was borne, in communities that used to have a culture of getting up and doing a hard days work it became the accepted norm to just go to the DHSS office and sign on, if you don't get what you want start riots.

Then under Blair's years people started getting back to work although the scars of long term unemployment were deep rooted in some of those communities so there were some areas that didn't get reached by employment.

Now in Cameron's government it is going back to the days of the past Tory government, a higher claimant rate than there has been since 1996, unions going on strikes, students rioting and attacking the police, inner city areas rioting.

The Conservatives have always been the party that prides itself on supporting the private sector to create jobs its just a shame that their social policies encourage people to sit at home claiming benefits whilst the employers can't fill them.

You are seeming to link numbers of benefit claimants with "a benefit culture". The benefit culture was called by the liberal elite.

Well it's a good place to start.

During the 1960s and 1970s people didn't mind doing a hard days work down the steel works or the coal pits getting their hands dirty but the Thatcher government of the 1980s turned us into a society where we'd rather turn up and claim dole.

You can't blame people though because with such low wages and the fact people would be paying so much tax and lose their housing benefits they were out of pocket coming off benefits, so they stayed on the dole. That was the Britain of the 1980s and 1990s.

At least Blair's government made some headway into tackling this social failure, brought in a minimum wage, cut the starting rate of income tax to 10p, and introduced a tax credit system for the low paid particularly working families, so it meant work paid. So people moved off benefits and came into work. If you look at the ILO figures across the world, through the 97-07 period we had lower unemployment than all the other G7 economies apart from Japan and briefly the US for a period.

That period was one in which living standards and ambition rose, young people wanted to get an education, go to university and then get graduate jobs and get on the property ladder. In opposition the Tories just said that was Blair's fantasy land of sending everybody to university and there are too many graduates etc. This would be a fair argument if they had come in with a plan of saying there are too many graduates and not enough training in skills x, y and z in which we have skills shortages and so are having to recruit migrants from Eastern Europe, so we are going to shift the education emphasis to providing this training. But there is no plan like that at all, they have just made it more difficult to access higher education (and by cutting EMA, further education as well) with no alternative plan in place. So what you will get is kids doing what they did under the Tories in the 1980s and 1990s, leave school at 16 and then go to the dole office, smoke weed, get pregnant, get provided for by the state.