...and they are even worse than predicted. We already know about the credit crisis that Blair and Brown promoted via friends at City banks, but the socio-economic results are equally bad. The UK has more personal debt than the US and it is actually greater than the GDP as opposed to a hair under the US GDP. City bankers never had it so good as they have during the reign of New Labour. So good, in fact, that Blair now works for JP Morgan where he receives millions. Yesterday a new report was released that reinforces existing sentiment that the Blair years promoted inequality and were failures.
Ministers were last night putting a brave face on figures showing a widening gap between the richest and poorest families and a second successive 100,000 jump in the number of children living below the government's poverty threshold. They said extra money pledged to help the young and the elderly in this year's budget underlined the commitment to meet Tony Blair's 1999 pledge to eradicate child poverty by 2020 and halve it by 2010.
Britain's leading tax experts - the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) - said that despite the billions of pounds spent on tax credits, Labour had yet to meet its 2005 benchmark of reducing child poverty by a quarter and that the prime minister would have to divert money from middle-class tax cuts to have an even chance of hitting the 2010 target.
Main & gay blog