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Blackpool should have had a penalty, but Adam may have gone for an elbow on Evra.

You should know not to post any score involving Man Utd until the final whistle!

You havent done very well in this thread, have you? I have put your comments in quotes, my questions you couldnt answer follow.

"He hasn't cut anything yet, the REAL cuts don't start until April"

So when Osborne said he was introducing ?6billion of cuts in the first year of government about which there was much pre-election debate, he was lying through his teeth was he?

"the 0.5 fall in GDP was due to snow, had there been no snow it would have been flat, ie. zero."

So even if you accept the huge drop in GDP "its down to the snow" it still means after three quarters of growth, we have gone into 0 growth at a time when a huge VAT increase and fuel increases have not kicked in yet. Do you think that those increases together with huge cuts in public services will increase growth?

You then totally ignore this
Here's another graph which shows that the public sector deficit under Labour in 2008 as a percentage of GDP is comparable with many previous governments and was the second lowest in the G7. The key is in the word GLOBAL.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog ... owing-data

"Thats government spending being increased every single year, that is plainly not a CUT"

You have totally failed to counter the figures in the Spectator including the graph on cuts in capital spending. You nonsensically try to argue that inflation should not be taken into account in any spending.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/ ... cuts.thtml

You offer no explanation to counter the views of Richard Lambert, the Director of the CBI who lambasted the governments policy for growth.

If you can answer the above, I may possibly start taking you seriously. If not, forget it.

Cheers
D

The reason for Blackpool's defeat is very clear. It was the weather and this has been independently verified. In the first half when Blackpool were doing well, the weather was good. In the second half the weather was terrible.

Oh, did I mention that the reason for their defeat was the weather?

Cheers
D

"the first budget was June with any significant policies not kicking in until this April. This growth is pretty all attributable to Labour policies."

This is nonsense for two reasons:

1. At the end of May Osborne outlined plans to cut ?6.2bn of what he calls "wasteful spending" to start to reduce the budget deficit. There were cuts to quangos planned, spending on consultancy and big IT projects and a civil service recruitment freeze. In short he planned to take 6bn out of the economy in the first year which is something which was promised pre-election. This had significant impact on the IT service industry and the building sector in particular as a result of cancelled projects which were ready to kickoff.

2. Secondly, you make a schoolboy error in ignoring the question of "confidence". Consumer confidence has been going down since summer. This is hardly surprising given that the OBR even with their downgraded assessment, believe a third of a million jobs will go in the public sector. Inflation is rising quickly. Wages are stagnant which means there is a real terms cut in living standards. Massive cuts are planned and councils throughout the land have already served warning notices about redundancies. In that scenario, as you would expect, people are very very worried about what this year holds for them, which is why people have been tightening their belts and why the services sector did very badly in today's GDP figures. Just as the government has been endlessly harping on about tightening our belts, surprise surprise, people have been tightening their belts and cutting back their spending. It ain't that difficult for you to understand, surely?

Cheers
D