From an economic point of view, the same principles apply in any situation. You cannot simply spend money you dont have forever more. There will be a day of reckoning.Brown wasnt stupid, he knew this, but he planned on using every trick in the book to delay the day of reckoning until after he had retired. He built a career on lying through his teeth in any given situaton, but thankfully he got his come uppance. The first time the British electorate had the opportunity to pass judgement on him he was history. Avery cynical dishonest character, with a hell of a lot to answer for.
Labours job creation policy is one of the major factors in the current problems. It has long been known that this countries civil service was overmanned, but they actually created approx. 750,000 extra jobs in the public sector in just over a decade.
These werent genuine jobs of course, they were jobs cynically created for political reasons which every taxpayer and business has to pay for. Brown also stole many billions from private pension funds to finance the pensions for these new jobs, and in one cynical stroke, destroyed what was probably the best private pension system in the world.
Im no fan of the Tories, but these things have to be undone and put right and there is no pain free way to do it. No economy can be healthy in the long term, if the govt. employs much of the population for no good reason, other than to keep them from being unemployed. If you dont believe that, go and ask anyone who lived in the USSR.Thats how they tried to run their economy for decades, but even they had to admit in the end it simply doesnt work, as has Cuba.
Small government and incentive to work hard to better yourself should be the cornerstones of running a countries economy imo. Nothing else has ever worked, and I dont think it ever will.