Government borrowing

We are not agreeing. The employers have already paid FFS. How many of these feckless mums claim for their brood  actully spend the money they receive for what it is intended for? You can bet your bottom dollar they will have the latest smart TV's or Iphones etc along with their designer clothes and all the latest myriad of mod-cons...

Just asking but what happens where the employer cannot afford to pay more? 

Do those jobs just disappear?

Yet public spending rose in real terms.

You are standing the English language on its head to claim that there was austerity at the same time as spending was rising.

OK, I fully accept the public spending didn't rise as fast as you would like but the definition of austerity is not how much you personally would like to spend.

Did public spending per citizen rise? A fall against GDP would indicate not. 

OK thanks. So I decide that this is a flat line against inflation. 

Until now I have been absent from this debate due to pressures of work, long hours and tiredness when I get home.

So I will start by addressing the opening question as to whether further public borrowing is a good thing or not.

Sometimes public borrowing in the short term is a necessary and lesser evil to get us through crises such as covid lockdowns and the cost of living crisis. Because in such cases the economic fallout from not doing so would end up costing the country far more whilst delivering far more hardship. This type of short term borrowing cannot be sustained indefinitely though.

More broadly, I draw a distinction between borrowing to invest and borrowing to pay for day to day expenditure or giveaways. Borrowing to invest can be a good thing if the investment is effective at growing the economy and increasing average wealth. This can result in the growing economy more than paying for the extra borrowing costs. Though of course much depends upon how effective the investment decisions are.

Borrowing to finance day to day expenditure however is unsustainable, likewise borrowing to finance giveaways of any kind. Things like tax cuts, or increased welfare spending, more money for housing or the NHS, etc need to be fully costed and not simply rely upon increased borrowing. This is where Truss failed disastrously, with massive tax giveaways mostly to the better off that were entirely unfunded and reliant upon a vast increase in borrowing. The economy would have needed to grow by an extraordinary amount to finance this and it was entirely unclear how such tax cuts were to deliver this, just an ideological assumption that they would. The markets didn't buy it.

And to be fair this was also a failing of Labour's 2019 manifesto with it's entirely uncosted promise to reverse the raising of the retirement age for women and to compensate those who had already lost out. The full cost of this was said to run into tens of billions which were to be explicitly borrowed. This helped to spook the electorate before it even had a chance to spook the markets. Their promise of free broadband to all also didn't appear to have been costed very well, if at all. Labour tried to promise too much in 2019, without any great attempt to cost all of it, and this lost them credibility in the eyes of the electorate which was a contributory factor in their defeat (though the Brexit issue and open party disunity and antisemitism smear campaigns from within and without were also major factors in that defeat, as well as the unpopularity of Corbyn himself amongst older voters).

Speaking for the left, going forwards borrowing to invest in infrastructure and the green and tech industries of the future makes sense. But promises in regards to nationalisations, increased spending on the NHS, abolition of tuition fees, more social housing construction, or whatever it may be needs to be costed. The left needs to demonstrate how it is to be paid for, who will pay, and how. The current Labour party appears to be giving the appearance of wanting to do that, but it also sadly appears to want to do so by abandoning most of it's progressive policy aims entirely in pursuit of a kind of Blairite thatcherism lite. Their main offering to the electorate seems to be a more competent and nicer version of the status quo with a few minor tweaks here and there. And run by a leadership who'll do anything for power except challenge the status quo or the economic establishment.

You have been asked to give evidence of your claim before today. IIRC, your claim was proven to be fanciful.