Customer Rating:  
Summary: Useful overview of the Blair legacy, a little short on detail
Comment: I found this quite an entertaining and reasonably informative read. Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, both economic journalists with the Guardian newspaper, have a lively style, and they are mostly critical of the Blair years. I was impressed by their fairly balanced account, despite their left-leaning background, which I do broadly sympathise with.
They make clear that on many policy issues in the UK, choices can and have to be made. For example, either we continue to fight expensive wars overseas and increase defence spending, or we reduce spending and withdraw troops to some extent. We cannot fight these wars, while holding defence spending down, and Blair has pretended that we can, with the consequence that our soldiers are not well-equipped enough. He therefore has us living on 'Fantasy Island'. I won't go into the other fantasies, as I recommend that you read the book.
On two key issues, indebtedness and the environment, the authors contend that we (politicians and citizens) have no choice. We must save more, spend less, and the economy must grow more sustainably. If we do not do this, we apparently face disaster: a deep recession, while debt levels fall, which may already be happening, and significant climate change, which may also already be underway. Action on climate change clearly needs to be global, but we all need to change our behaviour.On these last two, I agree with the authors.
They do avoid much detail, perhaps to make the book easier for the layman. There are no technical economic discussions at all. This doesn't really detract from the content, which remains interesting and informative. It does weaken a few of the arguments, some of which remain simply assertions about particular policy choices.
The final chapter sets out the choices and imperatives for any UK government facing the problems they describe.
A good read overall then, but if you follow Larry Elliott's columns, you may be familiar with much of it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: enjoyable and stimulating critique
Comment: I've nothing to add to the excellent review by PhilosopherKing except to say that the economics can be quite tough going at times -- nothing worse than what you need for the business pages of a broadsheet, but challenging for those like me who don't have any economics training.
And nothing yet has happened under Brown to belie their gloomy assessment.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pretty poor
Comment: This is an underwhelming book, and I'm not really sure what the authors were trying to achieve in writing it. As a previous reviewer says, if the material the book is based on is news to you then where have you been. there's nothing new in it.
Overall this is a very negative critique of the Blair era. Whilst I'm open to hearing reasonable arguments about why things haven't gone to plan since 1997, this is real one-note stuff. It seems that pretty much EVERYTHING has been done the wrong way, but there's not much explanation why. Each chapter is a short - and shallow - take on a particular policy area and in each area the story is the same.
For example, the authors repeat the common criticism that extra spending on the NHS hasn't delivered significantly better results, but they don't really look at why, they just query the Govt's assertion that things have got better. They seem to suggest that this might be because even masssively increased spending takes a while to deliver, but they don't commit themselves to even that view. By the time I got to the chapter on the environment I had pretty much given up on them saying anything worthwhile.
What also bothers me is the lightweight nature of the references. There are far too many newspaper articles and far too little proper research. So much information in the media is simplistic, sensationalised and inaccurate that to rely on that as your primary source for a book of this nature is a bit worrying. Maybe that explains why it's such a repetitive read. They have decided on their overall argument and sought out the news reports that tell the story they want to hear.
A massive waste of time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: On the money
Comment: Given that potential disasters that are already starting to become apparent with Northern Rock and Barclays, the authors' assessment of "Bulls*it Britain" is already being proven to be true. Although no one has a crystal ball to predict the future of the economy, the obvious train-wreck that has become Britain, drowning in debt and engaging in pure fantasy about the strength of the economy gives many pointers as to the disasters to come. The authors' present a picture of an absolutely deluded country that constructs elaborate fantasies about its size and strength when nothing could be further from the case. As a Labour voter and former Labour Party member it is a shameful tale of the current Labour government wasting a decade in office following right-wing policies that are nothing more than a sham. It is a painful picture of how Britain must become a fairer and more generous nation and if it does not it can only head to a devastated economy whereby the rich continue to take more than their fair share. It is a must read for any Labour supporter to see where the party went wrong.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Thought-provoking and educational, but occasionally sloppy
Comment: This book contains many interesting facts and arguments which will give the reader much to cogitate over on politics well before the Blair decade, as well as during it. The discussions of personal debt, the Private Finance Initiative and how Gordon Brown made successive redefinitions of the economic cycle in order to meet his `Golden Rule' are particularly educational and thought-provoking, and made me long for more serious coverage of such issues in the mainstream media.
However, journalists' desire to play Cassandra often compromises any serious message they are trying to convey, and at times the book lapses into a hysteria which reduces its credibility. For example, having pinpointed the origins of the 1973 oil crisis in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and a resulting `vast upswing in inflation across all economies', the authors later describe this episode to have been an `environmental-economic catastrophe' simply to tie in with their closing arguments on limits to economic growth. If it was genuinely an `environmental-economic' catastrophe, this should have been mentioned in their earlier exposition. Such occasional sloppy thinking does make one wonder how much of the book's stronger arguments are well-founded.
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