UK national debt still increasing by £2.3 billion a week...

[Gullys Cats]

How about actually collecting taxes from rich people?

This

 

[gordonchas]

How did Spain running a government sector surplus cope with the GLOBAL financial crisis
well it's government had to be bailed out so it could bail out its banks
currently there is over half of people under 25unemployed in Spain

The problems in the Spanish economy were that the economic growth of the 2000s was built on a long construction boom encouraged by interest rates which were far too low due to Spain's participation in the Euro. When that collapsed the whole economy went to hell and banks were left with bad debts on a massive scale. Those banks were the savings banks, nothing to do with casino-banking, as all of them were strictly regulated, economic collapse having been due to a good, old-fashioned property bubble.

Think how much worse their situation would be if, during the boom years, the (socialist at that time) central government had been steadily running up debt. The Spanish (PSOE) government was at least acting like good Keynsians - running a surplus during a boom. This was not the case with the Labour Party who ran deficits and the results of those are impacting on public expenditure in the UK now and will continue to do for many years - the UK government already has to find £20bn a year more now to fund interest payments on its debt than it did when the crisis hit in 2008. There'll be another £20bn a year to find in four years' time, by then UK government payments alone will £70,000,000,000 a year.

As for Spanish youth unemployment - a lesson in over-regulation of the labour market, however most UK commentators can't or won't see the connection.