Gordon's G20 Plan

Self-Serving Elite to Investigate Self-Serving Elite - ASI Blog
Brown's Fingerprints On Britain's Economic Disaster - Jeff Randall
Iain Dale Condemns His Earlier Madness - Hopi Sen
MSM Fell for Fake Palin Africa Hoax - Breitbart 
You Can't Legislate Your Way Out of Recession - Dan Hannan
Look in the Mirror Gordon Brown - John Major
Morgan Allen Moore Issue Legal Threats to PR Week - Machiavelli
Baby P - No Surprise - Theodore Dalrymple

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2008

Gordon's G20 Plan

Gordon is going to Washington with a few key spin objectives:

• To present himself as the respected elder statesman of international finance - never mind Sarko's pretensions.
  
  
• To frame Britain's problems in an international context. Sterling's collapse is to be spun as nothing to do with Brown's bubble.
  
  
• To frame any domestic tax cut U-turn as a co-ordinated international action. This will give him cover for abandoning everything he has told us is important for all his front-bench political life.
  

Why Gordon thinks it imperative to be portrayed as some kind of respected international finance genius eludes Guido. It won't save anyone's job, not even his own.

There is obviously an international angle to the credit crunch, but there are also domestic disasters which happened on his watch.. Sterling's collapse is not random. Who for instance decided to exclude house prices from the Bank of England's inflation target which meant we had a ridiculously loose monetary policy?

If the G20 endorses a policy of tax cuts - if - Gordon will have political covering fire to return to Westminster to cut taxes and bugger the deficit. The Pre-Budget Report on Monday week will be his chance to unveil an epic tax-cutting stimulus package U-turn. The Osborne-Letwin* designed response as it stands will be "we shouldn't be here, you shouldn't do that". Preaching fiscal sobriety to the fiscally hungover after the party has finished and the house is already wrecked.

The Tories have boxed themselves into holding to a Brown orthodoxy on tax cuts to which he himself no longer adheres. Time to think outside of the box...

*Letwin's aversion to tax cuts might have something to do with the 2001 election campaign fiasco when as a junior finance spokesman, he was forced into hiding after disclosing that the Tories had longer-term plans for £20 billion of tax cuts.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Is the Labourgraph on a Crusade Against Osborne?

Today's coverage:

Tories face tough choices - and moving George Osborne is one of them - Iain Martin
Sadly, George Osborne should go - Janet Daley
Why we need Ken Clarke to take on Alistair Darling - Tracy Corrigan
David Cameron should replace George Osborne with Ken Clarke - Alex Singleton

Iain Martin has been becoming noticeably increasingly incensed with the Tory's incoherency on the economy. Today it looks like the whole editorial collective over in Victoria has decided they have had enough of George.