Britannia Radio

This is a classic demolition job on Brown's pretence that 'It's 
nothing to do with me, boss'.  The trouble is that he's out-of-
control right now spending money that he hasn't got  and (with the 
fallig pound) can't get, puting our country's future at risk to try 
and win an election before the final crash.  (Remember, he hasn't won 
one yet!)

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TELEGRAPH   14.11.08
Gordon Brown's fingerprints are all over a disaster made in Britain
We are about to witness a burst of old-fashioned pre-election 
giveaways to hide the Government's epic blunders, warns Jeff Randall

By Jeff Randall

"Booms channel too many resources into speculative activities and not 
enough into others, hampering economic progress. The fleeting gains 
that such episodes bring are invariably far outweighed by the pain of 
the downturn that must follow."

Wise words. Prescient thoughts. It's a shame that someone didn't tell 
the Prime Minister. Hang on a minute, someone did. The Prime Minister 
told the Prime Minister.

This hard-to-fault insight into the destructive nature of economic 
excess was given by Gordon Brown in his Budget speech of 1998. Later, 
as if to prove his point, the then-chancellor orchestrated a public 
and private spree of outrageous consumption that ruined the economy.

"No, I didn't," pleads Mr Brown. "It was the Americans what dunnit." 
Sorry Gordon, not even Inspector Clouseau would fall for that one. 
This crisis was Made in Britain. Your fingerprints are all over the 
crime scene. Too much easy money, combined with diminished regulation 
of our banking system, created a frenzy of speculation in the housing 
market. Unaffordable commitments pumped up a poisonous bubble of 
illusory wealth.

At the same time, the Government was spending when it should have 
been saving. At the top of the cycle, instead of tucking away funds 
as insurance against unforeseen problems, the Prime Minister 
encouraged a structural deficit of about £7 billion annually. 
Profligacy trounced prudence.

Ten years ago, Mr Brown said: "Cycles of boom and bust have been 
particularly damaging to the UK's long-term economic performance. 
Recessions lead to premature scrapping of productive capacity and 
increase both short-term and long-term unemployment." Spot on, as we 
are now discovering. For many, the pain will become unbearable.

Families are under the cosh. Real incomes are shrinking. Businesses 
are desperately seeking to align costs with falling revenues. The 
human toll is rising at an alarming rate. The bloodbath in banking 
and broking is spreading to other sectors. Only this week, BT, Virgin 
Media, Yell and GlaxoSmithKline announced cuts that will lead to 
about 15,000 workers losing their jobs.

The final bill for Mr Brown's incompetence will be huge. When Labour 
came to power in 1997, unemployment was close to two million. Today, 
it is back at that level - and set to become much worse. The CBI 
expects the jobless total to hit nearly three million next year. In 
private, union leaders agree.

And that's before we add in 2·7 million recipients of incapacity 
benefit who are not officially part of the unemployment list. What 
are the odds that there will be a fresh epidemic of stress-related 
welfare claims, as the Government allows dubious health problems to 
help mask soaring joblessness?

Bankruptcy courts have rarely been busier. According to John Charcol, 
a mortgage broker, house repossessions between June 2008 and the end 
of next year will be more than 100,000. As in the nightmare years of 
the early 1990s, many Englishmen's dream homes are just castles in 
the air.

During the early stages of this credit crunch, the Prime Minister 
tried to deflect criticism by insisting that, however bad things 
seemed, household strains under the last Conservative government were 
much worse. If that was true a year ago, it is not so now. The 
looming train wreck that is the British economy has been caused by 
the driver who fuelled the engine of growth, not with reformed 
services or increases in productivity, but high-octane debt.

One area of egregious mismanagement has been education. Under Mr 
Brown, the budget for schools, colleges and universities has more 
than doubled to £77 billion (twice as much as defence). And what do 
we have to show for it? A debased system, where nobody can fail but 
excellence is under attack. A generation of pupils has been 
sacrificed on the altar of misguided ideology.

Stuffed with resources, comprehensives are not closing the gap on 
grammars and public schools. Frustrated by the resistance of our best 
universities to social engineering, the Government is bullying the 
top 20 Russell Group institutions to lower the bar in order to 
accommodate state-school pupils with sub-standard grades. Typical of 
Labour: rather than address the problem, it prefers to fix the 
figures and create a false impression of success.

Talking of which, have another look at Brown's valedictory Budget 
speech in March 2007. It was a masterpiece of self-deluding hubris. 
Warning lights were flashing across the economy but not, it seems, in 
Downing Street.

Despite rising fuel costs, higher taxes, the turn in house prices, 
and millions of personal balance sheets hopelessly over-stretched by 
credit, he pounded a bruised electorate with examples of his 
administrative brilliance.

"We will never return to the old boom and bust." Wrong.
  "Looking ahead to 2008 and 2009, inflation will also be on target." 
Wrong.
"In 2008, alongside North America, our growth will again be the 
highest in the G7 - between two-and-a-half and three per cent." Wrong.
"Our fiscal discipline is the foundation of the strength of Britain's 
finances." Wrong.
"Britain's net borrowing . as a per cent of our national income . in 
the future years to 2011-12 will be 2·4, falling to 2, and then 
falling to 1·8, 1·6 and 1·4 per cent." Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and 
wrong.
"The [borrowing] figure for this year and future years will be £35 
billion . then 34, 30, 38, 26 and 24 billion." Not even warm.

  When Alistair Darling delivers his Pre-Budget Report on November 
24, he will have to admit that next year's borrowing will be about 
£100 billion. It took the Prime Minister a decade to wipe out a 
handsome legacy, but he got there in the end.

The nearest indicator a country has to a share price is the value of 
its currency. With sterling so weak - down 25 per cent against the 
dollar in less than a year - global markets are laughing at Mr 
Brown's claim that Britain is better placed than rivals to deal with 
recession. The pound, as traders say, is "a sell".

With only 18 months to go before he will be forced to ask the country 
to pass judgment on his record, the Prime Minister is about to throw 
over the fence what's left of fiscal discipline. When he said, "we 
will not take risks with . the stability essential to our long-term 
economic performance", he didn't mean it.

 From here, anything goes. Golden rules are being melted down to buy 
votes. We are about to witness a burst of old-fashioned pre-election 
giveaways to hide the Government's epic blunders.

In coming weeks, as Mr Brown struts about the international stage, 
hoping to pass himself off as man with a plan, his successor will be 
hurling a kitchen sink of unfunded tax cuts at the economy in an 
attempt to secure the only outcome that his boss really cares about: 
another five years in power.