Sunday, 4th January 2009
Another Brown job
FRASER NELSON 12:56pm
Will anyone take Gordon Brown’s claim to create up to 100,000 jobs seriously? As a statistician will tell you, “up to” includes the number zero. And as any economist will tell you, government can’t create jobs. The best it can do is move jobs, from the private to the public sector via tax – or from the future to the present, via debt. And in this case, I suspect it’s all a hoax anyway. Sure, Brown can hire some builders to renovate schools. But first of all, how many of his 100,000 were going to be hired by the state anyway? And of those who weren’t, can he be so sure they were all otherwise heading for the dole queue? It’s all a nonsense designed purely to enable him to trot out the line “we are creating 100,000 new jobs while the Tories would do nothing”. For Brown’s plan to work, no one must challenge his figures. And I suspect no one will.
It’s fairly easy to tell that he’s fibbing. Each month, the Treasury asks a large number of independent forecasters of solid repute for their unemployment forecasts, and publishes the results. Their December forecast was for claimantunemployment to surge from 1.05m to 1.6m by the final quarter of this year. How many of them will downgrade, as a result of Brown’s claim? I suspect as many as upgraded their economic growth forecasts to account for his fiscal stimulus: that is to say, none. Brown’s utterings are regarded as economically irrelevant, taken seriously only in the fantasy world of Westminster. How lucky he is that politicians’ figures are never audited or checked, and that they are held to a far lower standard of accuracy than the City firms he is so fond of chastising.
PS Brown also tells the Observer he wants to help “everybody who is genuinely trying to pay their mortgage back”. So I assume as a matter of urgency he will tomorrow instruct the state-owned Northern Rock to stop charging penalty rates of interest to the 200,000 of its mortgage holders too poor to get another deal?
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