Gordon Brown has embarked upon a "scorched earth" policy, maliciously sabotaging the public finances to ensure his successors face an insurmountable task in reviving Britain's economy.
IS BROWN INTENT ON A 'SCORCHED EARTH' ECONOMIC POLICY?
Thursday February 26,2009
By Macer Hall
SENIOR Tories are getting anxious. As each successive opinion poll shows Labour slumping further towards a landslide election defeat, the nerve-jangling prospect of the next government inheriting an economic wasteland is preying on Conservative minds.
They fear that Gordon Brown has embarked upon a "scorched earth" policy, maliciously sabotaging the public finances to ensure his successors face an insurmountable task in reviving Britain's economy. With every frenzied blitz of initiatives, bank bail-outs and unfunded tax cuts, the Prime Minister is suspected of wilfully wrecking the public purse with unbridled debt. Throughout history, the scorched earth strategy has been the favoured military gambit of desperate leaders. Napoleon's army was forced to retreat after the Russians laid waste to vast tracts of farmland, eventually starving and freezing the French to defeat. Mr Brown, it is suspected, is similarly leaving Treasury finances in flames in the face of the apparently unstoppable electoral advance of David Cameron's Conservative forces. Tory grandee and former Cabinet minister Chris Patten summed up the fear yesterday.
DESPERATE LEADERS: Napoleon's army was forced to retreat |
"The longer this Government goes on, in terms of the Conservatives taking over it will become tougher because the Government are going to spend every single pound in the bank, " he said.
Today's Conservative leadership reject any suggestion that victory at the next election, most likely to be in the summer of 2010, is already in the bag.
But privately, they express growing concern about the billions - and potentially trillions - of pounds the Prime Minister is willing to send up in a socialist blaze during his final months in power.
Phase one of Labour's operation Obama rolls out next week when the Prime Minister visits the White House and Congress. |
The figures are mindboggling. Government debt has already reached £700billion even before the colossal liabilities of the semi-nationalised banking system are taken into account.
Add Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS to the balance sheet and borrowing exceeds £2trillion, more than the entire nation's annual economic output and more than £33,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
Senior Conservatives privately suggest that by the time of the next election, Britain's economy will be an even worse basket case than that bequeathed by Labour to Margaret Thatcher in 1979.