This takes the demolition of the Brown pretend triumph to a
definitive conclusion !
All his duplicity has been wheeled out this week and for about 48
hours he got away with it. But the markets have seen through him and
the British people will now wonder just how much each year we shall
to find in the annual budget just to pay the interest on his all his
borrowings - that's before we start paying them back.
The voter should now ask "What's in it for Britain?"
definitive conclusion !
All his duplicity has been wheeled out this week and for about 48
hours he got away with it. But the markets have seen through him and
the British people will now wonder just how much each year we shall
to find in the annual budget just to pay the interest on his all his
borrowings - that's before we start paying them back.
The voter should now ask "What's in it for Britain?"
DAILY MAIL 4.4.09
Hubris, hoopla and claims that were false, cynical and very, very
dangerous
audacious triumph at this week's London G20 summit. Super Gordon
single-handedly set in motion a lavishly funded global reconstruction
plan which will lead the world out of the slump and away from
economic disaster.
Gordon Brown himself asserted there are two key components to his
brilliant scheme. First, he has paved the way for recovery by
remodelling the world's economic institutions. But even more
importantly he claims that he has arranged for a massive injection of
liquidity into global financial markets.
Nor is it just the media that is hailing the Prime Minister. Barack
Obama described the G20 deal as 'historic by any measure' and issued
a statesmanlike diagnosis on the condition of the world economy,
saying 'the patient has stabilised'.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A good deal?
Gordon Brown and Barack Obama failed to secure any extra
government spending
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As summit host, Gordon Brown was no less fervent, declaring that 'a
new world order' had been established - comparing the deal struck
between the summiteers with the Marshall Plan which famously rebuilt
Western Europe after the horror of World War II.
'This is the day the world came together to fight back against the
global recession,' he intoned, 'not with words but with a plan for
economic recovery and reform.'
If these highly ambitious claims were even half-correct it would be
wonderful news indeed. However, the truth is that they are false,
cynical and very, very dangerous.
The reality is a much more modest achievement. The week's meeting has
certainly done a small amount of good and Gordon Brown deserves a
great deal of credit for making the event a success and shaping the
final agreement from world leaders (after fears of a mutiny from
France and Germany).
But the official communique is unlikely to register as more than a
blip on the radar of the map which is leading us, hopefully, out of
economic recession. The claims by Gordon Brown that we have now
reached some kind of turning point, while accepted by some
commentators who really ought to know better, is simply laughable.
The biggest falsehood concerns the belief that the G20 nations have
pioneered a $5trillion spending boost to global economies.
Although Gordon Brown and President Obama had originally hoped to get
world leaders to agree to such a 'fiscal stimulus', they actually
failed to secure a single penny of extra government spending anywhere
in the world.
Rather than admit defeat, however, they pretended they had won. So
they invented the $5trillion figure. They arrived at the number by
adding up the extra government borrowing expected to take place in
G20 economies between 2008 (when the recession began) and 2010 (when
world leaders hope it will end). It is a completely arbitrary figure.
The next fabrication concerns the claim that G20 leaders agreed a
'programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world
economy' - worth some $1.1trillion. It was this headline-grabbing
figure which caught everyone's imagination - yet sadly, it too is
mainly a bogus number because much of the money had already been
pledged in recent months.
Almost half of that $1.1trillion - some $500billion - takes the form
of extra money for the International Monetary Fund to bail out
countries that run into trouble during the economic downturn.
Although Gordon Brown brazenly asserted that this was new money, this
is simply not true. Japan, for example, gave $100billion to the IMF
last November, while the EU offered the same sum earlier this year.
Admittedly, China did agree an extra $40billion last week. However,
this contribution is very much less than Gordon Brown had hoped -
and, most worryingly, indications emerged after the summit closed
late on Thursday that the Chinese were having second thoughts.
Next, Gordon Brown claimed that some $250billion has been raised to
regenerate world trade with the help of extra finance. Once again,
his claim is an invention.
Indeed, the small print of the G20 communique suggests only
$3-4billion of new money has been committed, and the $250billion
figure is only a vague pledge.
I fear that the more we look beneath the headlines of the London
summit, the more its achievements look threadbare. I would estimate
that no more than $250billion of the much vaunted $1.1trillion is
genuinely new money.
The true story is that Gordon Brown seems to have corralled fellow
leaders into perpetrating a gigantic collective fraud on world public
opinion.
It is a sign of the degradation of the civil service over the past
ten years that senior British government officials were happy to
throw their weight behind what was little more than a lavishly funded
PR stunt.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Jeremy Heywood - the
senior Downing Street official who was deeply implicated in Tony
Blair's sofa Government ahead of the Iraq War, when Britain was run
by a close-knit cabal, when Cabinet government collapsed and normal
procedures such as note-taking were ignored - should have been
heavily complicit.
But it is disappointing that respectable Treasury officials like Jon
Cunliffe, who has a reputation for integrity, should have allowed
themselves to be compromised by association with the dodgy and
dishonest summit communique.
I also suspect that President Obama will also come to bitterly regret
his involvement in this cynical event whose main function has been to
pull the wool over the eyes of the public. Indeed, it is interesting
to speculate how much Obama, who displayed his inexperience this
week, was duped by Gordon Brown.
Amid all the hoopla of Thursday's triumphant communique, it must be
remembered that Gordon Brown has a long and disgraceful track record
of this kind of bogus financial announcement. When he was Chancellor,
many of his Budgets turned out to be contain fabrications.
This week's hubristic G20 communique reminds me vividly of Brown's
notorious Comprehensive Spending Review of July 1998. Back then,
Gordon Brown declared: 'On the 50th anniversary of the NHS, the
Government will now make the biggest ever investment in its future.'
This announcement was given a euphoric reception by the media - only
for it to emerge some time later that there was no extra spending and
that the Chancellor had merely made the figures look huge by double
and treble counting.
The problem with this kind of duplicity is that you always get caught
out in the end. So will be the case with the G20 summit. Gordon Brown
has achieved brilliant headlines in the short term, and it is likely
that Labour's rating in the polls will soon start to rise as a result.
However, in the long term, very little has changed. For all Gordon
Brown and President Obama's extravagant claims, the world is still in
the grip of recession and millions of people still face the loss of
their jobs.
Most significantly, the world's stock markets, which on Thursday
greeted the summit communique with elation, were going into sharp
reverse last night.
This week Gordon Brown and his fellow world leaders played cynically
with the hopes and fears of these desperate people. They made
promises they can't keep, made claims that they can never
substantiate and triggered hopes that undoubtedly will soon be dashed.
The Prime Minister has won short-term plaudits, but over long haul
his cheap and dishonest tactics will gravely damage the esteem in
which politicians are held, and do great damage to his reputation.
government spending
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
As summit host, Gordon Brown was no less fervent, declaring that 'a
new world order' had been established - comparing the deal struck
between the summiteers with the Marshall Plan which famously rebuilt
Western Europe after the horror of World War II.
'This is the day the world came together to fight back against the
global recession,' he intoned, 'not with words but with a plan for
economic recovery and reform.'
If these highly ambitious claims were even half-correct it would be
wonderful news indeed. However, the truth is that they are false,
cynical and very, very dangerous.
The reality is a much more modest achievement. The week's meeting has
certainly done a small amount of good and Gordon Brown deserves a
great deal of credit for making the event a success and shaping the
final agreement from world leaders (after fears of a mutiny from
France and Germany).
But the official communique is unlikely to register as more than a
blip on the radar of the map which is leading us, hopefully, out of
economic recession. The claims by Gordon Brown that we have now
reached some kind of turning point, while accepted by some
commentators who really ought to know better, is simply laughable.
The biggest falsehood concerns the belief that the G20 nations have
pioneered a $5trillion spending boost to global economies.
Although Gordon Brown and President Obama had originally hoped to get
world leaders to agree to such a 'fiscal stimulus', they actually
failed to secure a single penny of extra government spending anywhere
in the world.
Rather than admit defeat, however, they pretended they had won. So
they invented the $5trillion figure. They arrived at the number by
adding up the extra government borrowing expected to take place in
G20 economies between 2008 (when the recession began) and 2010 (when
world leaders hope it will end). It is a completely arbitrary figure.
The next fabrication concerns the claim that G20 leaders agreed a
'programme of support to restore credit, growth and jobs in the world
economy' - worth some $1.1trillion. It was this headline-grabbing
figure which caught everyone's imagination - yet sadly, it too is
mainly a bogus number because much of the money had already been
pledged in recent months.
Almost half of that $1.1trillion - some $500billion - takes the form
of extra money for the International Monetary Fund to bail out
countries that run into trouble during the economic downturn.
Although Gordon Brown brazenly asserted that this was new money, this
is simply not true. Japan, for example, gave $100billion to the IMF
last November, while the EU offered the same sum earlier this year.
Admittedly, China did agree an extra $40billion last week. However,
this contribution is very much less than Gordon Brown had hoped -
and, most worryingly, indications emerged after the summit closed
late on Thursday that the Chinese were having second thoughts.
Next, Gordon Brown claimed that some $250billion has been raised to
regenerate world trade with the help of extra finance. Once again,
his claim is an invention.
Indeed, the small print of the G20 communique suggests only
$3-4billion of new money has been committed, and the $250billion
figure is only a vague pledge.
I fear that the more we look beneath the headlines of the London
summit, the more its achievements look threadbare. I would estimate
that no more than $250billion of the much vaunted $1.1trillion is
genuinely new money.
The true story is that Gordon Brown seems to have corralled fellow
leaders into perpetrating a gigantic collective fraud on world public
opinion.
It is a sign of the degradation of the civil service over the past
ten years that senior British government officials were happy to
throw their weight behind what was little more than a lavishly funded
PR stunt.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Jeremy Heywood - the
senior Downing Street official who was deeply implicated in Tony
Blair's sofa Government ahead of the Iraq War, when Britain was run
by a close-knit cabal, when Cabinet government collapsed and normal
procedures such as note-taking were ignored - should have been
heavily complicit.
But it is disappointing that respectable Treasury officials like Jon
Cunliffe, who has a reputation for integrity, should have allowed
themselves to be compromised by association with the dodgy and
dishonest summit communique.
I also suspect that President Obama will also come to bitterly regret
his involvement in this cynical event whose main function has been to
pull the wool over the eyes of the public. Indeed, it is interesting
to speculate how much Obama, who displayed his inexperience this
week, was duped by Gordon Brown.
Amid all the hoopla of Thursday's triumphant communique, it must be
remembered that Gordon Brown has a long and disgraceful track record
of this kind of bogus financial announcement. When he was Chancellor,
many of his Budgets turned out to be contain fabrications.
This week's hubristic G20 communique reminds me vividly of Brown's
notorious Comprehensive Spending Review of July 1998. Back then,
Gordon Brown declared: 'On the 50th anniversary of the NHS, the
Government will now make the biggest ever investment in its future.'
This announcement was given a euphoric reception by the media - only
for it to emerge some time later that there was no extra spending and
that the Chancellor had merely made the figures look huge by double
and treble counting.
The problem with this kind of duplicity is that you always get caught
out in the end. So will be the case with the G20 summit. Gordon Brown
has achieved brilliant headlines in the short term, and it is likely
that Labour's rating in the polls will soon start to rise as a result.
However, in the long term, very little has changed. For all Gordon
Brown and President Obama's extravagant claims, the world is still in
the grip of recession and millions of people still face the loss of
their jobs.
Most significantly, the world's stock markets, which on Thursday
greeted the summit communique with elation, were going into sharp
reverse last night.
This week Gordon Brown and his fellow world leaders played cynically
with the hopes and fears of these desperate people. They made
promises they can't keep, made claims that they can never
substantiate and triggered hopes that undoubtedly will soon be dashed.
The Prime Minister has won short-term plaudits, but over long haul
his cheap and dishonest tactics will gravely damage the esteem in
which politicians are held, and do great damage to his reputation.
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