Today I have separated economic news from comment on Brown’s extraordinary wild promises of ever greater madness. Here I’ve gathered comment from the Telegraph, The Sun, the Financial Timea and the Daily Mail. There’s near unanimity that (a) Mandelson’s running the show; and (b) that they are pursuing a scorched earth policy in the months left to them. There’s no thought of Britain or for Britons. It’s spite against the Tories, and naked personal vengeance.
It’s government by madmen
Christina
TELEGRAPH - Leading Article 30.6.09
Lord Mandelson is playing fantasy politics with no credibility
Labour's refusal to conduct a spending review is a sign of its desperation.
Telegraph View
The multi-titled Lord Mandelson is not content with being Gordon Brown's de facto deputy, but has also assumed control of the Treasury. How else can one explain his announcement on BBC radio yesterday morning (despite Mr Speaker Bercow's insistence that Government statements be made first in Parliament) that the three-year comprehensive spending review is to be postponed until after the general election? The First Secretary of State's claim that such a review cannot be conducted because "we are not in a position… to be able to forecast what growth will be and what the performance of the economy will be in 2011" insults the intelligence.
The ruse means that Labour will go into the election unimpeded by the inconvenient need to explain how it will fund its insanely lavish spending plans – leaving it free to concentrate on its dishonest allegations about Tory "cuts". This sleight of hand must be seen in conjunction with the publication by Mr Brown yesterday of Building Britain's Future, which is to all intents and purposes Labour's election manifesto. The Brown strategy is to promise ever more spending on the public services, but without saying where the money will come from, at a time when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is warning the Government to take drastic action to slash debt. Even by the standards of New Labour, this is profoundly misleading politics, drawing a warning from David Cameron yesterday that such trickery could lead to "riots on the streets" once voters are suddenly confronted with reality after the election. Labour is engaged in fantasy politics, which have not a shred of credibility.
In fact, we fear there is something quite sinister going on: this is beginning to look like a scorched earth policy. Only the most delusional members of this Government believe they will be in office after the election. Labour now seems intent on landing an incoming Tory administration with such a gigantic task of clearing-up that it will be forced into a string of unpopular decisions and face an early ejection from power.
A desperate strategy? Well, Labour is in desperate trouble. The last lame-duck government, John Major's, did a noble job of creating a legacy, particularly on the economy, that was worth having. This Government, in contrast, is behaving ignobly and selling the country short. Mr Cameron has shown he has the measure of the Prime Minister. His task now is to expose Labour's spin on spending and debt day after day, until we are sick of hearing about it. The stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.
THE SUN SAYS - - - - 30.6.09
Pie in the sky
WORLD class schools, super health care, better policing and "British homes for British people"... Oh, and 1.5million brand new jobs.
That's Gordon Brown's latest recipe for motherhood and apple pie. Or is it just pie in the sky?
Remember "Education, Education, Education"? Well, after a school lifetime under Labour, four out of 10 children aged 12 are still unable to read and write properly.
Despite a shedload of taxpayers' cash, the NHS still isn't world class.
As for putting locals top of the queue for council homes, what will town halls do when a destitute migrant family of six lands on their doorstep?
And how will we pay for these grandiose daydreams?
The PM grandly sprays hundreds of millions of pounds on his new "vision", but is the money real or imagined?
If it's real money, where is it coming from?
Efficiency savings? Pull the other one, Gordon.
Tory leader David Cameron accused Mr Brown of living in "a dream world" and asked: "When is someone going to tell him that he's run out of money?"
Britain is already borrowed to the eyeballs and facing a £1.3TRILLION tsunami of debt.
That's as much as the entire national economy is worth in a good year.
Yesterday the OECD think tank voiced alarm over the UK's rocky finances and demanded evidence of plans to cut back.
Instead, Business supremo Lord Mandelson arrogantly went on radio to demand a blank cheque from British voters.
Without telling Parliament - or even the Chancellor - he cancelled the Treasury's autumn spending bulletin and kicked everything into touch until after the election.
This ramshackle, paralysed and incompetent Government is now either utterly delusional about the frightening scale of our economic crisis.
Or it is taking the entire nation for fools
FINANCIAL TIMES - Leading Article 30.6.09
Wanted: a strategy
When Gordon Brown was chancellor of the exchequer, he was notorious for padding his Budget statements with little ruses to win over narrow groups of target voters. Now he is UK prime minister, he has established set-piece events where he gets to repeat that trick, announcing new pico-policies, nano-schemes and micro-pilots. Only in this job he does not have the tiresome duty of describing the country’s dreadful fiscal position.
In his latest relaunch, setting out the government’s draft legislative programme for the year – under the brand of “Building Britain’s Future” – Mr Brown has announced a plethora of new measures. Most of the new promises are reheated commitments from years gone by or reworded performance targets.
Where one would expect strategy, instead one finds existing government plans clumsily grouped together under thematic headings. And where, amid the new branding, there is a soupçon of new content, one finds whatever sops can be afforded from whatever little slack can be found within departmental budgets.
By focusing on headline-grabbing initiatives, the government is trying to avoid addressing the most important issue in British politics: the fiscal crisis. The only way to set out a solution to this problem is to hold a spending review, setting out departmental budgets for the coming years.
It is clear why Mr Brown will not; he has decided that the route to victory at the general election, due within 12 months, is to pretend that he will increase spending, while the Tories will cut it. By remaining vague about its intentions, the government creates the room within which to play this game. But this is deeply damaging for public discourse. Not only is the government being dishonest, but it encourages the Tories to be quiet about their plans. [Since Brown-Mandelson are denying us all the official figures nobody can make proper estimates. You can bet that they are producing the figures fir themselves but not publishing them. This is playing with fire and is deliberate with Mandelson’s grubby hands all over it -cs]
Lord Mandelson, the de facto deputy prime minister, has claimed that a spending review is impossible given the current economic uncertainty. It is, after all, quite plausible that the country will suffer an unexpectedly weak return to growth, or enjoy a remarkably rapid bounceback.
But that is a reason for drawing up contingency plans, as well as a plan based on the Treasury’s current central forecast. It is definitely not an excuse for the government to sit on its hands, to close down political debate and to refuse to explain how it proposes to get out of its current hole.
Thanks to government policy, it looks increasingly likely that voters at the coming general election will be forced to choose between parties without knowing what their policies actually are. Thanks to the government’s evasiveness on fiscal policy, the next UK general election will be one-part democracy and one-part lucky dip.
DAILY MAIL 30.6.09
This reveals both moral and economic bankruptcy
Thirty years ago, the Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan found himself in almost exactly the same predicament Gordon Brown does today.
In 1979, the British public finances were in disarray. However, a general election against Margaret Thatcher's resurgent Tory Party was just round the corner.
Callaghan faced a hideous choice: he could come clean about the scale of the problem and make deep and painful spending cuts - thus risking the loss of the election. Or he could pretend that nothing much was wrong.
To his enormous credit, Jim Callaghan chose to act in the interests of Britain, rather than the narrow factional interest of the Labour Party.
He ordered his Chancellor Denis Healey to slash spending, but many Labour supporters bitterly blamed Callaghan for adopting this course of action.
By an extraordinary irony Gordon Brown - in 1979 the losing candidate for Edinburgh South - was one of those bitter critics.
And yesterday the British Prime Minister signalled loud and clear that he would not be repeating Jim Callaghan's courageous path.
Gordon Brown has chosen to lie rather than tell the truth. He has chosen to act in the partisan interests of New Labour rather than the country as a whole. He has chosen to pretend that there is no need for spending cuts in the hard years ahead.
The proof that the Prime Minister has opted for the politics of financial chicanery came with the announcement yesterday by Peter Mandelson (the real deputy prime minister) that the scheduled Comprehensive Spending Review has been scrapped until after the General Election.
These spending reviews, which set out the level of government expenditure for years ahead, are normally held every two years. The latest was due to be announced by Chancellor Alistair Darling in the autumn.
Over the past few weeks, it started to dawn on Gordon Brown that it would be deeply embarrassing if Darling were to go ahead and announce future spending plans.
By doing so he would set out for all to see how disastrous the financial situation has become. But it would have done something even more damaging personally for the Prime Minister.
Over the past few weeks, Gordon Brown has gone on claiming at every opportunity that under his premiership public spending will carry on rising come what may.
'In every year in the future,' as the Prime Minister remarked on June 5, 'public spending will continue to rise.'
Alistair Darling's spending review would have revealed the true figures, and therefore exposed the Prime Minister's claims as cynical deceit. It would have wrecked Gordon Brown's repeated claims to be a man of integrity and exposed him as morally bankrupt.
So the decision was made by Gordon Brown, after close consultation with his ally Peter Mandelson, that the CSR will be scrapped and that this Government will instead fight the election with fabricated figures.
Last night, the sighs of relief from inside Downing Street were audible. However, there is still a very heavy price to be paid. This price will not be paid, of course, by Gordon Brown as a politician. Instead, it is the reputation of Britain as a nation that will suffer from Brown's deeply misguided and selfish move.
Our financial credibility simply cannot survive this development. To understand why not, it is only necessary to imagine what the reaction would be if any large stock market quoted company suddenly announced that it was not publishing its annual results this year because the economic outlook was too bleak.
Mayhem would ensue. The share price would collapse and the company itself would be delisted from the stock exchange.
Nor is that all. Yesterday's announcement was also a huge humiliation for Alistair Darling. Normally any announcement of such massive financial significance would automatically be made by the Chancellor.
In this case, it was slipped out by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson on Radio 4's Today Programme. This incredibly casual method of announcing the abolition of the CSR shows us that true power in government lies with Lord Mandelson rather than in the Treasury.
This is deeply troubling. For the past few months Chancellor Darling at the Treasury has been fighting a fierce battle for control of the nation's purse strings against Gordon Brown.
At times, the battle has been so fierce that Darling and Brown have been scarcely able to bring themselves to speak to one another.
'Alistair has been forced to go directly to Peter [Mandelson] just to try to get his message across,' one Treasury insider told me early last week.
Yesterday's announcement that the Comprehensive Spending Review has been abolished shows that Gordon Brown has won the battle and that the fight for prudence has been finally lost.
This is very frightening indeed at a moment when every respectable financial institution in the world - the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and yesterday the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development - is warning us that we are chronically overspending. Only last week, Bank of England governor Mervyn King, in an unprecedented intervention, spoke out publicly when he told MPs that Britain urgently needed tougher action to cut what he rightly labelled 'extraordinary' levels of public borrowing.
I am told that the Bank governor uttered his sensational warning because he is now genuinely afraid that Britain faces bankruptcy. He fears that such is the profligacy of the New Labour government that British government debt will be downgraded on the international markets, with catastrophic consequences for our currency and our finances.
Tragically, Gordon Brown is determined to ignore this truth. Indeed, in his speech to the House of Commons yesterday he unveiled a fresh series of giant spending commitments.
The Prime Minister's litany of pledges would have been funny were matters not so serious. There was £1billion for jobs, £1.4billion for renewable energy, almost £2billion for housing, and a £150million 'innovation fund' for new technology.
Admittedly, some of these announcements were cynically recycled and mean nothing.
This was not the case, however, with the sweeping and very ambitious announcements on health and education, including personal tuition for every secondary school pupil who is falling behind, and a guarantee that no one will wait more than 18 weeks for hospital treatment.
The Prime Minister, of course, made no attempt at all to cost these worthy but hugely expensive commitments. The true bill is bound to run to many billions of pounds - and shows that this is a government whose feet have entirely left the ground.
Thirty years ago Jim Callaghan calculated that it was best to be honest with the British people - even if that meant losing the election.
Today, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson have made the opposite calculation. They have chosen what some City analysts are now calling a 'scorched earth' policy ahead of the next election.
They don't seem to care what fate is in store for Britain in years to come, just so long as New Labour can scrape its way to the General Election.
Maybe their sordid calculation will work in the very short term, but surely not for long.
Today, historians look back at Sunny Jim Callaghan with respect. It is hard to imagine that future generations will look back on Gordon Brown and his accomplice Mandelson with anything other than contempt.
The first examines his tactics while the second is a classic satirical ‘send-up’
Christina
THE TIMES 30.6.09
1. Can Brown the builder fix it? No, he can’t
Labour has spent 12 years constructing Britain’s future but nothing has gone up – and we don’t have a quote for the costs
Rachel Sylvester
In 1997, Tony Blair promised it would be “New Labour, New Life for Britain”. By 2001 the party was offering to fulfil “Britain’s Great Potential”. In 2005, it was “Britain: Forward not Back”. Yesterday Gordon Brown published “Building Britain’s Future”.
If it sounded familiar, that’s because it was. It was a relaunch made up of rehashed policy announcements and repackaged spending commitments, less a national plan than a national repeat. More affordable housing, health checks, one-to-one tuition, docking benefits, Lords reform — these are all things that have been promised for months, in some cases years, by the Government. It is only three months since the last relaunch, a “strategic plan” called “Building Britain’s Future”. Clearly not much building has gone on since then.
“Our most enduring reforms have come when we are boldest,” the Prime Minister wrote in the foreword — a deliberate echo, perhaps, of his predecessor’s declaration that “we are at our best when at our boldest”, which Mr Brown countered at the time with the phrase “at our best when Labour”. The reality is, however, markedly less courageous than the rhetoric.
There was an eye-catching initiative designed to appeal to BNP voters — the promise to give priority to local people for council housing — but like Mr Blair’s plan to march yobs to cash machines it is far from clear how it will work. The switch from targets to entitlements is more about presentation than substance: it is hard to see how it can make much difference to exam results or waiting lists. It’s also unenforceable, unless ministers plan to allow every parent and patient to sue if they are unhappy with the service they get.
The problem is that Labour has already spent 12 years on this construction project and the voters are getting sick of the number of tea breaks. It’s not that nothing has been built so far — there have been real improvements in primary schools and the NHS. But if this building firm wants to be rehired it needs some attractive new plans — a loft conversion, say, or a conservatory — it can’t just offer to repaint the walls. The Government seems to have run out of money as well as ideas. Even the current refurbishment is, as Lord Mandelson has now confirmed, uncosted. And everyone knows you don’t hire builders without a written quotation, particularly when money is tight.
Privately, many ministers are in despair. “There is nothing there,” says one. “We’re going to be out of power for years.” One of Mr Brown’s longest-standing supporters in the Cabinet admitted to a colleague recently that he had made a mistake. “I knew Gordon’s weaknesses but I thought they would be lessened by becoming Prime Minister, and that his strengths would increase,” he told his fellow minister. “I was wrong.”
Mr Brown is embarking on a national tour, by train, to try to persuade the voters that he is still the best Fat Controller. But he is in danger of looking like John Major, extolling the virtues of the cones hotline, as he pushed peas around his plate in a Little Chef. Cabinet ministers are being sent out to sell the message, but it is unclear what the message is. The enthusiasm for public service reform is undermined because the part-privatisation of the Royal Mail — the most high-profile example — is being shelved to avoid angering the Left.
The Prime Minister’s promise to make schools and hospitals more customer-driven is at odds with his declaration, as Chancellor, that “in health the consumer cannot be sovereign”. The pledge to give power to individuals means nothing unless they also have control over the money so they can choose a different school or hospital. “It’s dressed up in the language of empowerment but it’s nothing of the sort,” says a former Cabinet minister. “Yet again it’s Government by focus group, a hotch-potch of policies with no unifying theme.”
The voters would be confused if they were listening, but the truth is that most have switched off. Before the 2005 election, the pollster Philip Gould told party strategists that even though Labour was still scoring a few goals, nobody would notice because the crowd had gone home. Now the erstwhile fans are not just absent, they are angry. It will take more than a bit of constitutional reform and carbon capture to get them to listen. A Cabinet minister, who is loyal to Mr Brown, says: “It’s a bit like when a husband has an affair. It’s not enough for him to buy his wife a bunch of flowers; he has to really prove that he’s changed.” The Prime Minister is proffering some droopy carnations from the local garage but shows little sign of reforming his habit of fiddling with figures.
The battlelines are being drawn for the next election and it is increasingly clear that Labour intends to fight on a platform of fear, not hope. Already it is fuelling the fear of Conservative spending cuts, executed by “Mr Ten Per Cent”, fear that the “nasty party” still lurks behind David Cameron, fear of Tory toffs and job losses and negative equity. To this can be added fear of immigrants who jump the housing queue and welfare “scroungers”.
In private, Mr Brown’s strategists are clear about their intentions — the next election should, they say, be timed just as the economy is beginning to turn around, but before the recession is over so that people are still sufficiently afraid to take a risk with an untested leader. They cite with admiration the “Labour tax bombshell” campaign that secured victory for the Tories in 1992. “It wasn’t true but that didn’t matter,” one minister told me, “it made voters too worried to support Labour.”
The next election campaign is going to be a cynical and dirty fight. Now it is clear why: the party has no really substantial positive plans for the future. In his inauguration speech Barack Obama said: “We have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over discord.” Mr Brown is clinging to fear and dividing lines because he has still not found a message of hope.
2. Everything’s perfect in Gordon Brown’s green and pleasant land
Ann Treneman: Parliamentary Sketch
Oh sunny days! I had forgotten, until yesterday, that we lived in Utopia, a green and pleasant land of milk and honey and skill-based opportunity. But we do. Gordon Brown came to the Commons to unveil his vision and to explain how Britain (soon to be rebranded Gordonia) is getting even better. Forget Britain’s Got Talent, Britain has Gordon!
It is, simply, marvellous. Oops, I hope that’s not too negative. The Prime Minister was bubbling with good news, not least that the Sun has got its hat on, hip hip hip hooray. Yes, that’s right, Mr Brown is now making the weather, too. It’s a brave thing to do in Britain (sorry, Gordonia) but he is exactly that.
He came before us as a visionary but, sadly, unlike Gandhi, he had no loincloth. Gordon’s vision has taken a while but then, you can’t rush these things. The apple does not just fall from the tree (as Newton knows), you have to see it fall. Still, it has been more than 18 months since Mr Brown said he wanted a vision, not an election. Since then he has been sitting cross-legged, chanting, with fellow visionary Peter Mandelson (this is a two-for-one vision deal, like Specsavers).
My only cavil is that the name, Building Britain’s Future, is, as visions go, a bit clunky. Surely, Gordon was just being modest (as you may know Mr Brown is an expert on modesty and, as he reminded us yesterday, humility). I understand he thought of Paradise Rebranded (Milton, a sub-visionary, would have understood). Or Gordonia — Leading the World. But, whatever it’s called, it is all marvellous and here is why:
Everyone has a job. Yes, everyone. There are no skivers in Gordonia. Every youngster will have a skills base whether they like it or not. It is costing a billion and it is not just a pledge but a “guarantee”, just like you get with a fridge.
Green Gordonia. Blake (another lesser visionary) may have dreamt up that line about a green and pleasant land but it has taken Gordo to flesh out the detail. Forget the new Jerusalem, now we know this means four commercial-scale carbon capture and storage demo plants. (NB: these are NOT dark satanic mills).
Everyone has a house. It is like The Three Little Pigs for the masses. Over two years we are tripling our investment to create zillions of homes (all of them green, another bit Blake left out) and then we are going to evict all the migrants. In Gordonia, it is local housing for local people. I’m not sure what that means but the Big Bad Wolf may be busy.
Targets are out, personal entitlement (PE) is in. Several people in the Commons asked what the difference was. Mr Brown — so modest — didn’t like to say. Basically, we may all get PE cards — like Tesco Clubcards — to swipe if we want health checks or personal tutors or to “extend our choices”. In Gordonia, everyone’s choices are always being extended.
Spend, spend, spend. In G-Utopia, spending plans are tedious irritating things that just remind people of the debt (sorry, did I say debt, what I meant was investment opportunities). Yesterday Mr Brown explained that the decision on this was, really, up to the Chancellor (that modesty again).
So there you have it. Isn’t it great? The only tiny cloud on the horizon (I’m sure Gordo can remove it) is that no one knows what’s happening with the Royal Mail. Still, visionaries don’t need the post, do they?
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