Let us not blame Gordon Brown for everything. He has learnt the lessons of his predecessors. The wrong lessons.
Compare:
Then spake the chief butler unto Pharaoh, saying, I do remember my faults this day:
[…]
And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went throughout all the land of Egypt.
And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls.
And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. (Genesis, Ch.41)
And,
I announced that I had no proposals to touch on the ‘anomalous but much-loved tax-free lump sum’
[…]
The side offensive began with the imposition in 1986 of a statutory limit on the size of pension-fund surpluses. This was much more difficult for the pension lobby to fight, and as a result I was able to get it on to the statute book. The dramatic improvement in the financial climate of the previous three or four years meant that many occupational funds had accumulated assets far in excess of those needed to honour their liabilities to their pensioners – in other words, and even on the highly conservative basis used by pension fund actuaries, the funds were heavily in surplus. This was not simply due to inadvertence. For these excess funds enabled companies to accumulate income, free of liability to Corporation Tax, in a gross fund
[…]
The 1986 reform put an end to this: no undue surpluses could be created, and existing surpluses would have to be run down over a period to a maximum of 5 per cent of total liabilities.
[…]
The course taken by most companies was the employer’s contribution holiday, whose economic effects were a rise in company profits (and cash flow) and thus in Corporation Tax receipts, coupled with a fall in recorded personal saving, since employers’ pension contributions are officially classified as personal savings. (Nigel Lawson, “The View from No.11”, Bantam 1992)
And saith the chief butler to Pharaoh, pay unto Joseph no mind. For the tax-gatherers counsel that ye take any fat kine that ye find among the people and slaughter them. The meat of the unjust surplus shall feed the priests of your temple. If there be famine the people will gnaw on old bones. And they will be weak and not rise up. But the tax-gatherers will be fat and glorify Pharaoh’s name.
No surprise there. Looters one and all.
Brown is a great man will be a great PM, he has embraced Tory economic pragmatism, but moderated it to fit the Labour model of social justice, and in doing so has prevented us from falling prey to the deflation that comes with excessive neo-liberal idealism and rampant inequality.
I’m too tired from fighting the (New) Labour model of social justice (“everybody must do whatever we tell them to or somebody will be severely punished”) to fisk that. Anybody?
Is it necessary to point out that I was hinting that a son of the manse with collective welfare in mind would be expected to imitate Joseph, not continue the Inland Revenue’s war on savings so unwisely assisted by Lord Lawson, and also suggesting that the “pension crisis” has deeper roots than the Advance Corporation Tax raid.
(I’d quarter expected to be accused of anti-Semitism because Joseph and Nigel Lawson are both Jewish, but I submit “Brown is a great man” is a random ricochet no one could prepare for.)
I feel that within the next 6 months Gordo will be known as “the end of Boom Brown”.
Deflation is when capital gets more buying power, i.e. people that spend less than they earn are more wealthy.
I can see why those jealous of financial success would hate deflation.