It is easy, with all the terrible events going on in London at the moment, to let other significant stories slip under the radar. However, last week the UK senior finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, tweaked the rules of UK budget policy in an offhand manner that takes the breath away for sheer barefaced cheek.
Brown has a so-called “Golden Rule” that stipulates that the government’s books must be in balance over the course of the economic cycle. The books are currently seriously in the red at the moment, which would appear alarming given that we have had a relatively decent period of economic growth recently. So what does the gloomy Scot do? He shifts the year in which a key part of the economic cycle is supposed to have started by two years, the effect of which is supposed to show that the Golden Rule has not been broken. This sleight of hand produced fairly scant coverage outside the business sections, but in its own little way illustrates the utter contempt this government has for the financial markets, or the general public.
Brown has done this sort of thing before. And it makes one wonder just how long Brown can go on before the economy, supposedly Labour’s strongest card in the last election, turns south.
I never bought the argument that Brown was a great Chancellor, as, with all his faults, was Nigel Lawson, for example. Brown has been enormously lucky to inherit an economy left in fine fettle by the previous Conservative government, and apart from his wise move of making the Bank of England independent, has done precious little right since. He is an ardent meddler and micro-manager, making the tax code into a hideously complex morass that does precious little for growth apart from make lots of jobs for tax accountants.
How the world changes. A few weeks ago the political trainspotters were wondering how soon Brown would take over from Blair. I suspect the likelihood of that happening has been pushed away by quite a distance.
Don’t forget about that old bank account which you haven’t bothered with for a few years. The Great Thief at the Treasury thinks he’s entitled to steal that too:
In much the same fashion that Jo Moore and Stephen Byers urged colleagues to rush out bad news under cover of the September 11 terror strikes the 7th and 21st of July bombings must have been seen as an absolute godsend by the government. There has been little or no mention of Stephen Byers’ truly disgraceful conduct in court, his use of parliamentary privilege to cover his lying to the transport select committee nor his flagrant lie under cross-examination by Keith Rowley, QC, where he openly denied asking Shriti Vadera to send an e-mail to colleagues saying he had asked her to work up options “involving alternative owners and management” for Railtrack, despite a copy being provided in court.
Pete_London,
I forsee massive and disasterous withdrawals taking place in the British banking system.
It is worth pointing out that Arthur Andersen did pro bono work for the Labour Party,the Public Private Finance Innitiatives which were design to take liabilities off the books mirror those of Enron.
But what do you expect? Brown is a marxist!
Peter,
I don’t think you’ll find that Gordon Brown is a Marxist. What he is, is a liar and a thief.
Brian,
That’s what I said, a marxist.
I have always been puzzled about why people – the socialist media – went on about what a wonderful Chancellor Brown is because he always struck me as a bull in a china shop. Yes, giving the Bank of England authority to set interest rates was a very good move – but I thought at the time it was because he didn’t have the faintest idea how to figure it out for himself and didn’t trust the civil service to advise him disinterestedly. I think he has been immensely incompetent and ideology driven.
He is enormously unattractive as a person, too.
Well I’m sure you’re as pretty as a rose Verity, but I don’t see how people’s appearance generally applies to political discourse.
Attractive people get more cooperation than ugly people. Part of his lack of attraction is home grown. The prim, disapproving face developed because he’s been prim and disapproving since, probably, boyhood. He’s got a sloppy mouth when he speaks. He should have attended to that years ago. He looks stupid and loutish in a lounge suit among a whole roomful of men wearing white tie. The man’s a mess.
If he were a brilliant Chancellor, we would overlook the faults to some extent. But he’s not. There’s no brilliance or sparkle to distract one from his unpleasant appearance.
I have often wondered to what extent a Chancellor’s actions and reputation are earned by the individual concerned; surely the financial affairs of the country are managed by the civil servants in the Treasury?
The job of Chancellor is a pitiful one if one honest. It is nothing but an invitation to bugger up the free market and every chancellor will do just that to one degree or another. But Brown is not an honest chancellor and his buggering of the economy will be felt by all sooner or later but probably sooner. This will have the benefit of tending to render him unfit, at least in the eyes of many, to become the next PM. So as long as the Tories don’t do something unbelievable stupid, and I wouldn’t put it past them, this is likely to be NuLab’s last term.
The incompetent joker sold 60% of our gold reserves (around 400 tons) just after he became Chancellor. This was at a time when gold was at a multi-year low of $270/oz. It’s been rising ever since, and now stands at $425/oz.
Also, don’t forget the tax credit debacle. Wasn’t this totally ridiculous benefit, which doles out cash to people on £50 000/yr and demands four figure repayments from single mothers on £9000/yr one of Brown’s initiatives.
I can’t stand Teflon Tone, but at least he’s doing a great job by keeping Brown out.
And, one ought to point out, the gold reserves were sold in order to create euro reserves, which have lost a third of their sterling value.
Excellent points there from John East and guy herbert.
The question of whether Gordon Brown is a good Chancellor is hard to answer as he hasn’t been tested. He inherited a reasonable position and, whatever people like to say about the UK having the world’s fourth largest economy, the C of the E is largely at the mercy of events far too large for one country to influence. The best he can do is not to make matters worse.
On that score, I’d say he was pretty poor. He has slid the taxation system even further into gross incompetence, he has massively increased bureaucracy and meddling. But he’s been lucky. Thus far World conditions have been in his favour. That may very well be about to change.
If Brown and his camp stand for anything at all (and I admit that it’s not much) it sure as hell must be a lot more than the Gramscian Blair and his thieving wife stand for. However this is just supposition – I feel that Blair won’t be going until after the 2012 Olympics now, given his chronic desperation to leave his mark upon the UK’s history, and that Brown will be left in the unfortunate limbo state of ‘sometime never’.
Someone in the Conservative Party told me recently that Labour backbenchers refer to Brown as the ‘Prince Charles’ of the party – i.e. trudging along in the hope that he will be still alive to inherit one day.
Gordon Brown has done three things correctly.
He stuck to the Tory spending plans he inherited for his first two years in office.
He completed the process towards Bank of England independence and inflation targetting (although I am not convinced that inflation targeting is a panacea for all circumstances which might arise) that the Tories (Lamont and Clarke) started. Interestingly, this was a LibDem election policy, not Labour.
He has kept us out of the Euro.
All these things we would likely have got from the Tories
I cannot think of another thing which he has done which is not incompetent, meddling and injurious to future prosperity. He is also a public deceiver, par excellence.
He couldn’t run a whelk stall.