Fisking Darling

The Labour Party conference is already turning out to be a stage where a fictional narrative of events is being established and Alistair Darling’s speech was no exception. Here is a small list of correctives.
 
1) “Record of economic growth not achieved by any other economy” Um, the UK has had the worst growth in the English speaking world since 1997. Most developed countries have grown faster. See theOECD growth tables for proof.
 
2) “Youth unemployment is down by 90% in Dorset and that is what a Labour government has delivered”. Um, youth unemployment has (scandalously) risen under Labour across the UK (see here).
 
3) He claimed Bournemouth has a 1.5% unemployment rate. Look at the official figures for Feb07, and look up Bournemouth for the full story. It’s true that 2% of the work-force are on jobseekers allowance, but a full 8.6% are on incapacity benefit. When you add in the other categories a shameful 14.7% are on out-of-work benefits in the Bournemouth Council area. If Labour ministers are served lunch, coffee and drink by Poles in this seaside town, they’ll know why. Here, as across Britain, natives are being paid to do nothing.
 
4) Globalisation is to blame for the Northern Rock crisis. The credit crunch was certainly global, but only Britain had a run on the bank. That is because only Britain made the fundamental misjudgement of refusing to pump liquidity into the banking system in the way the ECB, Fed, Norwegians, Russians etc did. Darling could have overridden Mervyn King’s error. This ineptitude was to blame for turning a global drama into a very British crisis.