The Brownies just keep on coming

On the basis that a Prime Minister should not be able to mislead his country every time he opens his mouth, here is a list of the Brownies to which we were treated on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. The sheer volume of them is overwhelming: this is carefully woven-together matrix of exaggeration, misrepresentation and outright porkies in order to create a fake picture of prosperity. Here is the by-no-means-exhaustive list, all in the space of less then half an hour.

INTEREST RATES: "Well interest rates in the last world downturn were 15%. I think everybody remembers that terrible time. Interest rates at the moment, the base is 5%."

You’ll remember this Brownie – we first met it during its debut with Sky News on Friday. Two Brownies at work here. One is the ‘real terms’. He’s not adjusting for inflation – real interest rates are broadly comparable now and then, though there is no data series online. Can any CoffeeHousers help? Next a characteristic of the Brown Bust is the detachment of actual lending rates from the Bank of England base rate – anyone out there renewed their mortgage at 5% recently? This is the ‘false proxy’ Brownie.

DEBT: "In the last ten years, Andrew - and this is yet another myth that I've got to puncture today - we've reduced the share of the national debt. We've reduced it from I think 44% to 37%, so we are in a position to borrow because of our good housekeeping to take us through difficult times.”

Flatly untrue. May 1997 national debt was 43.2% of GDP according to the Office for National Statistics. Last week, it said the figure is 43.4%. Brown may perhaps remember that he nationalised Northern Rock last year.

TORY YEARS: “We sorted out the instability of the economy, so we have lower interest rates. We had 15, 18% interest rates at one point. Our average is about 5% 6% interest rates and mortgage rates.”

This ‘metric switch’ at work – comparing a Tory peak of 15% (he concocted the 18%) with a Labour average.

EMPLOYMENT: Marr: “Highest unemployment for 10 years, highest inflation for 16 years.” Brown: I'm sorry, we have created 3 million jobs and that is, that is not correct.”

Notice how he uses his “new jobs” (every one immigration, pensioners or the public sector) to try to negate Marr’s accurate suggestion that unemployment is not the highest for a decade, which it is.

INFLATION: “It’s true to say that America has got much higher inflation than us.”

It is untrue to make such a claim. US inflation is 5.4% . UK RPI inflation is 4.8% and CPI 4.7%. I suppose this comes down to basic arithmetic – does Brown believe that 5.4 is “much higher” than 4.8? Observe the ‘metric switch’ Brownie at work again. American interest rates are compiled a different way than British ones and are not comparable – for a lengthy article from the US Statistics Bureau on why, click here.

A LIFE LESS ORDINARY: “I’m a pretty ordinary guy that managed through an ordinary school to get to university."

When Gordon Brown was 12 he was writing political articles for newspapers he made in his house. As you do. He went to perhaps the most selective state school in Scotland, which then fast-tracked bright kids and gave them intensive, tailoired tuition. This worked, so he went to university aged 16 – having more attention paid to his education than most of the privately-educated Tories whom he regards as the class enemy. Brown has devoted most of his political career denying state-educated children the selective education he enjoyed. He rails against this education experiment of which he was a part, but can hardly pretend his secondary education was in any way ordinary.

FAKE CRISIES: “Britain did pretty well surviving the Asian crisis, the American recession, what we call the dotcom bubble.”

The Asian crisis is an Aunt Sally: it was never a threat, it decimated Asian currencies and let us binge on their produce. So to claim we “survived” it is bunkum. It put rocket boosters on globalisation – it was the likes of Marks & Spencer that barely survived the Asian crisis after the influx of imported textiles. The dotcom bubble was not an economic shock, but a stockmarket drop. The economy did indeed slow around 2001, yet Brown responded by jacking up debt and pumping up the housing bubble which filled the economic chock full of borrowed money. The Economist ran a cover at the time with houses as balloons, suspending the rest of the world. What we didn’t realise was that Brown had taken us into dangerous highly leveraged territory, at the mercy or the global deleveraging now underway. Britain had household debt of 160% of income – not just the highest in the G7 but the highest any G7 country has ever known. We sure as hell will not “survive” this credit crunch as well. The bill has come in for brown’s illusory “stability” and its payback time.

FUTURE: “Look, Andrew, I was Chancellor for 10 years. I'm in a position to deal with the international and national events that are happening.”

I wonder if Adam Applegarth used the same argument when pleading to stay on as chief executive of Northern Rock?

BAILING OUT: “We would be letting people down. We would be letting people down if suddenly we walked away and said we bail out.”

He’d certainly be letting down David Cameron, whose electoral strategy is based on Brown staying on. Right now, the outlook from this Labour conference suggests they’re ready to die and it’s all systems go for a two-term Tory government.