The global temptation

adrian drummond

How on earth can you say that, "Brown is at his most formidable politically talking about economics" when the man almost single handedly created the financial framework that has bankrupted the country?

Statements like that, make a man question his own sanity.

Marco Polo

If it is true (which I doubt) that "Brown is at his most formidable politically talking about economics", that is an absolute disgrace. To quote Austrian economist Gary North, "It is inconceivable to me that investors take seriously the promises of a group of 20 big-time national politicians, accompanied by 10 other nations' politicians. These people got into office by lying to their constituents, and then convincing their constituents, election after election, to send them back into power so that they can betray them for another round...The Keynesians' goal is to train students to believe that money spent by the government is productive, while money spent by investors and capitalist enterprises is wasteful. They teach the students to believe that the expansion of money by the central bank is productive, while increased savings by the public leads to what the Keynesians call the paradox of thrift. Somehow, thrift creates economic recessions. Somehow, increased saving to make available capital goods is a threat to the financial stability of free markets."

Publius

I do wish people wouldn't keep going on about Brown's economic expertise. He's a charlatan.

Yes, Rawnsley's column is always worth reading. And there's a good piece by Dominic Lawson in today's Sunday Times.

yarnesfromhorsham

But surely Andrew if GB can sort the world out in a day dealing with the UK should be childs play.

John Page

Cameron really needs to get him on to other issues, where he is much weaker.

Simon Stephenson

"Brown is at his most formidable politically talking about economics."

There's a curious, but widely-held belief that Mr Brown is a top-grade economist who has used this skill to construct a political ambition for society far beyond that which would be possible from a lesser man.

This is nonsense. Complete nonsense.

Brown's blueprint for society is unchanged from his days as a teenage clever-dick revolutionary in the university politics of the late 60s and early 70s. What he has learned of economics in the meantime is no more than the obfuscating jargon that allows him to camouflage the real purpose and motivation behind his actions.

His mission in life is for every decision he makes to be consistent with the goal of increasing the dependency of individuals on the state, and their subordination to it. Not, I think, to satisfy his own lust for power, but because he genuinely believes that this is how society should best be organised.

The crippling of the pension funds; the compulsion of the financial sector into imprudence; the normalisation of unaffordable public-sector provision - easy to set up, almost impossible to break down; the massive build-up of private debt for eventual take-over by the state, with the transfer of obligation that this entails. However much they were represented otherwise, every one of his policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer was specifically and deliberately designed to weaken the foundations of independence within society.

Try looking at it this way, having first suspended the desperate hope that it isn't true, and see how clear it all becomes.

Verity

John Page says: Cameron really needs to get him on to other issues, where he is much weaker.

On which particular issues do you think Cameron is strong, or even notionally competent? (Michael Gove on education, I'll give you.) But I have not seen a display of strength or intellectual vigour from Cameron on any subject at all.

Oh, wait a minute! I forgot the A-List.

Ivy Eileen

"Brown is at his most formidable politically talking about economics." -

well, is it economics or finance or just numbers ? I agree whole heartedly with the other comments. The man is not an economist, a financier, a banker - he has had 10 or so years saying (and bullying) what he wants in the Treasury ... and the result is an artificial boom and a consequential bigtime bust.

It is pure tractor production figures. There is no personal verification, due diligence, sense of responsibility or conscience over what he is saying - as witness his double counting and re-announcing "investment". And which is why it eventually unravels .. but by then he's moved on to something else - everyone is left to play catch-up (except, of course, with the 10p tax but then there was another player in the game - Darling - so Brown couldn't blather his way out of that one).

I wish the Womens' Institute would invite him to speak to them. They would bring him down to earth (i.e. "Blairise" him) in a way the journos and the Opposition Front Bench don't.

Denis Cooper

I happen to live in one of the safest Tory seats in the country, so it won't matter too much how I vote at the next general election.

But if I lived in a marginal constituency, and I had to decide whether to vote for the sitting Labour MP, or for his Tory opponent, I might actually find that a difficult choice.

Labour is both incompetent and disgusting, but the Opposition is frankly pathetic, apparently proceeding on the assumption that they can win on the back of the government's failures rather than on their own positive merits.

There is a case for saying "Better the Devil you know", and giving the Brown government a further lease of life in the hope that at the following election we could replace it with a decent government.

Forlornehope

Yes, he is very formidable talking economics. It is just that he is a disaster actually running them.

Nicholas

"There is a case for saying "Better the Devil you know""

Unfortunately not in this case. The Devil we know is far worse than any alternative and an extension to Plan Brown would only increase the power of the state to render the alternatives null and void.

The choice is simple. Vote for fascists or vote for the party that are not fascists.

JohnAnt

Never mind pious speeches on crime. Brown himself is responsibile for the biggest act of national larceny in our history, so he's not really in a position to preach to us on the subject of crime.
What we need is to reduce the state payroll. How can we justify hammering people in the productive private sector, while cushioning government employees (that includes GPs) from feeling any pain at all, other than slightly reduced budgets?
Just as the private sector is the driver of wealth-creation that government battens off, so also an unemployed worker in local government or the civil service does not even represent a diminished resource capacity - (s)he's just an unemployed person and a subsidy we need no longer pay. Oh, it's the wrong time to sack people? Tough! Let's start sacking the ones who need sacking.
Brown deliberately set about increasing the state payroll in 2003 in order to provide himself with a majority electorate - and because of ludicrously expensive restrictions on redundancy or termination, added to index-linked final-salary pensions completely unjustified by funded provision, he turned it and the incapacity benefit cop-out into a one-way social engineering system. A salary is only a small part of personal wealth. Golden pensions that outstrip those of more competitive professions, freebie mortgages, housing subsidies, free facilities, free or subsidised travel, free nod-and-wink local grapevines that provide benefit in kind, endless subsidies for malingerers: this is the way Brown has shafted the private sector.
A tax strike is the only weapon with which to fight back.

Michael Booth

JohnAnt - a tax strike... interesting, very interesting...would have to be everybody though and PAYE makes that tricky

JONNY

'On which particular issues do you think Cameron is strong, or even notionally competent?'

I imagine exactly the same might have been said, Verity, about Blair in 1996 (probably by you).
Or how about Maggie in 1978?
What exactly was her area of supreme conpetence? (Having failed at Education).
In fact you'd have to go back to Churchill in 1940 to find something positive.
Cameron's qualification is that he is highly intelligent and more charismatic (if not to yourself) than any other politician around.

David Ossitt

Ivy Eileen.

You make some very good points but he would never; ever, dare to visit with the Womens Institute.

Remember he does not take flak; he is a natural born coward.