Brown's Black Wednesday?
Peter Hoskin 8:35am
Few have torn into Gordon Brown's Government with the ferocity of Anatole Kaletsky, and today the Times writer adds another landmark article to the pile. In it, he highlights the parallels between the Northern Rock debacle and Black Wednesday:
"Black Wednesday revealed a Prime Minister unable to face reality or think more than a few days ahead, after watching the collapse of a totem with which he had foolishly identified his virility and self-esteem.
A similar state of confusion and denial is what we now see in Mr Brown. In reacting on Monday to his nationalisation announcement, I wrote that Mr Brown now seemed to be following Lewis Carroll's advice to believe in six impossible things before breakfast every day. He has been embracing impossible contradictions since the day he became Prime Minister - ranging from the inconsistencies in his foreign policies through his attitudes to climate change to his faith that wealthy foreigners would pay up, instead of leaving Britain, in response to his unprecedented tax assault...
...[And] just as Mr Major failed to gain from the shift in political consensus to the right in the late 1990s, because he was still in denial about his earlier blunders, Mr Brown now finds himself on the wrong side of the swing to the left in opinion.
Instead of arguing that the State can sometimes provide services efficiently or help to shape the future economy of the future, he finds himself defending the indefensible: a £100 billion support package to the least viable company in the one industry that everybody wants drastically shrunk. And while ministers scratch around for spurious self-justifications, serious thinking about the new settlement needed between the private sector and the State is left to the Tories.
In short, the Opposition is starting to fill the intellectual vacuum created by a Government in denial: the last, and most ominous, similarity between Major and Brown."
It's well-worth reading the whole piece. And, if you haven't seen them already, now's the time to catch-up with one or two of Kaletsky's other recent articles.
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mike
February 21st, 2008 10:53am Report this commentAnatole Kaletsky is just talk, we can all do that. If he was a doer then that would be a different kettle of fish. A doer would be out canvassing the voters on wind swept streets, entering estates where few would dare to venture. Posting his little pamphlets through dreary doors and shaking hands with even drearier people. Making speeches to an audience consisting of three party stalwarts and hoping that one day he would be asked to go on Paxos'. Many years would pass and eventually he would be elected as his local MP. Many more years and his party would be asked to form a government. Many more years would pass and Anatole would be asked to join the cabinet and to go on Paxos. Many more years would pass and his party would ask Anatole to be its leader. Having been in the job for just a few months some plonker writing for a newspaper would tell him what he has been doing all his life was rubbish and that he was rubbish, I think not. Anatole get back to your laptop where you belong, you silly person.
salieri
February 21st, 2008 11:39am Report this commentSome commentators are just talk, even at the Times, but Kaletsky is not one of them. His writings are universally (well, Mike, almost universally) respected and admired, especially on economic issues, and Mr. McBean must be sorely troubled by losing his support. As for the argument that rising slowly through the party's (any party's) apparatus confers some form of authority, compared with that of a journalist who has been in the job "for a few months" [sic], for heaven's sake what infantile rubbish.
Caroline
February 21st, 2008 12:20pm Report this commentPresumably the PM and chancellor have advisors both within and outside government. Who were they, and can anyone here assess their capability?
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