Quote of the day

Sir Graphus

It's also total rubbish. It's a 1-off cost for having an economic idiot in charge, and if we ever vote for 1 again, we'll have to stump up again.

Even the fools who believe the current crisis is entirely the fault of the Americans won't buy this excuse.

Stevie

The recession is a 'one-off cost' and people losing their homes is the 'best thing for them'. Such beautiful Pearls of Wisdom from Labour....

Paul Owen

Can you imagine what Brown would have said if a Conservative had said that? Doesn't it sound rather like someone saying unemployment is a price worth paying? It's Brown's less than subtle way of trying to dodge the blame again. But if it's globalisation to blame, how come we are the only major economy currently in grave danger of suffering a double dip?

toco

A typically callous comment from the alarmingly dysfunctional and erratic Brown.We can thank our lucky stars he is a 'one-off' and that we shall shortly be rid of him.

stephen

Maybe the Tories should remake that famous car TV commercial [was'nt it for VW?] that showed a man walking out of a casino totally skint with a line "this is the man who started backing red just as the table turned black. This is the man who went out with a sex kitten just as she became a cat" and so it went on! It would make great TV!

Scott Mills

sounds to me like it is similar to "un-employment is a price worth paying" comment. Whatever Brown says, he just will not accept any responsibility for what he has done to the British economy

Neil McEvoy

With luck, it will be a one-off cost for gordonisation.

General Zod

We are all idiots unworthy of our leader: this is the one-off cost of the final abolition of boom and bust.

(what he never told us was that he intends that there should be permanest bust)

OldS.B.

I would just love him to tell that - face to face - to my nephew, who recently lost his job, and The Chelsea have just applied to court for an eviction order on his flat!
Of course, it might conceivably be because he has consistently vote Conservative for years, but somehow I doubt it... They have already hired a trainee for a lot less money..

Ed B

It's a bit out of date but I rather like this one:

“What you as the City of London have done for financial services, we as a government intend to do for the economy as a whole”

- Gordon Brown, as Chancellor - Mansion House speech June 2002

And they did...

Naomi Muse

The comments through the article are interesting and almost indicate schizophrenia.....the symptoms closely resemble those indicated in the article.

As to the specific quote - "We are paying a one-off cost for globalisation."

Wierd. Globalisation is the move of power away from geographical and national states to multinational and international companies.

It is relentless and will go on costing the nation states until the multinationals also begin to provide welfare for the communities in which they are based, and not just look after their employees and shareholders.

One-off cost? Pah!

Paul B

He- Brown- is a one off. One off the joint at the end of my arm.

Michael Booth

Sorry Paul B, Brown is not a one off - there are plenty more delusional people like him in the Labour Party...not to mention those still prepared to vote for him.

TrevorsDen

This is all part of Brown rationalising his broken paradigm to himself.

This is not just his post neo classical endogenous growth theory rubbish. or his facile social engineering. Its all his bull$hit about global this that and the other and how it means never ending sweetness and light.

Just before he came down with his brain illness Ted Kennedy had to sit through Brown waffling on about 'global' issues. Laughably you will not be surprised to learn that Brown thought that everything good thats happened in the world was down to President John and Senator Ted.

But when you hear Brown say things like "Let me sketch out the challenges we face, the new directions I favor and the solutions I propose.", you know you should run for the exit.

Interestingly when you consider his response to the leaked UEA emails Brown says, "A few years ago in regime after regime sentries could stand over fax machines as governments sought to deny information to their peoples ... the digital age is enabling people to become the authors of change rather than its
subjects"

Browns conclusions ? " a new World Bank; a new International Monetary Fund; a reformed and renewed United Nations ... strong regional organizations from the European Union to the African Union able to bring ... humanitarian aid, peacekeeping and the support for stability and reconstruction that has been absent for too long -- all built around a new global society founded on revitalized international rules and institutions, "

You pick up on that? Rules, pity those pesky Greeks cannot obey rules 9and pay their taxes. Rules - thats why we have hd 6000 new laws in the past 13 years. Rules to make life better. If only people would think like brown and obey his rules.

This is Browns warped paradigm. He then demanded "during the year to come I want this debate about change to become a global dialogue about renewal as we embark upon a task perhaps more ambitious than even the Bretton Woods
Conference"

All that was in April 2008 - anyone seen any of these absurd pipe-deams coming to fruition?

No. Brown did not cannot envisage 'globalisation' making things worse not better, so our current disaster becomes a 'one off' price.
What should worry people is that if he really believes that then he will not be rushing to rebalance our economy as according to his paradigm we have all of the time in the (global) world.

PS
And for followers of the Jonah principle - soon after this speech Senator Ted had a brain seizure and subsequently died, with the Democrats losing his seat to ... someone called Brown.

Disaster looms. Britain desperately needs a new government.

Rex Burr

I very much doubt that it will be seen to have been a one off cost.
If it is then we have got off very lightly.

Ivy Eileen

Does anyone believe he understands a word of this ? It's like that "endogenous growth" thingy. Sounds good, appears weighty, might make a good headline .... but it's absolute twaddle.

The guy is crackers. Unfortunately, we suffer.

brian kelly

I really don't see any conection between 'one off payment' and the the global crisis. It's nothing to do with 'global' in that sense. The crisis was caused by extremely lax financial rules in the USA [Greenspan] and the UK [Brown], incompetent oversight and sheer personal incompetence. Brown is a delusional disconnect and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near public money. It really is as simple as that. All these fancy flown theories - it's just mismanagement and ignorance - i cannot believe how supine we all are in the face of such wreckers of this country.

Liz Brown

have we been asked if we want globalisation let alone a one off payment - this idiot is talking out of his nether region again

Boudicca

I suppose in one respect, the moron's right.

If you've lost everything because of Brown's mishandling of the economy, it will be a one-off. When you've lost everyting, there IS nothing else to lose. In the immortal words of Kris Kristofferson:

"Freedoms just another word for nothin' left to lose

Nothin' ain't worth nothin' - but it's free"

Gee - thanks Gordon!

Paul B

Michael Booth, of course you are right. I should explain, a one off is an insult from where I come from. Its a habit many young men indulge in all day long.

Tiberius

The "one-off" mentalism does present the Tories with a strapline that could fit into many statements on Brown.

The hilarity is that Brown really believes what he's said.

Mike Brighton

When I hear Brown speak, in the words of John Major I hear the flapping of white coats and the muffled thump of a padded cell....

2trueblue

The man is certifiable. Tell my grandchildren in 15yrs time that it is a one off cost. We will be paying for this when he is long gone...but never forgotten. The man who told us that we were best placed to weather this crisis. Protect us from another Liebore government so I can get on with my retirement.

Derek

To paraphrase the words of the Housing minister: "For the British people, it can be the only and, it can in fact in the circumstances, be the best option for them to allow No.10 to be repossessed."

Noa Zrk

No.

We are paying a continuing cost for Gordonisation

Olaf Rye

Naomi: the companies paying for the 'community' ? What is all that tax revenue extorted from us by the government supposed to be doing ? They collected the taxes in good times but still borrowed and borrowed, regulating us to death and spending the tax money on armies of bureaucrats. This is a failure of the state, not the companies, and trying to pass the buck on to them for the provision of welfare and benefits above and beyond the tax collected is ridiculous. In many ways, Brown can be described as a 'balloon man': full of bravado and bluster when times are good, taking credit for the most benign economic cycle since the 1950s, and despondent when times turn bad and looking to blame everyone but himself for the current quagmire of debt and over-regulation we find have been condemned to endure by the cocktail party socialists.

Rhoda Klapp

Time for Cap'n Queeg to be put in his place. After it's all over for him, the stories will come out. The ones we've heard rumours of, the nokias, the shouting and temper loss, the abuse of staff. We'll all say why did they put up with it. We'll all say he should have been removed from office. And the ones who let the charade go on, the civil service, the cabinet and labour hierarchy, and most of all the damnable useless lobby journalists and their editors, well, they will all still be around. Job well done, chaps.

Dorothy Wilson

Yet again he is proving the Jungian interpretation of his personality type:

He will follow his ideas …… inwards and not outwards. Intensity is his aim, not extensity.

In the pursuit of his ideas he is generally stubborn, headstrong, and quite unamenable to influence.

"However clear to him the inner structure of his thoughts, he is not the least clear how they link up to the world of reality."

JONNY

But Sarah loves him warts and all - you can't get round that.
Though it might be argued she, unlike us, had an element of choice.

Percy

We really have to have some kind of electoral system which means never again can we have some unelected idiot like this utter tool foisted on us without consulting the people.

bill

"Ed B"
What a wonderful statement -

Nicholas

Rhoda, Cap'n Queer surely? In the old fashioned sense of the word meaning exactly that. A very queer fish about to bathe us in the pearls of his Piers Morgan extracted wisdom (another manifestation of the strange hybrid mutant of PM/Wannabe Celebrity/Government by Campaign/Party Political Broadcast), including the fact that he believed he should have been PM instead of Bliar. As if we didn't already know that.

Britain's failed dictator. Cap'n Queer.

oldtimer

A belated addition to the voices that consider Brown to be utterly deluded about the causes of the UK`s predicament and in denial about his responsibility for a large part of it.

Rosie

Heaven help us if GB had become PM in 1997! He said to Piers Morgan, arguing that he should have become leader, not Tony Blair, that he had the skills and experience to lead. Really? What happened to them? Did he lose them along the way, along with his 'moral compass'?

David Gore

In one way it might have been better if Gordon Brown had become PM instead of Tony Blair in 1997. Blair was sufficiently adept (and surrounded by people also adept) in presentation and manipulation that he was able to fool enough of the people enough of the time to win three elections. I suspect Brown would have screwed it up badly enough and quickly enough that it would have been a one-term Labour Government and we would have had the Conservatives back in power to clean up the mess in 2001/2002.

Moraymint

"Globalisation"? Don't make me laugh.

As the UK Industry Task Force on Peak Oil reported earlier this week, there's a shed load of evidence that we've got about 5 - 10 years before globalisation will be forcefully replaced by localisation. Don't hear too many politicians talking about localisation ... yet.

http://tinyurl.com/y92k5pr