Brown demolishes himself with untimely ‘admission’

Boudicca

So why has he been lying to us for the past 2 years about it all being the fault of the Americans and he had been making the right long-term decision for the country. The continual 'Not Me Guv' has been laughable.

Now he says he has learned the lessons - so when DID he realise that he had made some catastrophic errors? When, precisely did he realise that his banking regulatory system was crap? Why has he continually told the Tories that their attacks were wrong, quite wrong? When did he accept that the 10p tax was a catastrophic mistake when for months and months he insisted no-one would be worse off?

I guess the lying git think a mea culpa now will gain him Brownie points.

Woody

Gordon Brown's 'admission' as you put it has been done quite deliberately as you well know, so stop treating us like idiots.
He always makes sure that anything that comes close to an apology always includes the fact that it was actually someone else's fault in the first place.
This man has no equal when it comes to mendacity.

toco

The alarmingly erratic and dysfunctional Brown has done it again!Talk about someone who is flawed and confused when his only supposed competence concerned matters financial he admits this is also a myth.

Dean

I dare you to print what Brown said rather than attempt to paraphrase it with Tory spin. He did NOT say that the recession was home grown. He wasn't talking about the recession at all.

What he SAID was that the emphasis on light touch regulation in the years leading up to the Crash - in both America and Britain, and supported by the Tories as well as the government - was a major contributory factor behind the banking collapse. He has said the same thing on numerous occasions, as has Alistair Darling, since October 2008 when Lehmans collapsed.

The point he was making was not a party political one, and you cannot deny that the Tories supported 'light touch' regulation throughout the period when Labour were in office. They are on record as having done so, not just in Commons debates but also in the Treasury Select Committee.

As usual, the Spectator proves itself completely inept when discussing any issue relating to the City and the credit crisis.

The only countries to have escaped relatively unscathed from the credit crisis are those that had strong regulatory systems. How do you reconcile that with your apparent belief that 'big government' is the root of all evil?

Barry

What better way to throw an election he might now not want to win.

Gawain

Now that he has admitted this it would be good to see him forced to apologise for the worst cruelty he has been responsible for, the destruction of the private pension system. The banking system will recover thanks to the largesse thrown at them. on the other hand anyone between 40 and 65 who hasn't worked in the public sector or isn't one of the small number of privelaged directors on fancy remuneration packages will be regretting the day Greedy Gordon got his hands on the purse strings. All the media luvvies who sneer at the Tories "big society" should just contemplate retirement. Anyone in the public sector should just look at the deficit and debt predictions and contemplate the worth of their so called "gold played" pensions. They'll also need to work out for themselves how they want to provide for themselves. Based on Grim Gordon's rhetoric and Saint Vince's fag packet accounting it is a good bet that the Lib/Lab "big state" won't sort anything out.

Snowman

methink, David, he’s demolished himself through his deeds long time ago. Talking just doesn’t wash. His lips move.

country mouse

He has clearly said this now to prempt any awkward questions in the TV debates.

Irene

Mrs Brown trying another tears for piers stunt?

General Zod

Utter rubbish, Dean.

You cannot get away with "the Tories supported us and it's on the record". Who was in government? Who was Chancellor of the Exchequer? If he has been letting the Tories dictate financial regulatory policy for the last thirteen years, is his pitch "now I've decided to stop listening to them and decide for myself"?

Ludicrous.

Willie de Peepul

So . . . Perhaps it IS time for a novice?

Snowman

and another thing. When the real estate bubble got into a full swing, and even as it was getting started, nobody could have stopped it. Nobody had the courage, the power, the ear of the people to say ‘no’. Only one player was able to cut the insanity to pieces – the market.

imagine what would have happened if BoE King hiked the cost of money to prick the ballooning house prices, the ‘must’ talk of the nation. The man would have been pensioned off before he shut his mouth, those who re-mortgaged every nine months or got 125% loans would have taken to the streets, Brown at the Treasury, deprived of the billions of receipts from the banks to spend on the welfare state and on saving Africa would have had a coronary…

history shows conclusively that the only way to stop a bubble is to prevent it happening in the first place, nip it in the bud before it forms. In case of the real estate bubble, mortgages only for those with a record of regular savings, max treble the salary, and no more than 80% of the property value. It was thus before the ‘no boom or bust’ bunch arrived, and it worked well.

Paul

Britain is borrowing £5000/second.
In 1997, Britain was borrowing rather a lot less.
Whichever way you try to spin it,someone in government, somewhere, at some stage,must've made rather a big blooper.

Ken

Dean: Having memory failure? Here's a full transcript. Brown "mispeaks" at the Mansion House? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/jun/22/politics.economicpolicy)

"And just as two years ago we promoted the action plan for liberalising financial services across Europe, I can tell you that the Treasury is now working with Charles McCreevy and with you to ensure that the forthcoming European financial services white paper signals a new wave of liberalisation."

Fees Office Clerk

Brown has only been lying to the people that believed him.

I've always known he was lying. I could tell...his lips were moving!

annassasin

His ending comment was revealing: He gas learnt to do what is best for the country. In other words National Insurance. Note. Lib Dems say they support tories on N.I. in manifesto. SNEAKY.

David Ossitt

Dean

Are you Richard?

Richard of York

Blimey! Spinning like tops again I see.

Brown said it was a mistake for the gov to listen to the banks and others when they said light regulation was enough. The truth is that AAA rated sub-prime mortgages were sold to British banks where American regulation was not strong enough.
Brown has admitted that he did not impose tougher regulation because he was persuaded by arguments it was not required as the markets were self correcting, which they would have been, provided everyone, including the Americans, obeyed the rules.
Part of the chorus of people urging light regulation were the Tories...Check Hansard for Oik and Cameron statements in the house.
So yes he has said that he should have not listened and imposed tougher regulation.
Fair enough!!!!
Now Cameron and Oik cannot then jump on the bandwagon now.
If my wife said turn left and it turned out to be a no-entry street.... yes its my fault I was the driver but it would be wrong for my wife to then castigate me for taking her advise....simple.

Holly ......

Gordon Brown is pulling this stunt because he KNOWS this will be mentioned in the debates tomorrow!
He is trying to 'soften us up'.
Once he's practiced 'looking honest' while saying it tonight,saying it tomorrow will be easy.
The bozo will by that time even believe his
own lies.
Just like Old Labour, New Labour are the worst thing to ever to hit this country.
Brown is a compulsive liar and he lies because once out of the clutches of his parents he could lie and not have a bar of soap rammed down his throat!
Once he got away with being 'punished',he just carried on...and on...and on.
Now the line by some scottish Labour bod is,the banks & of course the Tories are to blame.They faught Bozo tooth & nail opposing
regulation.Yeah right!!
Bozo did not make sure our economy was run properly.Brown was chancellor throughout all the banking wrecklessness and spent and borrowed like the bozo he is.
Bragging how secure and brilliant our economy was.
These scheming shoots are going to try every
trick in the book.
Too late Bozo & Co...
Tick....tock...

JONNY

'If my wife said turn left and it turned out to be a no-entry street.... yes its my fault'
Michael Crawford rides again.
Some Mothers do 'Ave 'Em

Michael

Brown is only attempting to say regulation was weak when he came in so the problems weren't his fault, as usual.

But of course they WERE his fault, because he removed banking regulation from the Bank of England and gave it to his tame puppets in the weak and politically controlled FSA. That's when the problems started.

Robert

Channel4 News just reported Brown's admission. Pointed out that it was Brown himself extolling the virtues of his light touch regulation and that he wouldn't countenance any change!
Damning indeed let's hope the BBC reports this in the same truthful way!

sleeping dolls

Richard, do you really think the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Shadow Chancellor is like that between you and your wife? What a strange marriage that must be! At least it does go some way to explain how sad you must be.

Osred

I feel kinda warm inside thinking about how $#!te Brown is going to look tomorrow on the 'debate'. Loving it already. ...And Cameron. Dont be such a phking wuss. Hit hard hit high and hit often. Show contempt and passion if you truly want to convince.

Right On

I don't really think this is much. It does undermine his (frankly ludicrous) claim to have saved the world but that's an arguement which people are pretty much decided on - loyal Labour supporters buy it, most others don't, that won't change.

What again this flags is the crazy idea that the amount of regulation is important -it's not, it's what's in the regulation that counts.

We could have had low levels of regulation which still restricted the amount of speculation that banks engaged in. If designed well it could have allowed and supported growth and not risked the collapse that occured.

No matter what perspective you take I find it impossible not to conclude that Brown totally failed.

Chuck Unsworth

So what is the clown Brown's view now of selling off the gold - and signalling that he was about to do so? Who 'advised' him to do that?

For years Brown paraded himself round the City, encouraging banks and other businesses to take greater and greater risks - and now he denies this and says he should have been more careful when taking 'advice'. He wasn't taking 'advice', he was actively, personally and directly involved in inflating the giant bubble.

Who was it who decided to go hell for leather for PFI - and then decided to hide the vast scale by taking the deals off the books? Who 'advised' this?

Who was it who 'advised' Brown to raid the pension funds?

He's not only an idiot, he's a lying idiot. And now he portrays himself as a man entirely at the mercy of his own chosen 'advisors'.

Snowman

Richard @ 7.28:

you truly are the biggest one rhyming with dick.

are you trying to tell us that Brown listened to the Tories on what regulations to impose on the banks? Brown at his glorious prime taking the Tories’ advice, like you following your wife’s?

I tell you, it ain’t the difference in views on that or the other, it’s just that the likes of you can never ever admit getting anything wrong. Pile of shite has more dignity than you and your phylum.

and another thing: Northern Rock 125% mortgages were not sold by the Americans, you retard.

Fergus Pickering

Richard my love, who was responsible for Black Wednesday? You say Norman Lamont and the Tories. But I say Gordon Brown because he was totally behind the policy. Look it up, little lamb. The guys in power are the ones to blame. Always. Always. Always.

Tim W

After watching the Mark Austin programme, it was hardly an admission.

He managed to apologise by blaming somebody else. In a way taking credit for the apology but apologising on behalf of someone else. Incredible. It won't go down well in the debates because he doesn't seem straight with people.

J H Holloway

I see this as Brown covering his ass for one thing that can be pinned squarely on him.

The Brown-created FSA could have stopped Northern Rock and RBS (and the others) going completely nuts and lending galactic amounts of funny money.

That bail-out cost the UK £120bn and Brown's 'regulation' was 100 percent to blame. The brass neck of the Labour mob was exemplified by Adair Turner being made boss of the FSA in 2008 when it was realised what had happened on the FSA's watch.

Turner then toured the TV studios banging on about the banks' behaviour, pretending that the FSA had been invented shortly after his arrival.

But by remarkable coincidence - in the midst of the general election - the FSA has

' fined former deputy chief executive David Baker £504,000 for misreporting mortgage arrears data.

Former credit director Richard Barclay was fined £140,000 for also failing to ensure accurate financial information.

The FSA said the two had admitted their misconduct and received reduced fines as a result of their co-operation.'

So Brown gets his defence in as his FSA is shown to have been crooked. Question is, was the FSA lent on to cook the books and, if so, by whom?

David

This is just another "I take full responsibility for what happened - that is why the person that was responsible went immediately." - if you remember that classic from the Damian McBride affair.

I see two completely different levels of 'mistake' here. One was alluded to by John Humphrys last week and is represented by Gordon Brown's simplistic targetting of inflation without any apparent awareness of the complexity of the global economy e.g. inflation may be low not because of 'prudence' or genius, but because of never-before-seen levels of globalisation and eager Chinese workers. Gordon Brown ignored the hollowing out of UK industry, the massive increase of private debt and ridiculous buy-to-let bubbles etc. etc. because he really did think that low inflation would automatically result in a strong economy. That was a *huge* error and revealed a *huge* level of ignorance, arrogance and... well... an Aspergers-like lack of perceptiveness.

The idea that he took the word of bankers "in good faith" and now wishes he had regulated the banks better is an 'admission' of a much smaller level of 'mistake' and is clearly designed to deflect attention from The Big One.

oldtimer

This is a significant admission - in stark contrast to what he said to Geoff Randall about two years ago. This was just replayed, alongside the ITN interview, on the Boulton/Randall programme on Sky News. Randall also pointed out that before the crash, there were plenty in the EU and the BIS who also warned Brown about the risks to the economy; Brown brushed them aside at the time.

It is also a fact that the Conservatives opposed transferring responsibility for bank regulation to the FSA back in 1997; it is to be found in Hansard. But nobody paid any attention as they had just been thumped in the polls.

It is also clear that when the BofE and the FSA reviewed bank stress testing with the banks before the crash, the risk to the public purse was obvious but nobody wanted to talk about it. For evidence see Andrew Haldane`s speech "Why the banks failed the stress test". This is available as a *.pdf download from the BofE web site.

Simon Stephenson

The thing about Gordon Brown, which seems to apply to no other human being, dead or alive, is that his explanations of past events, and his own involvement in them, are always presented as though good outcomes are down to him/Labour and him/Labour alone, and less good outcomes are the result of his/Labour's normal judgement being impaired by poor advice from someone else. If you actually sit down and condition your mind to thinking that what Brown is offering you is a completely objective summary of actual events, it's totally uncanny. Here he is, a person with human frailties like the rest, and the best of us, and yet he's never, ever made a poor judgement on his own.

If he weren't Prime Minister, people would listen to what he says and conclude that these were the delusionary self-defences of someone whose entire mental make-up is dependent upon not accepting his own failings. Yes, I know that he's a politician, and that it's part of the job to grab a bit of reflected glory, and to downplay ones mistakes, but what Brown does isn't politics, it's personal. So no Richard (7.28pm), much as I'd love to take Mr Brown's word for it, I'm afraid that I have to read this "admission" as just the next instalment of a long line of denials, built into tactical manoeuvres, the planning of which don't involve paying any attention to truth or reality.

djw2009

David Blackburn, you agreed with Brown's analysis because you are a socialist yourself, along with most of the Spectator staff. What Brown did wrong was not a failure to regulate the banks. Brown's "apology" was an insidious attempt to put the pro-regulation argument, lapped up by pinko commentators like Blackburn. What Brown did wrong was running a deficit at the top of the boom and importing millions of foreign workers and thus artificially stoking house prices further. There has always been plenty of regulation of the banks - but nothing this side of outright communism can prevent busts from happening completely, and such severe regulation shouldn't even be attempted. I find the Spectator increasingly unpalatable due to its instinctive socialist orientation.

Victor Southern

Peter Lilley very clearly, and in Hansard recorded debate, pointed out the errors in Brown's establishment of the tripartite regulation of banks.

In successive years - 2006 and 2007, Brown at the Mansion House, praised his light-touch regulation and encouraged risk-takers in the City. That is not an opinion - it is a fact.

Brown forced the amalgamation of the good bank Lloyds with HBos, so adding a point of fresh cream to a quart of sour cream with th inevitable result.

The worst and most disgraceful of the Scottish bankers were friends of Brown and acted as his advisors on banking and the City.

He was wrong, wrong , wrong and over and over again. From the FSA to the pensions raid to the gold sales to borrowing.

J H Holloway

Apologies - my earlier post said the 'FSA was crooked'.

I lost the thread and meant to say Northern Rock was 'crooked' and wondered if 'NR was lent on to cook the books'.

Remarkable coincidence that the FSA starts prosecuting bankers in the middle of the election, though. Pity it wasn't so on the ball years ago.

Captain Christy

Friday Aprl 23rd, it is a sunny day and the latest growth figures published are better than expected - and it is St Georges Day ! Brown will milk this like nothing else and the 80% of voters who do not understand will believe him. Cameron will need an answer - perhaps if he explained the difference between the deficit and the debt in simple language we might get somewhere.

Nicholas

Brown learned this trick from the Sage of Twickenham. Keep claiming you were the only soldier on parade marching in step and hope no-one bothers to check the actual record (q.v. Ken, above).

"Och ay, me, I wiz always aginst liberalisation as chancellor, nehr, said so many times, nehr, but the wicked Tories wouldn'ae listen. It wis'nae me, the Tories did it an' ran away."

"M . m . m . m . mr Speaker" points across bench with trembling accusatory hand, jowls wobbling, chewed finger nails grim in the light, frightful Chapel of Rest suit dusty with dried bogies, "It was'nae me! Those big Eton bullies made me do it!"

Laughable, but unfortunately the moronic mob that passes for society these days will swallow it, pat by pat (q.v. Richard the Dork)

Anne Wotana Kaye 1

He's a cunning old s*d, so don't bee fooled. He has worked the poor dead baby act one time too many, so now he is up to a new trick. The British public is basically too naive and soft hearted when it comes to dangerous lunatics. It sees them as scapegoats and harmless, and wants desperately to be fairminded. He may (heaven forbid) garner extra votes.

TGF UKIP

Nah. all this is Brown trying to position himself ready for the debates. He's going for solid, experienced, reliable but humble Gordon contrasted with flash, slick, gimmick laden, Dave.

A lot of focus group derived research on perceptions of Dave, have all gone into this.

Simon Stephenson

Tim W : 8.06pm

"He managed to apologise by blaming somebody else. In a way taking credit for the apology but apologising on behalf of someone else. Incredible."

Not incredible to me, I'm afraid Tim. This is a fairly standard modern tactic for unjustified self-aggrandisement. A certain Anthony Charles Lynton Blair used it quite frequently.

You'll never get a socialist to apologise on his own account, so anything you hear from one of them that sounds like an apology is one of these cynical exercises.

Percy

It's obviously a trap, be careful Dave!

Boudicca

Oldtimer - you are quite right that Gordon was warned repeatedly that his economic policies were dangerous:

Gordon, the Treasury, FSA all knew we were heading for disaster. They were warned by the IMF and the EU but they ignored it.

These are the IMF warnings which give the lie to Gordon and the FSA's protestations of innocence:

1) Dec 2003 IMF gives Brown a borrowing warning

2) Sep 2005 IMF report warning over £1 trillion mountain of debt

3) Sep 2005 Brown besieged over growth and borrowing plans

4) Dec 2005 IMF fires new warning over Britain's finances

5) Sep 2006 IMF warns over possible UK property crash

6) Oct 2007 IMF report UK house market is 'heading for crash'

7) Apr 2008 IMF: UK vulnerable to US-style housing slump

Gordon has spent years insisting that the UK economy was hit for six by the credit crisis which started in America - and it couldn't be foreseen.

Wrong. Our economy was already in a dangerous position when the US housing market went t!ts up. It could be predicted and was but GORDON IGNORED THE WARNINGS.

Not the lying git is trying to say he only did what the Banks told him to do. Pathetic. He spent a decade telling us what a wonderful Chancellor he was. How he had eliminated boom and bust and how his tripartate regulatory system was the dogs' b0llocks.

Now - in an attempt to reap a few votes by appearing contrite and humble - he claims he was only doing what others told him to do. What a despicable, feeble excuse for a man he is.

Athesius the Facilitator

Richard you should be out on the stump campaigning or you will loose your seat. Don't keep blogging your using up precious time. Normanton (or whatever your new constituency is called) needs you.

Dysgwr Cymraeg

Hey guys all this is media froth.....where have I heard that before. All that has happened here is that the Gargoyle has admitted being an accesory when he was the culprit.
All he has done is admit in advance of the TV debates that he has some lessons to learn about (w)bankers. He will point out of course that the tories wanted an even lighter touch regulator...did they?...we'll never nkow.
It's just a case of getting in your retaliation in first. And if you dont believe that I'll throw my nokia at you.

Ivy Eileen

Holly - haven't heard the term "bozo" for yonks.

Thank you, it's a great term .......... but you are too polite. "Brown is a compulsive liar" is much more accurate. Needless to say, I agree with all the above (save, of course, the non-job, recycling my taxes personage - one "Richard" ).

Dysgwr Cymraeg

Soon the tosser will be out!...

Olaf

Is the problem not that the majority of voters 'know' Labour or 'know' the Conservatives in their heads and have no interest in actually hearing anything about politics?

They'll vote the same way as always because that's what they do. What is said in the press or on TV is irrelevant as are manifestos.

Lizzy

He's finished and they're finished. This is the endgame we are seeing. My late mother-in-law used to tell me how her mother used to spit at the radio when Lord Haw Haw came on during the war.
I know how she felt. I just can't bear to see Brown's ridiculous gurning face any more.

Major Plonquer

Dean said: The only countries to have escaped relatively unscathed from the credit crisis are those that had strong regulatory systems.

This is truly funny. The country that had the lightest recession (none at all), Australia, also has ASIC, as a regulator. ASIC is not just 'light-touch', it is functionally non-existent.

Dean's post is typical of the Left. Shout as loud as you can when you tell lies and nobody will bother to check your facts.

Ron Todd

Dean

Brown does nothing without thinking about party political advantage.

BigAl

Brown's enlightenment on the financial crisis is timed to set him up for the debate tonight so that he can trap DC into agreeing to some condition of financial regulation without knowledge of the fine details. Failure of DC to agree will be interpreted by Brown (and Balls) as his lack of determination to reign in the bankers.

Remember DC to find out the details first when dealing with Brown. The reduction in the basic rate of tax by Brown was hailed as a master stroke during the budget. It was only when the fine print was looked at that the removal of the 10p level was found out. Beware of Brown and Balls............(and Whelan)

echo34

Whooah people,

Now look what you've done. Rich and Dean have gone off to sulk.

You keep it up like this and they wont come back with more of their pearls of wisdom.

David Bouvier

Gordon of course is relying on public unwillingness to get into detail on bank regulation.

Brown's decision to alter the UK banking supervision arrangements was condemned from the very beginning - by the Tories among others - as likely to be ineffectual (the governor almost resigned over it at the time). Brown wrong. Tories right.

Secondly, the approach to capital adequacy that was being moved towards globally under the Basle accords had built into it, unfortunately an inappropriate over-reliance on Rating Agency paper (which is only suitable for commercial due diligence, not regulatory hurdle jumping) and rules that contained a regulatary arbitrage opportunity allowing over-leverage.

I actually believe that many senior bank directors did not understand this and were gulled by their apparent regulatory compliance. I don't think any leading politician gets points on this one.

And since we had a long long boom, time and career advancement wiped out the cautious and promoted the risk-takers who were more lucky and less smart than they realised. There were as others pointed out plenty of people suggesting an unsustainable bubble was happening.

DC's unwillingness to tackle Brown on that early was regrettable, though TACTICALLY understandable.

Unless you have actually abolished boom and bust it is better to keep your booms fairly short.

The question is good or bad regulation, not light or strong regulation.

El Sid

This is a bit more subtle than people are giving Brown credit for. He's trying to rewrite history into one where it's all about quantity of regulation, which then allows him to be on the side of big government versus the Tory small government.

Of course, it's not about quantity of regulation. What the City really objected to was the dismantling of a system under the BoE that had been flexible enough to cope with everything that had been thrown at it for centuries, to be replaced by a rigid, rules-based system that collapsed within a few years.

A particular failure was the way Brown split the power to regulate banks from the regulators who understood banks. Thus you had the BoE screaming about what was going on in the mid-Noughties, about unregulated insurance products, the customer funding gap etc but they couldn't do anything about it, whereas the FSA monkeys who had the power, didn't understand what was going on.

Another example of how real bankers _did_ understand the problems and warned about them - p128 of the BIS annual report of June 2005 describes how many banks lacked the analytical capability to understand CDOs, CDSs etc and warned about possible knock-on effects if the economy faltered:

http://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2005e.pdf

Brown and the FSA can't say they weren't warned. But they did nothing.

His rigid, rules-based regulation was part of the problem, because it's always going to be 10 years behind the game. Hence the likes of AIG Financial Products, ground-zero of the credit crunch, was based in Mayfair and was completely unregulated.

It's not about the severity of the regulation, it's about the nature of it. Confining lending to 5x Tier 1 capital would be very restrictive, but it leaves the capital allocation decisions up to the banks. Having rules on how many paperclips should be used on submissions to the FSA represents a lot of regulation, but it doesn't stop anyone doing stupid lending. Guess which Brown prefers? He thinks quantity of regulation equals quality of regulation and he's profoundly wrong.

For instance, the US authorities were right to reduce regulation in the 90s, the problem was that they didn't fill in the gaps that resulted. So for instance, instead of reducing regulation by 40%, they should have reduced it by 50% and then introduced 10% of new legislation to cover the megabanks that resulted from the repeal of Glass-Steagall. That was the mistake, even though the overall push to reduce regulation was broadly right. Brown is trying to rewrite that history, in a way that makes fans of small government appear to be shills for the bankers.

Nicholas

Good analysis by David Bouvier and El Sid, the latter especially convincing in the way that its explanation gels with Brown's known pedantry towards the trivial and tick box at the expense of the big picture and the basics. The re-writing history bit needs to be established in the public narrative - the national socialists do it all the time.

Thanks.

djw2009

Memo to Fraser: sack David Blackburn (let him go and work for the New Stateman instead) and take on El Sid.

Simon Stephenson

Yes, i'll go along with Nicholas in commending David Bouvier and El Sid for their comments, and thanking them for them.

I personally think that Brown's underlying strategy is different from that which, I think, underpins both these explanations. I don't think that Brown has at any time made an ideological peace with free enterprise and individualism. He's made what he portrays to the world as a commitment to work alongside the capitalists to create a prosperous world with social fairness, but in truth his commitment to this joint-venture is about as hollow as Germany's commitment to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of non-aggression.

This is because in Brown's mind it is an anathema to consider that pre-distribution prosperity is more effectively created by free-thinking than by the deliberation of a committee. It's not given house-room, even in one of the remotest attics of his mind. Brown's socialism is not based on tempering individualism to achieve fairness, it's about creating a society in which people don't even think of themselves as individuals.

So to my mind the central strand of Brown's thinking with light-touch, the FSA and the ridiculing of prudence was the knowledge that this was the rope with which capitalism would hang itself. What he worked on was the removal of the devices by which irrational exuberance was controlled. Not content with the gradualist approach of institutionalising the encouragement of short-termism, he set about creating an environment in which short-termism became the only principle upon which commercial survival was possible. Front-end the benefits, and obscure the costs by scattering them into a future loaded with wishful assumptions - this became the only business strategy in town.

It's a clever game, played by the most Machiavellian sociopath of our times.

El Sid

Thanks for the kind words all (BTW Nicholas, I'm a "he") and apologies for duplicating large chunks of David Bouvier's excellent post which hadn't been approved at the time I was writing.

@Simon Stephenson - I'd blame cockup rather than conspiracy - and this apology comes from Mandelson rather than Gordon. We know that Brown has certain areas that he's passionate about and which get most of his attention - but if he's not interested in something, he completely blanks it. Defence is a good example, his only interest there has been in maximising the amount of work that goes to Scotland, and Rosyth in particular. So it was with City regulation, he wasn't really interested so left most of the work to his juniors.

Brown and the City is an interesting relationship, because as a posh boy from the outskirts of the second financial city in these islands, he doesn't have the class hangups or inferiority complex about the perception of the City that many Labour types have.

He certainly has no problem in taking the taxes they generate to fritter on his latest scheme to help lesbian gherkin growers or whatever - he's not one of that sizeable contingent on the left who would rather not have a financial services industry at all. OK, his partisanship meant that he'd rather knock out Lloyds than risk losing the Bank of Scotland, but he's not anti-finance on principle.

However he is anti London's role in finance. He really, really hates what he perceives as old-boys networks such as those personified by the Bank of England and House of Lords.

The fact that the BoE and HoL "worked" wasn't the point. Brown is not a pragmatic man, he's driven by dogma. He's perhaps the most abstract thinker to have held the job of PM in a long time because such people normally don't have the people skills to climb the greasy pole. That's why he'll always resort to the infamous tractor statistics (no matter how manipulated) rather than explain something more instinctively, perhaps with an anecdote that happened to a real person.

Anyway, he would rather dismantle something that was theoretically "unfair" but that worked, and replace it with something that was dysfunctional but apparently "fair". And the only way to ensure that "fairness" was to write it into the rules in mindblowing detail, removing any scope for flexibility.

Of course, the real world requires such flexibility, no matter how "unfair" it is. For instance, the run on Northern Rock would probably not have happened under the old regime. The BoE could have touted it around discreetly and a buyer found before Peston could find out and start a run on the bank. Brown's "fair" transparency rules meant that such discretion was impossible.

Anyone who'd ever been involved in business could have figured out that sometimes you just have to be "unfair" for the greater good, but Gordon's lack of experience of the real world has left him this child-like belief in fairness at any costs.

The gold sale was another example of his unworldliness - he just wasn't interested in the nitty gritty of how to optimise his returns, he just wanted to move on to the much more intellectually interesting challenge of how to spend the proceeds.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/food_and_drink/article7088810.ece?print=yes made an interesting point, comparing Jamie Oliver's upbringing in an Essex pub with a certain Grantham grocer's shop. Centres of the community where everyone comes through the door, but faced with the eternal battles of how to run the business efficiently. A world away from Brown's ivory tower, how many Labour types can you imagine saying "I’m a bit over charities....[the] healthiest thing in the world is a commercial business with a massive social heart." That's the sort of person we need in government, not yet another party bagcarrier.