Ten questions for Gordon Brown tonight
Fraser Nelson 6:38pm
By rights, Gordon Brown should fear this debate on the economy more than any other. Here
are ten questions I would like to hear him answer:
1. You told Gillian Duffy yesterday that
you have a "deficit plan to cut the debt in half over four years." This was a lie, wasn't it?
Our debt is £771bn now. Your deficit plan - ie, to run huge deficits for years - will actually double it to £1,406 billion within four years according to the Treasury. The debt for which Mrs Duffy and other taxpayers are liable would double under your plans - yet you told her it would halve. How can you tell a lie of that magnitude, to the very sort of women whose taxes you intend to use to service this extra debt?
2. If someone in the pensions industry had mis-sold a pension, in the way that you mis-sold your deficit programme to Mrs Duffy, would they not go to jail? And rightly so?
3. You said in the first leaders debate that there are 2.5 million more jobs in this country". Strip away pension-age people returning to work - perhaps because their pension is not enough to retire on - and the public sector. And how many of these new jobs are accounted for by immigration? Might it be 99 per cent as The Spectator revealed?
4. If the crisis was "global" as you keep saying, why do Canada and Australia have no collapsed banks on their hands? Might it be because they did not have inept regulation?
5. Your government took a 40 percent cut in every bonus paid in the City. Might your own greed for tax revenue have blinded you to the risks they were taking? If you had applied basic debt-to-capital ratios like Canada, then is it not the case that British banks would still be lending money to people and not the other way around?
6. Your economic policy was based on the idea that, if consumer price inflation was under control, everything would be OK. Did this not render you blind to debt bubble, whose calling card was the soaring asset prices?
7. You are very proud of your International Finance Facility, which you were advocating for world aid but managed to do, in miniature, for vaccinations.
It uses a pool of debt, shared with other countries. Under a loophole in Eurostat rules, if no one country owns a majority of the debt then the debt does not turn up on anyone's balance sheets. This is pure concealment, isn't it? Might your "facility" be better described as an Enron for Africa?
8. State spending was 37 percent of GDP in 2000 and is 53 percent now, according to the OECD. Apart from Germany in the 1930s, can you name a developed country where the state expanded so quickly over such a pace of time?
9. You are proud of "intervening", as you put it, over the banks in 2007. Can you be clear about the cost of that? Broadly when will the British public debt be back to where it was? The IFS say it will take 25 years: have you really condemned a generation to higher debt to dig yourself out of a pre-election hole?
10. You know a little British history. In our peacetime history, has ever a Chancellor left the public finances in so much worse a state than he found them?
Previous
steve
April 29th, 2010 6:49pm Report this commentFraser for PM.
Dave will waffle about changey hopey stuff..
Think This
April 29th, 2010 6:59pm Report this commentImmensely sound. Brown would crumble
TGF UKIP
April 29th, 2010 7:04pm Report this commentFraser, you have omitted the lie on IHT he told the caller to Martha Kearney on Tuesday. The lady told him she was divorced single, with two sons and asked him if he intended to continue freezing the IHT threshold (£325k). He replied that unless she was leaving more than £600k there would be no IHT. A bizarre lie as the couple threshold would be £650k. Perhaps, he really is cracking up.
Publius
April 29th, 2010 7:09pm Report this commentGood questions. But of course Brown, if asked, would just lie. And you'd be left sitting on the sidelines saying, 'But, but, but...' And Mandy would tell you to 'Calm down, lad.'
W
April 29th, 2010 7:13pm Report this commentSurely the best one runs:
'Last time we ran up a debt of this magnitude we won the Second World War. Which of your achievements, Gordon, do you rate as equal to that?'
james
April 29th, 2010 7:13pm Report this commentFraser....nothing to disagree with here.I fear,however that the debate format and the 'chair' will ensure that the 'beauty contest'continues, and that the critical issues that face us all will get just a superficial airing,more's the pity.
Noa Zrk
April 29th, 2010 7:17pm Report this commentNot financial but...
Q11. In your canvassing for Labour for the election we see that you use tax payers property such as cars and mobile telephones, police and staff.
Do you or the Labour party pay or contribute towards this mis-allocation of public property?
Q12. After you had referred to Mrs Duffy as a bigot you then spent an afternoon in apologising for your behaviour. Will you be remitting your salary and bearing the expenses of this personal business, conducted at public expense?
Q13. Do you think that a public employee who gratuitously insults a citizen, when acting or appearing to act in the course of their employment, should be subject to disciplinary proceedings and dismissal?
Q14. Should senior ministers of state (and all MPs) be subject to regular independent medical and psychological examination and subject to retirement if found to be unfit for work?
Alex
April 29th, 2010 7:26pm Report this commentI could answer most of these questions.
Brown could swipe them away like a bear and some pesky bees...hope Dave asks them..
paul holdstock
April 29th, 2010 7:30pm Report this commentas only labour, and Brown, have been in charge of the nations' finances for the past 13 years, surely simply pointing this fact out to Brown, and the audience, and asking him to apportion responsibility for the parlous state of our finances now, ought to cause him some difficulty?
Snowman
April 29th, 2010 7:32pm Report this commentFraser, excellent except for missing the question 11:
you have a job to go to after May 6?
Snowman
April 29th, 2010 7:35pm Report this commentand another thing:
why is the MSM insisting that the economy's Brown's strongest point? If this is truly the perception of his handling the economy, we're beyond the point of doom.
annacor
April 29th, 2010 7:37pm Report this commentI blame Sue for everything!!
ollie
April 29th, 2010 7:43pm Report this commentI would suggest Cameron avoids, at all costs, mentioning Mrs Duffy. He doesn't need to do that - everyone saw that news clip.
All he has to do is nail Brown on his woeful record - should be very, very easy. I stress "should be" - but the Tories "should be" on 40% - and they aren't.
Moraymint
April 29th, 2010 7:46pm Report this commentCameron wouldn't dare (regrettably).
Percy
April 29th, 2010 7:55pm Report this commentForget all this, C4 news has the big one, Tango Tony is coming back to campaign and surely the big question must be will he be bringing the weird Cary Grant accent with him?
Tiberius
April 29th, 2010 7:58pm Report this commentWell if somehow those questions were put, can you imagine the conversation in the get-away car afterwards?
"That was a disaster."
"No, it was okay, Prime Minister".
"No, a disaster. Who put me in there? Cameron; when he said he'd do the debates. Tory toff. (Sound of knife cutting upholstery). Bullingdon. How the hell does he have the name 'Cameron'? And who is this Clegg to tell me to stop cosying up to him.? Insect".
"Really, sir, it went okay".
" And Dimbleby. Isn't it about time we made the call to move him out"?
"Bit late for that now, sir".
"Don't tell me that! I'm in charge!" (Mobile ring). Hi, Peter. 20%? Well thanks. Right, turn off the mic now. I've had it with this triangulation stuff. Tell Alastair he's fired. Now I need to ... (Thump).
Fatbloke on tour
April 29th, 2010 8:29pm Report this commentTrevor aka "Faser" the fastest spinner in the Nelson family even though my brother is a DJ.
One area where UK PLC could improve is the journalistic productivity of right wing mentalist, MOD subsidised, dog boiling editors.
Is that all you ahave managed to do today, make up 12 questions and most of those are re-cycled.
Need to do better, just where is your retraction of the numbers you put forward for peak to trough GDP decline?
Either you know you are wrong but don't have the backbone to admit it or you still think they are correct and all that MOD money spent on your private education was wasted.
No more socialism
April 29th, 2010 10:33pm Report this commentDebate tonight a definite Cameron win. Clegg overegged it on his "same old same old parties" beef. Cameron got the knife in on immigration pretty successfully. Gordon was just hopeless. Wooden, rictus grin, constant harping about tax credits (ie taking with one hand, losing the transaction costs and giving back with the other) and interminable contextless tractor stats. Brown is awful and I hope he's finished. As for Lord Mandy of Mortgage saying Gord won, well my wife complained I woke the kid by laughing too hard.
S Ferguson
April 29th, 2010 11:14pm Report this commentThanks for all your work shining a bright light on this shower of ba#tards Fraser. Hope it pays off.
Clunking Iron Arse
April 30th, 2010 12:24am Report this commentI think we also need to ask him what happened to his claim last Autumn that 'we have fewer than 50 days to save the planet from catastrophe'. That was on 20th October, some 192 days ago.
Are we doomed Gordoom?
daniel maris
April 30th, 2010 1:49am Report this commentre the debate:
Like the second it was a bit of a dead heat I would say in terms of performance with Cameron probably getting the edge.
I wonder whether Cameron was actually unwell for that first debate. There's been a bit of a virus going round in the London area and he sounded pretty hoarse until the last day or two (he was gulping water for the second debate). Anyway, he's definitely perked up and seemed much firmer and powerful.
Brown won points for the sheer relentless nature of the man. It's not attractive but I think it wins him some support in the same way Mrs T's relentlessness did. I think instinctively we feel, well he's never going to buckle under pressure. But he's got a mountain to climb after Duffygate.
Clegg remains slick - but too slick? I agree with NMS about the over-repetition of "those two old parties" tag line. If he wants to play with the big boys he has to accept that he is part of the gang and stop that meaningless complaint. However, he did well on housing I thought, whihc is a much bigger issue I feel than commentators, who mostly have a house, fail to understand. We've have a toxic combination in the UK:
A small area of usable land that is not either mountainous or on a flood plain; governments that have allowed mass immigration (including by groups with very high birth rates) with no planned housing provision; a virtual cessation of state or local government house-building; greatly increased personal wealth so there is more to spend on housing (but little housing to spend it on)combined with huge amounts of inherited wealth now becoming available for housing expenditure; a weak co-operative sector.
Clegg at least sounded like the Lib Dems had given this some serious thought. Brown made no impact on that and Cameron didn't sound convincing.
El Sid
April 30th, 2010 4:31am Report this commentNot a question, but a point I wish Cameron would use against Brown's "saving the economy with £6bn of waste" line.
"When you're in debt, any spending has a long-term cost. You could stimulate the economy massively by giving every voter a million quid in cash. But it would bankrupt the country as we don't have the money.
"You can't talk about stimulus without thinking of the cost. If you can't spend money wisely, you're better off not spending it at all.
"So we'd concentrate on getting the most stimulus for every pound we spend. £1 of R&D credits has the same economic effect as £6 spent on houseplants in a government office. But Gordon would never spend £1 when he could spend £6. That's why we're now having to talk about cuts, he's spent money so badly that there isn't any left.
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