Brown has come full circle since 1988

29 October 2008

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Tom Bower, the Prime Minister’s biographer, says that Gordon’s reinvention as the socialist who can save capitalism is just the latest in a series of convenient masks he has donned

Gordon Brown would probably prefer to forget his magic moment in the crowded House of Commons exactly 20 years ago, on 1 November 1988. In the midst of a withering attack against Nigel Lawson’s management of the faltering economy, the Labour front bencher pierced the Tory’s façade with deadly accuracy: ‘This is a boom based on credit.’ Labour MPs frenziedly cheered as Brown artfully mocked the forlorn-looking Chancellor for allowing consumption to spiral out of control and for offering consistently wrong forecasts. The Chancellor’s boast about his ‘sound management of the economy,’ scoffed Brown, was worthless. ‘Most of us would say that the proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor.’ That evening’s newspaper headline intoxicated the aspiring Scotsman: ‘veteran chancellor bloodied by upstart’.

Two days later, Labour MPs voted for their shadow cabinet. Brown’s demolition of Lawson’s boom gave Labour MPs hope. Their new hero promising a socialist Britain, most agreed, was destined to be Labour’s future leader. He came top of the poll. ‘He appears to possess the ultimate political quality of luck,’ wrote one commentator unable to imagine the turmoil before Brown reached 10 Downing Street.

To travel full circle within 20 years from scorning ‘Lawson’s Boom’ to masterminding ‘Brown’s Bust’ is probably unrivalled in modern British history. Just as Thatcher was harmed by her misquoted phrase, ‘there’s no such thing as society’, Brown’s damnation of ‘the age of irresponsibility’ was uttered by a confused socialist psychologically unprepared for his nemesis. Deriding all the warnings of an impending recession, Brown had relied on Alan Greenspan’s assurances that credit fuelling the housing boom was rock solid — and rewarded the chairman of the Federal Bank with a knighthood for his genius. Until the crash, Brown’s crude misunderstanding about derivatives, credit markets and ‘naked short selling’ was concealed by that brilliant propaganda cliché, ‘the Iron Chancellor’. His economic illiteracy would be the stuff of political boredom if Brown did not remain responsible until mid-2010 to save Britain from a slump. Frighteningly, Brown still does not grasp why the collapse of ‘Brown’s Britain’ — the title of Robert Peston’s pastiche published with Brown’s co-operation in 2005 — was inevitable. Unaffordable and ideologically warped, Brown’s vision relied on unsustainable state spending, manipulation of Whitehall and addiction to personal control. Those are precisely the tools he will use over the next months to restore Labour’s re-election chances. Only the state, he will argue, can save the country. His critics will reply that his remedy is poison because the same medicine caused the crisis.

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The Laughing Cavalier

October 30th, 2008 1:23pm Report this comment

We're doomed.

Michael St George

October 31st, 2008 2:18pm Report this comment

A brilliant piece, comprehensively cataloguing Brown’s litany of deviousness, mendaciousness, obfuscation, and unrestrained statism, backed with sheer economic illiteracy of breathtaking proportions, over many years. As I have posted before, this man is an unreconstructed Marxist viper, fully signed up to the Gramscian-Marcusian project, and will wreck this country even as he gloats over the developing wreckage.

It must be political aeons since such an easy target was available. That the alleged Opposition are only now even starting to attempt a critique of this deeply flawed authoritarian socialist and the pernicious philosophy he espouses, and are struggling to articulate one, simply beggars belief.

During the banking crisis and subsequent forced bank nationalisations, Brown was allowed to pose unchallenged as the saviour of the world in undertaking an extension of state control unprecedented since the post-1945 election, and beyond anything Labour would have dared to include in a manifesto. The situation cried out for a forensic demolition of Brown and Darling’s past policies, a vigorous repudiation of their future remedies, and a strident defence of capitalism and a more effectively regulated free market. Yet Call Me Dave Camera-On and Boy George appeared to resemble nothing so much as a rabbit trapped in the headlights with nothing to say and not a clue what to do next.

Camera-On’s polls lead has duly been slashed. Brown has been allowed to re-habilitate himself. It gives me no pleasure at all to say it, but this will go down as the month in which the Conservatives lost the next election.