Just as Mr Brown’s jokes are no laughing matter, you imagine his facts are not supposed to be taken seriously anymore either. His statistics go over the heads of the public and one almost tires of correcting them here. But as Simon Mayo mentioned CoffeeHouse on air on Five Live and our fondness for “Brownies” (a word, alas, he didn’t mention) here is a list of today’s top PMQs Brownies.
1. “We now have the second biggest defence budget in the world”. This dodgy figure is cooked up by looking at military spending in nominal terms – rather than adjusting for purchasing power parity (PPP). If you spend £1 million it will obviously go further in China than Britain – which is why analysts routinely use PPP adjustments for international comparisons. Brown takes the raw data from the Stockholm Peace Institute (find it here, pdf). Unadjusted for PPP (ie, the dodgy raw data Brown uses) than America is first ($547bn) then Britain ($59.7bn), China ($58.3bn), France ($53.6bn) and Japan ($43.6bn). But adjust for PPP and the real figure has Britain fifth. And by the way, Brown inserted “as a share of GDP” afterwards. He’d forgotten his own scam. If you take it as a share of GDP then Britain at 2.6% is fifth behind the India (2.7%), Russia (3.6%), the US (4.0%) and the Saudis (8.5%).
2. Labour inherited debt at 44 percent of GDP and reduced it to 38 percent of GDP. This was his response to Ken Clarke. One can set aside Brown’s vast array of Enron-style debt concealment vehicles and look at debt under the Maastricht definition (a definition he can’t tweak). Annex 62 of the OECD World Economic Outlook (data released a couple of weeks ago) shows us that Brown inherited debt of 50.6 percent which was fast falling and hit 47.4 percent (mid-98). It is 47.1 percent of GDP now. As his scorched earth policy gets underway, this debt will soar up to 49.5 percent next year. Let’s remember that Brown had 11 years of growth, which prudent governments use to pay off their debts. Denmark took debt from 60 percent to 22 percent over this period, Ireland from 54 percent to 28 percent. In Western Europe, only Germany and France join Britain in the ignominious club of countries that increased their debt during the boom years – and, of course, for these basket case economies there were no boom years.
3. Labour inherited rising inflation, which Brown had to bring down. Even by his own CPI measure, the inflationary dragon was slain in the early 1990s peaking at 8.5 percent in April 1991. By January 1997 it was 2.1 percent and by May 1997 it had fallen to 1.6 percent. This is what he inherited from Ken Clarke. And did I mention that CPI is now 3.8 percent? For more on inflation, our original Brownie, click here.
4. Three million jobs as a result of this Labour government. Or, to state it more accurately, as a result of this Labour government’s policy of paying 5 million Brits to stay on benefits and importing a new, cheap and dedicated workforce: the Statistics Commission tells us, 81 percent of the new jobs are filled by foreign workers. Brown also includes in this figure pensioners returning to work, and even then he rounds it up from 2.8 million. Strip out pensioners, immigrants and the public sector and there would – scandalously – be fewer people in work than in 1997.
Brown was right to say today’s CPI inflation of 3.8 percent is below the 4 percent CPI average for the Eurozone – but is that really a difference to boast about? The US inflation is measured differently (ie, urban areas only) so one cannot (honestly) make a comparison. But if Brown thinks the US’s 5 percent inflation is a horror story he just has a few months to wait before this nightmare hits Britain. Just in time for Christmas shopping. Remember: unemployment lags economic downturn. The economic nightmare has just started.
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