Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

An interview packed with Brownies

Brownies galore in our PM’s interview with the Economist. So many, in fact, that I thought I do a quick Fisk:
 
The Economist: The big worry seems to be the deficit—the deficit. What should the message should be?

Gordon Brown: I actually think that the first thing that we’ve got to do as a global community—and I said it this morning and I’ll say it again—is that the reforms of the global financial system are not complete. As far as Britain is concerned, we are dealing with a one-off hit as a result of globalisation.

FN: Let us pause, here, to consider the brazenness. Brown’s policies pumped the UK economy up with the steroids of debt. The banking collapse hit us harder than any country because he took the wildest risks. But, to cover that up, he repeats the claim that he first made in interview with FT a few weeks ago: that this is “one-off” adjustment. Brown never says anything just once – he’s a wee tartan robot, who keeps coming out with the same Brownies, time after time. Rest assured, you’ll hear this “one-off” claim again, from Brown’s mouth or Balls’s, pretty soon.

GB: We’ve just experienced the first crisis of globalisation. It is not the usual type of recession that we’ve had in the past which was inflation-driven. Interest rates had to be high, you couldn’t get out of the recession quickly because your interest rates were still remaining high. We’ve got the chance of going for growth out of this recession because interest rates and inflation are low.

FN: Observe the master of deceit at work. Inflation-induced recessions are relatively easy to fix. We’re now in a debt-induced recession, vastly worse. To fix this requires deleveraging – a painful process which can knock a country out for years, as Japan found in the “lost decade” which followed its 1990 collapse.

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