Brown ignored the warning signals

Some are saying that you can’t hold Brown in anyway responsible for the current situation because no one saw it coming. But as Martin Bright points out in the New Statesman this week, this simply isn’t true:

“Brown’s assiduous biographer, Simon Lee of Hull University, noticed the warning signals contained in the report. He wrote last year, in his book Best for Britain?: the Politics and Legacy of Gordon Brown, “as the IMF has noted, by encouraging the UK economy to become even more linked to global financial markets, the British model has increased the vulnerability of the UK economy to global risks and contagion”.

The report warned of the UK’s high levels of household debt, not something the Prime Minister can blame on global markets, and it noted the UK housing market was overpriced and could be heading for a crash.