When a patient’s heart stops beating, medics have about ten minutes to revive it. So it is with the Labour government. Gordon Brown is running out of time to get his defibrillator working. He failed yesterday, and failed again at his monthly press conference. He looks puzzled, bewildered and out of his depth. He is in grave danger of sharing the same verdict history served on the hapless Paul Martin of Canada: an over-promoted finance minister.
No one event has done for him. It has been the accumulation of disasters, a long list which pushed him over the mishap/incompetence boundary on Black Tuesday last week. There are so many its hard to keep track. But here is a little list of Brown disasters in his first few months. It’s for starters – can Coffee Housers think of any others?
1) The shambolic reform of Capital Gains Tax, which has seen the Treasury trying to row back and giving an all-too-accurate impression of mayhem.
2) The institutional shambles at the Ministry of Mayhem, HMRC, whose loss of the two discs was just the most egregious example of the kind of sloppy treatment of data since it was merged by, erm, Gordon Brown.
3) The shambolic cancellation of the general election.
4) The failure to pump penalty-free liquidity into the banking system in the summer credit crunch, like the Fed and EBC and rest of developed world did (and no, the Bank of England is not “independent” in this issue, but answerable to the government).
5) Indecision over Northern Rock, resulting in £24bn of taxpayers loans at risk
Comments