Brown’s feeble fight-back

Brown has just been on the BBC (“speaking from a school gymnasium”) defending himself. People, he says, will judge him on what he did on terrorism, foot and mouth and the Northern Rock crisis. And PS, it took “tough decisions” to produce the economic growth of the last decade.

Let us set aside the fact that voters judge politicians on any criteria they like. But what did Mr Brown do on terrorism? Responded the next day in a hypnotically dull Marr interview and have his Home Secretary downgrade this to a “crime”. On foot-and-mouth? He messed it up, hence a new wave of outbreaks. And Northern Rock? It was a fiasco: in a global credit crunch, only Britain suffered run on a bank. Finally he does not run the British economy, he just taxes it. And judging by our economic growth (ranked a pathetic 19th of 31 OECD countries from 97-07) he taxes it too much.