No.10 has come up with an ingenious solution to what could have been a yearly presentational problem: to have Gordon Brown’s New Year’s Message as a disembodied voice, with no video at all. You can listen to it here.
And that voice observes that an “old era of unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered out”. Remind us, who was Chancellor during the last ten years? It’s typical of Brown’s pettiness that he also includes in his New Year message a stab at the Tories, saying “The failure of British governments in previous global downturns was to succumb to political expediencsy and cut back investment across the board thereby stunting our ability to grow and strangling hope during the upturn. This will not happen on my watch.” This is beyond parody, and not just his lame attempt to share Obama’s “hope” motif. What happened on his watch was the disfiguration of the British economy into a massive over-leveraged hedge fund with the highest personal debt ratios in the world – which, of course, has made us worst-hit by the credit crunch.
“To those worried about jobs, we can taken every action we can,” he says – too late. OECD figures show Britain will this year have the sharpest unemployment upswing in the developed world. “We will do our best to help people trying hard to pay their own mortgages stay in their own homes” – the Council of Mortgage Lenders doesn’t think this will help much. It predicts 75,000 repossessions this year as opposed to 45,000 last year. Brown instructs us that 2009 will be remembered as “another great global challenge thrown Britain’s way that Britain met.” Well it will certainly leave us with more debt that WWII – but without any great victory. Just a generation saddled with debt from a man who will be remembered, as Allister Heath wrote in The Spectator almost four years ago, as “one of the most destructive Chancellors in British history”.
This must be the year the Tories make the connection between Gordon Brown’s reckless misjudgements and our current mess. Judging by the quality of the his New Year’s Message, the PM’s there for the taking
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