Gordon Brown’s political strategy for the recession involves claiming that it came from America, that Britain is uniquely well placed to deal with it thanks to his policy decisions and that only he has the experience to see the country through this crisis. But as the Observer points out in its editorial today—entitled “It’s your recession, Mr Brown. Deal with it”—these claims are simply not accurate:
“The implication is that recession is a foreign ailment that the UK only contracted through its exposure to global financial markets.
But for a decade, the government promoted the City of London as the international centre of financial services. A financial boom poured cheap credit into the real economy, with Britons taking on vast levels of personal debt – more than in any other developed country. Loose money stoked a housing bubble bigger, according to the IMF, than the one that burst in the US, triggering the crisis. A disproportionate amount of British wealth is borrowed and tied up in assets whose value is falling; a disproportionate number of jobs are in services that are vulnerable to a fall in consumer demand. The credit crunch may have started abroad, but it was custom-made to hurt Britain.”
The Tories have done a poor job of getting this message across and tawdry business of yacht-gate has cost them valuable time, it will be a while yet before George Osborne is a credible messenger on the economy again. But they have a compelling case to make against Brown’s record. To let Brown get away with claiming that because he’s not solely responsible for the coming recession, he’s not responsible for it at all would be political malpractice by the Tories.
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