Saving the world: part 73

Is Brown trying to save the world again?  It’s hard not to get that impression from reading his dreary article in the FT today.  Headlined “What Europe must do to build a recovery,” it adopts the same lecturing tone, and the same misleading claims about the UK position, that Brown patented last autumn and carried forward into the G20 Summit:

“…the next stage in the recovery from global recession must be a strengthened European growth strategy. The economic decline of our biggest export market is becoming today’s greatest anti-recession challenge. In its last forecast, the European Commission predicted a 4 per cent decline in output across the EU, with unemployment potentially rising by as much as 9.5m between 2008 and 2010.

The euro area is expected to be hit harder than the UK this year and next, despite the disproportionate initial impact on Britain of the banking crisis.