The Brown version

For children who have been naughty this year, Simon & Schuster have just produced the perfect punitive Christmas present: a new book from Gordon Brown, Beyond the Crash. It would be a mistake to write off our former prime minister’s musings on the financial crisis as an irrelevance, to be read only by Tories with a taste for schadenfreude. It provides a compendium of the dangerous thinking which brought such economic calamity to Britain, and threatens us still.

Brown claims, preposterously, that the crash would have been much less severe if only senior bankers had paid themselves 10 per cent less. He speaks darkly of ‘unchecked greed’, when the root problem lay with unchecked incompetence at the Treasury. Why was there no banking crisis in Australia, Canada or Sweden? Because they had a properly regulated banking system. Britain had an inept system designed by Brown himself, which encouraged banks to take greater risks. It was ministerial greed for higher tax revenues — and 40 per cent tax on bankers’ bonuses — that meant so few questions were asked. London was transformed into a bankers’ casino.

But as Brown has found to his delight, no one points this out. In his book, he speaks of the crisis as if it were an economic Sars virus, incubated in Asia then creeping to America and hitting a defenceless Britain. His mistakes — overspending, ordering the Bank of England to ignore the asset price bubble, thereby keeping debt dangerously cheap — are mentioned nowhere. The Conservatives are embarrassed because they accepted so many Brownite errors in opposition; he even taught them to say ‘investment’ instead of ‘spending’. The Tory manifesto was splattered with Brownian pledges — for example, to ‘protect’ the NHS and foreign aid budgets on the basis that cash means that you care.