Doing the Honourable Thing

A quote from Kelvin MacKenzie:

“Gordon should take a bottle of brandy and a gun, go to a quiet room, have a drink, then blow his brains out. “

Admirable sentiments, but I fear Kelvin hasn’t thought that one through properly. Such is Gordon Brown’s competence that if tried to shoot himself, he would miss. In truth, Gordon is a local politician with delusions of adequacy who has been promoted way above his station. I fear much the same applies to the rest of the current cabinet. In Gordon’s favour, he has had a couple of years in the job, and that experience alone lifts him above those in his own party who plot to succeed him - though there is still very little between the hopeless and inept array of nonentities and numpties that make up the current government.

A change of governing party or parties is long overdue.

Is Brown Bonkers?

It looks like I was ahead of public opinion, then. Since my last post about Brown needing to apologise, the narrative has moved on from Bankers, and people have been calling for Brown to apologise himself. Ministers first hinted at regrets, then Brown finally came out with a non-apology, while making it clear he had nothing to apologise for.

The trouble is, even if he were to apologise, and he hasn't come anywhere near, he still needs to admit to himself and to the rest of us that he bears some of the responsibility for this mess. I don't think he will ever do that now, because with every interview or public appearance his statements and proclamations get more ludicrous, more detached from reality, and more deluded. He even seems to believe he is entirely innocent for the bubble in the UK.

Has Brown lost all sense of reality? I realise that Guido Fawkes has been suggesting this for some time, but it is becoming rather obvious nowadays that Gordon Brown is increasingly detached from events. Does he honestly believe he's some sort of Churchillian figure, striding around the world stage, solving a problem the Americans caused and that only he can put right? Or is this just Gordon's inept attempt at spin?

The Madness of King Gordon

And so the sales start in earnest. Thousands of shoppers jostling each other around, in search of discounts on cheap, yet overpriced tat they don't actually need, on credit they cannot afford, with no thought about how the debts are ever going to be repaid when their jobs have disappeared into the ether.

The government, too, is keen to promote this lemming-like behaviour, the same behaviour that led us into this debt crisis, inspired by the government that set off the whole sorry chain reaction. Let us recall the terrible decisions taken by Brown that led us into this trap; The creation of a regulatory regime too cumbersome to do its job, the removal of house price inflation from interest rate decisions, the raid on pensions, the discouragement of savings, and the encouragement of debt, led by none other than the arch debtor and irresponsible borrower himself: Gordon Brown. Let us not forget, the Prime Minister led by example, running up big government debts during the boom when he should have been saving for a rainy day. Yet Brown's stealth tax on savings clearly demonstrates he has no concept of saving for a rainy day.

Now Brown pins his hopes on a pseudo-recovery, a false and temporary blip in consumer confidence underpinned by a pretty ineffectual and short-term cut in VAT, which will be reversed long before the pain has subsided and the real recovery begins. His chancellor, Darling, trots out over-optimistic forecasts of recovery in the second half of 2009, criticised, derided and even ridiculed by economists and commentators. Their vain hope is to engineer some kind of temporary blip, no matter that it will make the long-term situtation even more grave than it already is. If Brown and company can somehow engineer enough false hope, however brief, it will give them a small window of opportunity to call an election in which they might not do as badly as some have suggested. If enough gullible voters can be persuaded that there is light at the end of the tunnel, perhaps they can even engineer an hung parliament. The rest of us will already have identified the light at the end of the tunnel as an oncoming train - the British economy, driven by Gordon Brown, and picking up speed as it heads straight towards us, completely out of control. The brakes were removed years ago, allowing Brown to boast of the lowest rates for a generation.

The madness of King Gordon must go on, at least until the election is called. Spend, spend, spend! Borrow, borrow borrow! The piper must be paid, but why worry about next year? After all, you could get knocked down by a train tomorrow.

Passing on Cuts to Savers

While driving home from a Christmas shopping trip this afternoon, I heard a news item on Radio 4 which stated Gordon Brown was going to force banks to pass on rate cuts to customers. Not borrowers, you understand, but customers. In fact, by passing on cuts to borrowers banks have to pass them on to savers too, or they lose money. Brown knows this, but he doesn't really care much for savers, as his record shows.

Next time your building society or bank cuts your savings rates, you know precisely who is to blame.

Brown's Culture of Debt

Shortly after taking office in 1997, Gordon Brown handed the task of determining interest rates to the Bank of England, charging it with keeping inflation down. Back then, the government's official inflation figures were based on the reliable Retail Prices Index. One might have expected this to mark the end of political interference in interest rates, but that was not the case. In 2003, Gordon scrapped RPI as the MPC's inflation target index, and replaced it with the Consumer Prices Index, or CPI. In effect, he was telling the Bank of England not to concern itself with ever-rising house prices and consumer debt, and to concentrate on little more than the price of goods in the supermarkets.

This was a highly significant act calculated to force rates down. In 2005, Labour's election campaign ran several posters boasting about the how cheap it was to obtain credit. The message was clear: spend, spend, spend and don't worry about the consequences. People did just this, and personal debt burst through the £1 trillion mark, and kept on rising. Personal insolvencies soon hit 100,000 per year, by far the highest numbers ever recorded. What did Gordon care? So long as the debt bubble kept growing, his faux growth figures made it look like the economy was still doing well. Accordingly, the government kept on spending money as if it were water, with no regard to what might happen in future. Eventually, the whole house of cards had to collapse, and so it did in 2007 with the first run on a British bank in more than a century. The credit crunch was upon us.

The mess that Brown has made of the UK economy will take years to clean up. Far from being in a good position to weather the storm, the UK is in an uniquely bad position to deal with the economic situation. The recession will hit Britain far harder than most comparable countries. Of course, infamous as he is for being unable to own up to his past mistakes, Brown won't admit to any of the damage he has caused, and still insists on trotting out the same tired old lines. This is why he is unlikely to restore RPI as the Bank's inflation target. To do so would be tantamount to admitting he messed up badly.

Oh dear.

We are now into what looks likely to be a very deep and long-lasting recession. What's more, the government seems intent on compounding the terrible decisions it made which brought us to this place with even worse ones in a doomed attempt to get us out.

Increasing public spending is the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time, and will inevitably make the situation far, far worse. We've been down that road before, and the consequences were pretty horrific. Even Jim Callaghan knew you couldn't hope to get away with what Brown is attempting, but then hindsight is not something that troubles Brown, who famously listens to no-one. He has persistently ignored best advice, which is why the country is in such a poor position, and why it will continue to get worse until he starts to see sense, or is removed from office. My money is on the latter.

Brown's answer to the economic hardship for which he is largely responsible is to lurch to the left, yet this it no time for outdated and discredited political dogma. Instead, he should just cut taxes and stop throwing away the money that this seriously indebted country does not have. The economy needs a stimulus, not another mortgage.

The Old Ones are the Best Ones

John Prescott, Charles Kennedy and Gordon Brown were stuck on the roof of the House of Commons in a thunderstorm. The rain was lashing down, and all three were worried that they might get struck by lightning at any time. Suddenly, the ghost of John Smith appeared in front of them. "Fear not," the apparition said, "I will act as your guardian angel. All you need do is jump off the roof, shout out what it is you want to land on, and you will descend safely and gently to the ground below."

Well, the three MPs were unsure at first, but none of them had much choice. John Prescott was the first to take a leap of faith, shouting "Meat pies" as he leapt from the roof of the building. Sure enough, he drifted slowly towards the ground, and landed in a pile of warm meat pies, which he started to devour.

Without a moment's hesitation, Charlie Kennedy was next. "Whisky!" came the cry, and he too glided gently down, landing in a vat of whisky below. Charles was in heaven.

This was too good an opportunity for Gordon Brown to miss, he was but a leap away from restoring his party's finances, and maybe the economy and his party's fortunes in the opinion polls too. As he contemplated which word to shout out, he lost his footing and tumbled head first from the roof.

"Shhhiiiiiittttt!!!!"