Gordon Brown: the luckiest Chancellor
I'm liking Gordon Brown just a little less each day.
Plenty of people think he's a great Chancellor - but let's face it, he inherited an economy poised for growth and public finances with a £50bn surplus. A trained monkey could have run the UK economy with that in its cheeks. Yet somehow - unbelievably - during the longest economic expansion in postwar history, he's somehow turned that into a £17bn hole. Raising taxes all the way.
He's retried his latest wheeze of redefining the economic cycle to make sure he appears to stay within his own golden rules. (Today he did it for the second time, moving the goalposts two and a bit years forward.) In addition, there's an extra £1bn or so from oil companies - which means they'll either book their future earnings offshore or not bother investing in the riskiest (and potentially most lucrative) oilfields, making our energy problems worse. (With the raid they won't be able to afford to invest anyway. Better start buying solar panels, everyone.)
All this in addition to his £5bn raid on pension funds a few years back, which precipitated today's pensions crisis. Then - since Brown hates the thought that other people's money might be lying around without him having rights to it - he's decided to use dormant savings accounts to fund another pet project.
Mean. Small-minded. And very, very sneaky. But it's all in tune with New Labour's basic desire to know everything about everyone. To raid those bank accounts, he'll have to know how much is in them and who they belong to. Just like his tax credits, and pension credits, and working families credits, and means testing for everything. All replacing one-size-fits-all (but simple) systems with something incredibly complicated - and impossible to implement. And driving out the incentive for most people to make themselves better off. (Unless you can climb FAR above the average in Blair's Britain, it's just not worth it.)
Brown a true Blairite? Yes he is. Talks like a Tory without the ability to execute like one.
Plenty of people think he's a great Chancellor - but let's face it, he inherited an economy poised for growth and public finances with a £50bn surplus. A trained monkey could have run the UK economy with that in its cheeks. Yet somehow - unbelievably - during the longest economic expansion in postwar history, he's somehow turned that into a £17bn hole. Raising taxes all the way.
He's retried his latest wheeze of redefining the economic cycle to make sure he appears to stay within his own golden rules. (Today he did it for the second time, moving the goalposts two and a bit years forward.) In addition, there's an extra £1bn or so from oil companies - which means they'll either book their future earnings offshore or not bother investing in the riskiest (and potentially most lucrative) oilfields, making our energy problems worse. (With the raid they won't be able to afford to invest anyway. Better start buying solar panels, everyone.)
All this in addition to his £5bn raid on pension funds a few years back, which precipitated today's pensions crisis. Then - since Brown hates the thought that other people's money might be lying around without him having rights to it - he's decided to use dormant savings accounts to fund another pet project.
Mean. Small-minded. And very, very sneaky. But it's all in tune with New Labour's basic desire to know everything about everyone. To raid those bank accounts, he'll have to know how much is in them and who they belong to. Just like his tax credits, and pension credits, and working families credits, and means testing for everything. All replacing one-size-fits-all (but simple) systems with something incredibly complicated - and impossible to implement. And driving out the incentive for most people to make themselves better off. (Unless you can climb FAR above the average in Blair's Britain, it's just not worth it.)
Brown a true Blairite? Yes he is. Talks like a Tory without the ability to execute like one.
posted by chrisworth at 2:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home