Alistair Darling goes into full “blame the world” mode in his interview with the FT today – saying that international coordination will be “crucial” to get credit flowing through the financial system and to help our economy recover from the recession. As Iain Dale noted, similar claims littered Gordon Brown’s weekend interviews; so we’re seeing something of a new Labour spin line – or at least one that’s been reheated since last October.
Now, I would be slightly sympathetic to the claim – after all, the interconnectedness of the world banking system means that local recovery is partially contingent on global recovery – were it not for my suspicions that the Government’s deploying it for two reasons: i) to handily shift the blame should their measures not work, and ii) to push the narrative that they called for the world to act, and – lo and behold, via Obama’s fiscal stimulus – it did!
But, likewise, there are two reasons to think that blaming the world won’t get Brown & Co. very far:
i) If other countries start recovering quicker than Britain – and there’s some evidence that they will – then things will increasingly look like our problem rather than the world’s problem.
ii) It raises the question of why – beyond a sense of urgency – the Government funnelled so much taxpayers’ money into schemes that require international cooperation to work properly. Would it not have been better to wait, to some extent, for coordinated action from other countries?
The worry for Team Brown is that the second set of “reasons” starts to dominate people’s thinking once 2009’s grim economic trends unfold themselves.
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