Do check out Tom Bower’s superb article in this week’s issue of the magazine (you can read it here). It traces Gordon Brown’s personal journey from attacking the Lawson years as “a boom based on credit” to overseeing one of the most spectacular busts this country will ever suffer. I’ve pulled out Bower’s overview of the current crisis below, but I’d recommend you read the whole piece:
“To travel full circle within 20 years from scorning ‘Lawson’s Boom’ to masterminding ‘Brown’s Bust’ is probably unrivalled in modern British history. Just as Thatcher was harmed by her misquoted phrase, ‘there’s no such thing as society’, Brown’s damnation of ‘the age of irresponsibility’ was uttered by a confused socialist psychologically unprepared for his nemesis. Deriding all the warnings of an impending recession, Brown had relied on Alan Greenspan’s assurances that credit fuelling the housing boom was rock solid — and rewarded the chairman of the Federal Bank with a knighthood for his genius. Until the crash, Brown’s crude misunderstanding about derivatives, credit markets and ‘naked short selling’ was concealed by that brilliant propaganda cliché, ‘the Iron Chancellor’. His economic illiteracy would be the stuff of political boredom if Brown did not remain responsible until mid-2010 to save Britain from a slump. Frighteningly, Brown still does not grasp why the collapse of ‘Brown’s Britain’ — the title of Robert Peston’s pastiche published with Brown’s co-operation in 2005 — was inevitable. Unaffordable and ideologically warped, Brown’s vision relied on unsustainable state spending, manipulation of Whitehall and addiction to personal control. Those are precisely the tools he will use over the next months to restore Labour’s re-election chances. Only the state, he will argue, can save the country. His critics will reply that his remedy is poison because the same medicine caused the crisis.”
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