Persisting in Economic Error

It isn't about the fantasy of 'protecting the fragile recovery'.  It isn't about raising taxes, or pretending that not raising taxes is the same thing as 'taking billions out of the economy'.  It isn't about 'saving jobs'.  All of this is a disturbed attempt to frame an economic disaster as if it hasn't happened yet.

It has happened, as today's figures on the economy and recent returns on unemployment show.  Taxes have been raised to levels that have dropped consumption  like a stone once consumption cannot be financed by inappropriately extended credit; credit that has indebted the least economically defended, the least able to bear debt,  placed them in a dark and threatening landscape where their living standards are compromised for decades and their basic life needs - housing, energy, food, water, transport,  are hanging  not by  a thread perhaps, but by a very thin cord.

Employment?  Many -  millions -  survive without waged employment and their numbers rise steadily, breaking sad record after sad record.  Saddest of all worklessness stretches deeper and further into communities excluded from earning their living not just from  lack of skills, inadequate re-skilling opportunities, inappropriately focused investment both private but principally public, and the exposure to the export of work - so much more damaging than the import of cheap labour - but extends now to those who are able and capable but undermined by government interference levels in the economy that render it susceptible to the analyses once used  to understand why planned economies failed.  Just as in those economies we have now unmet demand from lack of capacity, gross underemployment masquerading as work in the public sector, high levels of unemployed younger workers  in 'training' that leads to no work, crowding out of  private sector investment by government expenditure, deliberate obstruction by bureaucratic regulation of private enterprise, and ever lower growth accompanied by ever meaner living standards;  the whole garnished with repressed inflation.

Our economy is in the worst shape of any economy in the West and, to Labour's utter shame, in the East freed from realised socialism as well.  There is a lot of fat, certainly, but no longer for growing numbers who see their savings giving no return, their pensions slashed, their family members without hope of waged work.  And that 'fat' is attracting  supra-national asset strippers from whom government seems unwilling to protect us, as they obsess on the attractions of globalisation and their role as an elite of global governance.

The whole game plan of Gordon Brown is in error.  That he was enabled by Labour's lack of democracy and by a culture of political bullying and thuggery to ruin so much and so many is frightening; but to accept any misrepresentation of what has created our current condition as a basis for persisting would be utter foolishness.  The  reason he has never apologised for what he has done is that he still thinks he is right.  That alone disqualifies him from any further political career.