Michael Dean :: Blog :: a government without a people!

Yesterday was a really interesting day. The UK seems to have ended up in a strange position.

We have a government but nobody seems to want them. Does Labour, or do I mean, does Gordon Brown, have any credibility at all now?  But this reputation is deserved!

The UK is in an awful financial state. The one single person who is most responsible for this mess is Gordon Brown. His reputation is shot to pieces. He is totally discredited now. He was not elected as the prime minister and this fact alone rankles deeply with many people. But if he had done a good, or even reasonable job, then most people would accept him.

But he has not done a good job!

As chancellor he inherited a Golden Inheritance, an economy in really good shape. He took the credit for this, ascribing it to his good stewardship.

Clearly however, his good stewardship was not the reason that the economy was so good for many years. It is obvious now that the economy remained so healthy for the first years of Brown's stewardship because did not actually change the policies of the previous Conservative government!

Then Brown and Blair went on a spending spree. They abandoned the policies that had kept the economy stable and blew the lot. Many people tell me that this resulted in good hospitals, schools etc and to an extent this is right,  some of the money was indeed spent this way.

But we do need a proper analysis of where the money went. Because most of the new hospitals and new  schools etc seem to have been built on borrowed money. The UK built up debt to pay for these hospitals and schools.  This is the Private Finance Initiative, PFI for short,  and is a massive amount of money.

Brown has redefined the UK debit levels to exclude the PFI as part of the UK debt.

My personal view is that this is just deceiving the people about the state of the UK economy. There are some other debts, huge amounts of money, that are also excluded from the UK debt levels. (I do get wound up when I hear Brown on the tv saying that the UK has the low debt levels because he is choosing to ignore these other debts.)

So when the economy went into a nosedive following the global credit crunch problem (caused by the banks and financial institutions not being properly regulated by this government and others!),  the consequences of the bad stewardship of Brown come to the forefront.

The UK is in an awful financial mess. The policy of going into debt to spend huge amounts of money to get out of a recession caused by debt levels has to be questionable. Simply because we then have another massive  problem of having to pay this new debt back!