Well, why did our economy go so wrong so quickly? This is the question the Daily Telegraph’s assistant editor, Jeremy Warner, says he’s asked most often.
I’ll not bore you by repeating all of the frighteningly ‘orrible figures about the state of our national finances. I’m confident you’ll know that, as Jeremy Paxman said in Newsnight last night, we’re deep in the ‘poo’.
Jeremy Warner says, “There are two explanations for this potentially lethal cancer at the heart of the public finances”, which he says are:
- One is that Mr Brown mistook the windfall revenues of the boom in financial services and the housing market as a permanent addition to the tax base and spent accordingly.
- More deceptively, he also manipulated the “golden rule” – which states that the Government must broadly aim to balance the books over the cycle – to the point of destruction. The perceived end of the cycle was pushed ever further into the future, allowing the Government to continue running deficits when it should have been aiming for surpluses.
There you have it. Notice, no mention of that nice Mr Blair, just that nasty Mr Brown, who has caused the disaster to our nation’s finances.
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