A Batch of Brownies – Gordon Brown
Fraser Nelson has fisked Brown’s interview in the Economist, and boy is it full of Gordon’s Brownies. A couple of them might whet your appetite. First on Debt
GB: Every country has had a build up of debt as result of the recession, no country has been immune from that requirement to add to its debt and every country is going to suffer a one-off rise in their debt levels that has got to be dealt with over the next few years.
FN: Yes, indeed. But let us look at how much these countries increased their debt by. Woooh, wait a minute, I just fell into one of Brown’s “verbal snares”. We’re not talking about a country getting into debt, we’re talking about governments saddling their people with debt. So, again, let us see how much debt the governments of various countries saddled their people with:

Second let’s have a look at one that gets most of the people all of the time, Brown’s “plan” to reduce the deficit. As Fraser so rightly points out when Brown says deficit people hear Debt, All he is supposedly doing in his unavailable plan is bring us back to spending what we earn, or at least halving the gap in the next 4 years. The debt we have built up in the meantime will still remain and have to be paid for, for years.
GB: I happen to think that our deficit-reduction plan over the first four years of halving the deficit is probably the most ambitious of any of the G7 countries.
FN: Brown has given himself seven years to get the public finances back in balance (he last balanced the government’s books in 2000/01). I know of no country with such a leisurely timetable. Again, observe the power of his spin. When he talks about halving the deficit by 2015/16, this is made out as some great national achievement. The PBR before last said (p190, here) that they would “eliminate the deficit on the current budget by 2015-16”. To downgrade this aim, from abolishing it to halving it, is a deplorable lack of fiscal discipline. But Brown uses rhetoric to suggest the reverse.
I suspect Brown’s aim is to exploit the lack of understanding of “debt” and “deficit” – a notorious blind spot in journalism (the BBC gets the two mixed up all the time). When he says “I’ll halve the deficit in four years” he wants people to hear “I’ll halve the debt in four years”.
Read the whole thing and understand how much this man can stretch the truth.









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