From: Gordon Lawrence, Stumperlowe View, Sheffield.
THERE has been a renewed effort, in recent months, on the part of Labour
to absolve the Brown administration of any blame for the financial collapse of
2008 in an attempt to restore, in the electorate’s mind, some credibility for
its ability to run a successful economy.
David Blunkett, it seems, has joined the bandwagon by trying to allocate
the blame solely to the errant bankers (The Yorkshire Post, December
15), and by implication, to exonerate the Labour government from the economic
mainstream’s view that Labour was a major culprit in the shambles.
The Sheffield MP has become, quite deservedly, a distinguished figure on
the centre-left, so it is disappointing to see him trying to defend the
indefensible.
It was Gordon Brown who told us all that he’d triumphed over boom and
bust which gave him the rationale to spend without thought of the morrow. His
reputation as a Chancellor reached such heights that you would have thought he’d
not
only invented the wheel but sliced bread as well.
Unfortunately, as the global economy stalled, the UK economy was in a
worse position than almost any you could name; the wheels came off and the next
government was left with the bread crumbs.
Furthermore, Mr Brown’s Financial Services Authority, that he’d proudly
set up, was negligent in failing to rein in the banks’ personal lending and
that, coupled with government spending excess, amounted to the largest deficit
among the world’s developed economies.
Mr Blunkett also asserts that Labour predicted the coalition’s austerity
measures would not be achieved in one Parliament – true – but with the inference
that Labour’s expansionary proposals would have had a more successful outcome.
Poppycock!
Indeed, Ed Balls and his team confidently and repeatedly predicted
Osborne’s austerity programme would result in a treble-dip recession, three
million unemployed and glacial growth: all prophecies, in spite of treacherous
world conditions, resoundingly wrong. So much for Labour’s understanding of
economic management. Stuck in a simple Keynesian time warp, their natural
instinct is to spend, tax and regulate, a blueprint implemented by the current
François Hollande government with the predictable result that France is being
labelled with the not so enviable sobriquet, “sick man of Europe”, its
overloaded public sector a ball and chain on economic progress and an open
advert not to follow, in the UK, such an ideological
route. Yorks Post Letters.
