Brown has little left to say

It says a lot about Gordon Brown’s lack of a domestic policy message that the news line in his interview with The Times is that he has no intention of quitting any time soon. He does attempt to provide some kind of agenda on public service reform, what John Rentoul calls the Blair-shaped hole in British politics. But the idea of giving residents more of a say in whether CCTV is used and being able to call the police ‘get advice about matters such as crime hotspots’ is hardly the new frontier.

Brown is also clearly preparing a new Brownie, he talks about how the government’s actions “will probably have saved up to 500,000 jobs that would otherwise have been lost.” This statistic is impossible to prove or disprove (as Greg Mankiw pointed out when Obama tried the same trick) so we can expect Brown to trot it out repeatedly from now until the election.