No.10 has come up with an ingenious solution to what could have been a yearly presentational problem: to have Gordon Brown’s New Year’s Message as a disembodied voice, with no video at all. You can listen to it here.
And that voice observes that an “old era of unbridled free market dogma was finally ushered out”. Remind us, who was Chancellor during the last ten years? It’s typical of Brown’s pettiness that he also includes in his New Year message a stab at the Tories, saying “The failure of British governments in previous global downturns was to succumb to political expediencsy and cut back investment across the board thereby stunting our ability to grow and strangling hope during the upturn. This will not happen on my watch.” This is beyond parody, and not just his lame attempt to share Obama’s “hope” motif.

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