Brown’s golden rules have been exposed as a sham, says Irwin Stelzer, but the Tory response has been feeble. Their target should be the PM’s feathering of Old Labour nests
The good news is that Gordon Brown’s golden rules are no more. These rules did not stop the then chancellor from launching a spending binge. They did not stop him from spilling red ink all over the nation’s books at a time when the flow of cash into the Treasury was at record levels. They did not stop him from raising taxes, 60 times by some counts. They did not stop him from redistributing income from wealth-creators to wealth-consumers.
What the rules did do was provide the curtain behind which this latter-day Wizard of Oz could hide, give him the distraction on which magicians rely to prevent audiences from following their sleight-of-hand. Pay no attention to my tax-and-spend, I am adhering to the golden rules I invented.
And in the end, when his 2002 promise that ‘at all times — now and in the future — we will never compromise our commitment to meet our fiscal rules and disciplines’ became inconvenient, Brown sent his chosen successor into the newly cruel world to announce, ‘To apply the fiscal rules in a rigid manner today would be perverse.’
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