I’ve read and re-read Cameron’s speech on the economy, hoping that I had somehow missed the radical message to answer Gordon Brown. I have given up.
Britain is facing a tsunami of unemployment, two years of recession if we’re lucky and what do the Tories have to say? They’ll set up a new quango, and try to tinker with council tax. We had new phrases: instead of “irresponsible capitalism” we’re told there will be “responsible free enterprise”. His dreadful “social responsibility” phrase is making a comeback in the form of “economic responsibility” and remains just as vacuous as a concept.
Much of the detail appears worryingly wrong-headed. Cameron seems to say he’d stop another asset bubble by setting limits on how much individual banks can lend. His “Debt Responsibility Mechanism” – a gimmicky name for adjusting bank capital-to-borrowing ratios – is being held up as a method of controlling the money supply.
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