Ross Clark Ross Clark

Who is Gordon Brown to pose as the voice of fiscal sanity?

it is worth recalling Brown’s own record in government

(Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Gordon Brown is demanding Parliament be recalled for an emergency budget. By October, he says, quoting a study he commissioned from the University of Loughborough, half the population could be living in fuel poverty. ‘Not enough thinking is being done about the major social crisis,’ he told Radio Four’s The World at One on Monday. The former Chancellor and Prime Minister does, of course, have every right to make what representations he wishes to the government, and no-one can call him a hypocrite for wanting the Chancellor and MPs to sacrifice their summer holidays for an emergency budget. His first holiday as PM, in 2007, famously lasted half a day before he found an excuse – a minor outbreak of foot and mouth – to return to Downing Street.

But it is worth recalling Brown’s own record in government, and how it feeds into the economic situation in which we find ourselves today.

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