Gordon brown

About 15 years ago, Bill Clinton wanted to promote home ownership among the low-paid, but was annoyed that banks wouldn’t lend freely or cheaply to that group. So, the federal government intervened with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae selling government-backed mortgages at knockdown rates. Nothing showed up on the national debt, because the loan would — in theory — be repaid. The seeds for the sub-prime crisis were sewn.   Today, George Osborne wants to promote recovery and is annoyed than banks won’t lend freely or cheaply enough to small businesses. So, the Treasury will intervene by lending money indirectly by backing a new bond market that lends cash to

Tory strategists had hoped to keep Europe off the agenda at this year’s party conference, but they seem to have failed already. The European Commission’s threat about welfare claims has forced IDS into action. Ben Brogan reports that the work and pensions secretary was nothing short of visceral in his contempt for the “land grab”, which will apparently cost £2.5 billion a year. But, IDS’s rage is quiet compared to John Redwood’s, who asks “Why won’t he [William Hague] get on with renegotiating the UK position [in Europe]?” Next is the EU’s Agency Workers Directive, which comes into force tomorrow. Businesses complain that this will significantly increase their costs and have

The Labour Conference 2011 has turned into a horrible misery-fest. What a daft idea to make the theme of the conference: “We’re really sorry, we won’t do it again”. At least it’s not the slogan, although it would have been more honest than “Fulfilling the Promise of Britain”. I agree with Steve Richards in the Independent that the pessimism is self-fulfilling. This does not feel like a platform for re-election I spent most of the New Labour era criticising Tony Blair and his government. I thought he was too cosy with the ultra-rich, cynical about criminal justice policy, disingenuous about the use of the private sector in providing public services

There is a strange pre-Lehman feeling in the air right now: the idea that something awful is going to happen, but no one knows what or when. This is laden with political ramifications. The problem for the Tories last time was not that George Osborne had been caught aboard HMS Deripaska. The greater problem was that a crash had arrived and the Shadow Chancellor had nothing to say. Brown, at least, seemed to have an agenda, and the Tory poll lead was reduced to one vulnerable point. I admire Osborne, but he can do far better in making the case for the government’s economic strategy. If there is a second

Gordon Brown is back in the news this morning, or rather his legacy of debt is (an issue examined in depth by Pete and Fraser in 2008). The disastrous £12.7 billion NHS computer project is to be scrapped and, more important than that, the Telegraph reports that the care budgets at 60 hospitals are being squeezed by the costs of repaying PFI contracts totalling more than £5.4 billion. Andrew Lansley has taken to the airwaves to explain that Labour left the NHS with an “enormous legacy of debt”; he was keen to point out that no hospitals were built under PFI before 1997, so that there was no doubt where blame should

Almost exactly a year ago, Tony Blair’s memoirs wafted into bookshops to cause a stir ahead of conference season. Now it it seems that Alistair Darling’s, due out next Wednesday, will do exactly the same. Judging by the extracts published over at Labour Uncut, the quiet man of the last Labour government will splash his simmering frustrations and enmities right across the page. Gordon Brown, he will say, became increasingly “brutal and volcanic”. Mervyn King was “amazingly stubborn and exasperating”. And Ed Balls and Shriti Vadhera will be accused of “running what amounted to a shadow treasury operation within government”. But the most eyecatching revelation, and perhaps the one with

First came the Germans and then came the Brits. The UK Treasury has secured an agreement with authorities in Zurich to tax the assets of UK citizens held in Swiss banks to reduce on tax avoidance and stamp out evasion. The deal will follow the lines of that which Switzerland made with Germany last month. The FT has details: ‘Taxes on future income will be withheld at a rate of 48 per cent, corresponding to the top 50 per cent rate that now applies to Britain’s highest earners. A one-off levy of between 19 and 34 per cent will be applied to all Swiss accounts held by UK residents, with the

The news that the national debt is even larger than it appears ties a knot in the stomach, limiting, as it does, the state’s ability to cut taxes. Andrew Tyrie has called time on the PFI bonanza, but in many ways this intervention comes too late. Back during the financial tempests in the autumn of 2008, my colleagues Peter Hoskin and Fraser Nelson revealed the scale of Gordon Brown’s deceit over PFI. The great debt deceit, Fraser Nelson and Peter Hoskin, The Spectator, 20 September 2008 A few months before the general election which brought New Labour to power, Geoffrey Robinson had David Davis to dinner in his flat overlooking

Even by the normal standards of Monday mornings, this one reeks. Just sniff around you. That burning smell, it’s either coming from the global stock markets as they strain against the US downgrade, or from those places in London where the rioting spread last night. Although the destruction in Brixton, Enfield, Walthamstow and Waltham Forest didn’t match up to that on Saturday in Tottenham, it still involved fires, missiles and clashes between rioters and the police. Reading the reports and watching the footage online, looting appears to have been one of the most popular sports of the evening. In terms of the short-term politics — as opposed to the slightly

A number of papers report today that George Osborne is minded to replace the 50p tax with Gordon Brown’s original proposal: a 45p tax. How the ex-PM will be laughing. As he knows, even the 45p tax will lose money — that’s why Labour didn’t raise the top rate until the final four weeks of its 13 years. But the Tories haven’t worked that out yet, and the Treasury is still working on the false assumptions he programmed into it. In short, the amount of money that either tax rate will raise depends on what’s called the “taxable income elasticity,” or TIE — a figure suggesting how responsive various taxpayers

Gordon Brown graced the political stage with a rare cameo this week – if half an hour of deluded invective masquerading as reasoned piety qualifies as a cameo. Brown would have you believe that he had nothing to do with Rupert Murdoch. This following piece by Peter Oborne says otherwise.   The murderous intent of Gordon Brown, Peter Oborne, 20 April 2002 This Friday a triumphant Gordon Brown flies to New York for a business conference. The Chancellor and his colleagues perhaps see the trip as a well-earned break.   In No.10 Downing Street there is a temptation to take a more jaundiced view, and interpret it as a quick

Gordon Brown’s speech in the House of Commons just now was remarkable. It was completely deluded, one of the most one-sided versions of history you’re ever likely to hear. Abetted by the Speaker, Brown spoke for what must have been at least half an hour trying to justify his record in office and depict himself as someone who was prepared to take on the Murdoch empire, which he certainly was not while News International was supporting Labour. Rather than acknowledging—as Ed Miliband and Peter Mandelson have—, that Labour got far too close to News International and was too scared of it, he presented an entirely self-serving version of history. To

Gordon may have come carrying dynamite, but News International has some explosives of its own. In a pair of statements this afternoon, the Sun and the Sunday Times have set about undermining, or just plain denying, our former Prime Minister’s testimony. By the Sun’s account, not only did they get the story about his son’s medical condition from a “member of the public [who] came to The Sun with this information voluntarily because he wanted to highlight the cause of those afflicted by [cystic fibrosis],” but Brown’s colleagues also “provided quotes” to be used in the final article. By the Sunday Times’s, their investigation into Brown’s property transactions was pursued