Brian Monteith: King is crying out: we're broke!

Published on Friday 27 March 2009 09:01

I'M sorry. I really am truly sorry. I had hoped that this week I might for once be able to move on and not feel the urge to write about Gordon Brown yet again. I realise that you can get too much of a good thing and that you might be showing signs of Brown-beating fatigue.

It's understandable, but honestly, what else can I do when – just as I was going to type away about David Cameron's new policy vision, or how little Obama appears to be changing domestically in the US – up pops another Gordon Brown story, one that I can't ignore.

It's true, I've often had it in for Brown, in as much that even when Blair was prime minister I often felt Brown's misguided economic policies required more critical comment than the PM's empty soundbites. Now that Boom and Bust Brown is prime minister, only Alex Salmond brings anything interesting to the table worth discussing, while too many Tories are out to lunch and the Liberal Democrats asleep on the job. Still, I'd hoped this week would be different.

Then, of all things, a banker goes and says something to challenge Brown's world-view at a House of Commons' Parliamentary Committee. Not just any banker, but the Governor of the Bank of England – a man who has some responsibility for the economic mess we're in himself and who might be expected to support the former chancellor down to the last bullet, but no, he now begs to differ.

To cap it all, it couldn't really come at a worse time for Brown, who in his Flash Gordon mode is busy trying to save the world (again) by visiting capitals of countries that will be attending the G20 Summit in London next week.

So what did Mervyn King have to say?

He said the Chancellor had to be cautious with his next budget because we as a nation could not afford any more borrowing.

Now that may seem like a fairly lukewarm comment, but make no mistake; in the world of bureaucrats and Mandarins that is blunt talk for "We're broke. We can't afford any more." The International Monetary Fund says the same too.

The Prime Minister, apparently against the thinking of his Chancellor Alisdair Darling, has been talking of the need for more spending, more unfunded tax cuts – both of which would come from yet more borrowing that our grandchildren would have to pay for. He's been urging other world leaders to do the same. Spend, spend, spend.

Mervyn King knew what he was doing when he went into the heart of the beast, the House of Commons itself, and said this. He was letting it be known that if Gordon Brown keeps on spending he will be all alone. He was showing he would wash his hands of the prime minister.

King has to be thanked. For months now we have been berating bankers for deceiving us, for not telling us like it is.

Now the country's top banker has made it plain– we can't spend our way out of bankruptcy and we can't borrow our way out of debt. We can't cut taxes without cutting the spending it feeds. It's how most of us try to live our lives and it's time our Government lived within its means too.

It's not rocket science. It's home economics. And it's time Gordon Brown stayed at home and repaired his own roof rather than trying to fix everyone else's.

Mills' unfunny 'joke'

What on earth does the Director of Edinburgh's International Festival of the Arts think he is doing trying to promote his three-week artistic cavalcade with images of homeless people, urinating louts and roadblock roadworks?

The Festival programme, with nearly half a million copies to be distributed worldwide, trashes our city with a cover that looks like a tasteless wallpaper circa 1950s.

Every city has its seedier side, but why in the middle of a recession does Jonathan Mills think such visions will entice people to our city when they could go to Salzburg, Bayreuth, Vienna, or even Manchester?

It has been said it is all meant to be humorous. Well, "Come to Edinburgh and smell the urine" is not a joke that's got me laughing, and when many people's livelihoods depend on the cultural tourist trade the results of this prank will be deadly serious.

The Festival's artistic theme is meant to be the Enlightenment, but I see no relationship to the great works of Hume, Smith and Ferguson to the marketing of beggars and jakeys.

And it isn't even accurate – my office used to look on to Hume's statue and the philosopher never sported a traffic cone (a Glasgow pursuit), nor did the homeless sleep or beg below it (there was a blind piper scaring them all away).

Mills is a dangerously naive buffoon and should be given a cardboard box to crawl into – to sample the real experience for himself, rather than make light of it.