Gerald Warner: Our cult of the amateur has let Brown destroy Britain

Published on Saturday 28 February 2009 18:47

GORDON has turned feral and it is not a pretty sight. As with all control freaks heading for downfall, he has adopted a scorched-earth policy. Britain has proved itself unworthy of its great Leader, so must take the consequences.

Taxpayers' money is being squandered in hundreds of billions of pounds in a desperate effort to prop up doomed Labour. Not since the retreating Wehrmacht in 1944 have we seen demolition on so promiscuous a scale.

Historians will struggle to understand this crisis. How, they will ask, in the country regarded as the mother of democracies, could a manic spendthrift be allowed to incinerate the nation's dwindling wealth, with no mechanism available to remove him from power? We are spectators of the despoliation of Britain for at least two generations to come.

Journalists have described as "explosive" the evidence given last month by Paul Moore, the HBOS whistle-blower, to the Commons Treasury select committee. Now Moore has promised to hand MPs 30 documents which he claims place the blame for the financial meltdown squarely upon Gordon Brown. "Brown must go," said Moore. "He cannot remain in office." Unfortunately he can, sustained by the votes of Labour MPs who know they are destined for culling at the next election. That is why the present political system may not survive this crisis. Brown's immunity to parliamentary defeat damns our constitution.

Consider this man's career. On the first day of Labour government in 1997 it is credibly claimed he had a "blazing face-to-face row" with Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England, over Brown's plan to end the Bank's regulatory powers, replace them with the now discredited tripartite authority of government, Financial Services Authority and governor, and fob off the Bank with the Monetary Policy Committee as a consolation prize. This was subsequently trumpeted – and applauded by Tories – as "independence" for the Bank of England.

In his first budget Brown raided pension funds of 5bn, repeated annually and ratcheted up to more than 7bn, at a cost to the industry of 100bn. Documents published under freedom of information reveal officials warned Brown against this; but, as we know from former Treasury Permanent Secretary Lord Turnbull, Brown ran the Treasury with "Stalinist ruthlessness".

Not everyone has suffered. There are more than five million public-sector workers with final salary, index-linked pensions which will cost taxpayers 1 trillion. The average public-sector pension is worth 17,091 a year, compared with the average private-sector pension annuity of 1,086. More than 17,000 public-sector workers have already retired with pensions worth more than 1m – including 167 staff of the failed Royal Mail.

This is Gordon's client state, the lite he hopes will save him at the polls. He has been recruiting to it on a massive scale. More than 1.3m out of 2.2 million jobs created between 1998 and 2006 were in the public sector. Scotland and the South-West of England came top in this league table of stagnation, with a 29% increase; but the South-West at least registered a parallel 8% growth in private-sector jobs – in Scotland it was 3%. In 1997 one job in five was in the public sector; today, it is one in four.

Those are the shock troops Gordon hopes will spearhead his Ardennes Offensive in 2010. It is startling to think that he was ever associated with economic competence. Between 1999 and 2002 Golden Brown sold off 60% of the UK's gold reserves at $275 an ounce – a 20-year low. From 1997 to 2006 Britain's much-vaunted average growth of 2.7% may have looked good next to the sclerotic Eurozone, but it was lower than in any other English-speaking country.

All of Gordon's past fiascos, however, pale into insignificance beside the last act of his Gtterdmmerung, now playing before a captive audience. Before the first banks bail-out, the Institute for Fiscal Studies was already denouncing Brown's claim that debt was below 40% of GDP, claiming that, when PFI liabilities and public-sector pensions were factored in, it exceeded 100% of GDP. Now Gordon has rolled up his sleeves and is shovelling billions of banknotes into the furnace of RBS and every other zombie institution. This fantasist thinks in trillions now – last Friday's 2.3bn car industry bail-out was small change.

The British cult of the amateur transformed a history graduate and politics lecturer, with no formal financial qualifications, into the acclaimed pundit of post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory. "No return to boom and bust." Your great-grandchildren may enjoy the humour of that – the intervening generations will be preoccupied with paying for it.