Erikka Askeland: Sadly for Brown, it's worse than a twisted ankle

WHEN is an economy like an ankle injury? No, it is not a riddle from the new film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, it is Prime Minister Gordon Brown's attempt at helping simple folk grasp Labour's approach to tackling the economic crisis. Brown hopes that the football-watching, lager-swilling masses will get that the UK economy, like Wayne Rooney, needs time to recuperate before getting back into the game.

Analogies and similes are notoriously hard things to get right as they can sometimes jump up and bite you in the rear. A nugget of truth touched on by a comparison can easily be lost with just a moment of thinking about it, and this is the case for Brown's pairing of the wounded Manchester United forward and Labour economic policy ahead of an election.

The Tories are making an aggressive play with their promise not to bring in National Insurance tax rises proposed by Labour, a strategy that has been warmly cheered by those drinking champagne in the corporate boxes. Yet the party still maintains that its will reduce spending by 6 billion this year if its wins. Ambitious, yes, but as a game plan it is too short on detail.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Labour on the other hand proposes nursing the economy back to health, but without cutting the festering 160bn-plus budget deficit and then layering on a potentially toxic "tax on jobs".

Brown is right in one aspect. The economy is indeed wounded, although the last time UK plc was the equivalent of the English Premier League's leading scorer is one for the historians to answer. Until the striker's ankle was brought low last month, Rooney was at the top of his game and bearing the hopes of the England team in the World Cup in June. Not so the UK, I fear.

Where Brown is wrong-footed is his belief that, cuts or no cuts, the UK will be in any shape to play any time soon. The massive 857.5bn debt and the even greater payments on the debt if voters back Brown's plan look increasingly like the equivalent of Rooney leading the England squad in South Africa with wife Coleen strapped to his back.

Shares in precision ads

OK, I confess to being a regular Facebook user but I haven't paid a penny in the three-odd years since I started. Of course, Facebook's revenue model does not stem from charging me or any of its 400 million users, but making us fodder for the most effectively targeted advertising in the world.

It has been the constant dream of advertisers to understand the hopes and dreams of the consumer in order to sell a product. And Facebook is set to become the best and widest market research platform in history. Among my own list of friends I have learned of one untimely death, the birth of at least five babies and myriad stories about my friends' choices in holiday destinations, TV fads, hobbies and aspirations. And millions have been sharing all this useful information voluntarily, in their own time and by the use of their home computers or smart phones.

Imagine bottling that up and selling it. Actually, that is exactly what Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, plans to do. That is why Facebook is said to be set to float for some $40bn, having only broken even last year.

Although it is unlikely that all users will follow wholesale the commercial path Zuckerberg plans to take them on, Facebook's sheer size and scale give the firm lots of raw and potentially lucrative material to work with. This is no return to those silly, "new paradigm" days where hapless teenagers believed they could make millions by selling dog food, or whatever, on the internet. Divide 400 million into $40bn and this time the numbers stack up.