The Hangover

Our Polly , opens the year with an out and out attack on Brown .Never mind that she will be defending him in a week or so , here she surgically removes the layers of spin and reveals the depth of New Labour mendacity and failure . Her conclusions are the usual dreamy balls, but the disgnosis shows us why she remains the queen of hard left dissent . Have a look but this is the meat of it ...

The delusional tone of Gordon Brown's new year message says it all: "I believe we can create a new decade of prosperity with opportunities fairly shared amongst those who work hard and play by the rules." Just about every word of this raises questions about his record that he can never answer: GDP has fallen by 5% in the last year, taking us back to 2005; growth in his time was profoundly unfairly shared – over half the population saw virtually no growth at all; GDP per capita is a fraudulent measure that disguises how almost all growth went to the top 10%, and most to the top 1% – while he and Tony Blair did no more than see that the back half didn't fall too far behind. Middle Britain did badly however hard they worked and "played by the rules". Whose rules?
The 70% who owned homes were soothed by the feel-good compensation of seeing the value of their property soar by 68% in real terms in the unchecked bubble. So people borrowed to make up for no growth in their pay....Is the prime minister's "new decade of prosperity" the same as his last decade of "no more boom and bust"? Yet again Brown repeats in his message that the "crisis ignited in the US housing market and then came rolling across the Atlantic towards us" – as if our own housing bubble and over–reliance on the City were not contributors to our plight, along with failing to tax enough to cover Labour's popular and necessary public spending increases.
Brown cannot admit the monumental error he and Ed Balls made in their economic policies because there are some mistakes just too big to apologise for.


Substitute "Spend less" ,for "tax more", and she dead right . She is also the first commentator I have read who has pointed out that for ordinary hard working people there was no boom never mind a perpetual one . These are the very people who pay all the tax and whose future is now mortgaged to the hilt. Reading this sharp analysis feels now like waking for a hangover .As each horror from the binge bobbs to the surface like a rotting corpse ,disbelief mounts and you can only bury your head in the pillow and weep. What were we thinking of ? What have we done ?!