Douglas Carswell's Blog

What if Gordon was still inside the Treasury?

Remember how Gordon Brown walked out of Downing Street after losing the General Election?    

But what if he turned right at the end of the street, then right again and back into the Treasury?  What if someone let the long-serving Chancellor sneak back into the building, and he's been running economic policy from the basement ever since?

Fanciful?  It'd help explain why he has been seen so rarely around the House of Commons.

It would also explain why the Coalition is set to miss not just its own deficit reduction targets, but could well miss Alistair Darling's too.

Having hiked up public spending by over 60 percent since 1997, the Treasury seems extraordinarily reluctant to cut it.  As the brilliantly informed Ben Brogan wrote in his Telegraph column, under the current administration, government - and the bill for it - just keep on growing.  Gordon in the Treasury basement would explain why.

While Gordon was Chancellor, the government relied on monetary stimulus to grow the economy.  Low interest rates and cheap credit would stimulate demand and make us all rich - apparently.  No change in Treasury thinking there, then.

Under Gordon Brown the government began a massive programme of QE, which meant that the Bank of England printed off money to give to the banks - who then used that money to buy government IOUs so that the government could keep borrowing.  This print-more-money-and-pray approach remains at the heart of the Treasury strategy to achieve economic recovery.

I can even imagine Gordon Brown hiking up the air passenger tax he introduced, or looking at new ways to clamp down on wicked tax avoiders.  Sound familiar?

The reality is, of course, that Gordon is not still inside the Treasury. Instead, the problem is that Treasury ministers still seem to be selecting policy options from a Gordon Brown-era policy menu. And if Treasury officials only ever put to ministers the kind of policy options that they used to present to Gordon, you kind of end up with Continuity Brown. 

I write this in the hope that the government might yet change course.   It is not yet too late. There is still time for the government to break with our Brownian past. Britain is crying out for a genuinely conservative approach to the economy.

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