The following transcript of part of Gordon Brown's interview by foreign journalists this morning is reprinted with a warning to persons of a nervous disposition.
"But that would reduce global growth, deny us the benefits of global trade and confine millions to global poverty. .....we could view the threats and challenges we face today as the difficult birth-pangs of a new global order - and our task now as nothing less than making the transition through a new internationalism to the benefits of an expanding global society - not muddling through as pessimists but making the necessary adjustment to a better future and setting the new rules for this new global order. As the downturn spreads across the world, we are, for the first time, seeing cross border flows growing more slowly than domestic flows. And we are seeing banks favouring domestic lending over foreign lending. This is a trend which must be halted if we are to avoid the risk of a damaging worldwide spiral of deleveraging and deglobalisation - with adverse consequences for all economies."
Right. So just run that one by me one more time, please Gordon. Only this time could we have it English.
From Stable Economy to New World Order in Less Than 6 Months
I had to re-read this a few times as I initially thought the PM had talked in Swahili for the benefit of his foreign audience. Then, I may not have the best vocabulary but there are few cracking new words in there I should like to use in the pub to impress the ladies, especially 'deleveraging' but I fear I may be a slap or too. I have run the whole thing through my Thesaurus program and it came out with no known alternatives and I cut and pasted it into Babelfish and it said it was closest to Hungarian before giving up and saying 'buggered if I know'.
Perhaps the PM had a seance with John Maynard Keynes last night and got the latest scoop on the Credit Crunch or perhaps he was reading straight from a 6th Form text book most likely Homer's Iliad translated into Esperanto or perhaps he had simply had an Orwellian nightmare and was telling his analyst.
What you can be sure about is that it doesn't resemble English.
Delivered in his dourest tones he must have swigged too heavily on the Embalming Fluid or someone slipped Kryptonite into his Shredded Wheat because there was little hint of optimism in his voice and none of his superpowers were in evidence - he had as much wizardry as Pansy Potter rather than Harry.
The only thing that became apparent to me was that in a few short months we had gone from an supposedly stable economy that would avoid recession due to the prudence and cleverness of the PM to a New World Order that sounded like we had gone back to beings crawling out of the primordial soup or possibly the Bronze Age. It sent me in a lather rushing upstairs to see how many beads and blankets we had to barter with for supper tonight because we don't have any goats to work with while I started to snip up the few pieces of currency I had left as tinder for the fire.
Credibility In Techno-Speak
I remember the confident swagger that Gordon Brown had when he arrived in No. 11 all those years ago and dazzling us all with his intellectual economic techno-speak about 'In this economic cycle...' and we all nodded aghast as Britain seemed to do well. Perhaps it was just me but it all sounded too much like a the class swot regurgitating the text book verbatim than giving us the layman's explanation. More fool us, as most fell for it - twice. But now the phrases are all too contrived, too complex and far too convoluted for the ordinary person to get to grips with. If we could have a definition of 'deleveraging' it would be good as a start but when juxtaposed with 'deglobalisation' it conjures images of the great sphere of this earth deflating like a punctured football.
Quite where it leaves Gordon Brown is yet to be seen but his whole time as PM seems to have been a constant series of stumbles and lurches from one crisis to the next with a moment's respite when everyone actually believed for a moment that he had saved the world from economic disaster when in fact he had less idea on what he was doing than the average man in the street. The only thing he has succeeded in doing is taking his 'stable economy' and reversing it into a massive pile of debt which we may have difficulty in servicing and decreasing possibilities of borrowing more on sensible terms.
The only achievements that the two bail outs have had are 1) saving the skins of a bunch of the greediest, most irresponsible executives who made literally millions on the backs of our homes and none of whom are being made accountable for their idiot failings, 2) pouring £30bn down a drain into a company that collapsed in worth to just £5bn as they had not had the common sense to actually do some due diligence prior to agreeing the sums, 3) saving a worthless hunk (Northern Rock) which had the worst of business models and did not need to survive (we could have still protected people's money) and then paying an army of consultants massive fees to do what most O-level students could do while allowing the new executives to pay themselves bonuses just for repaying what they owe the taxpayer and 4) causing the worst run on our currency in the last century.
Strip away all that techno-babble and blah and what we have is a series of knee jerk reactions hastily put together at the whim of the same fools who got us into the mess. From his use of language it is very clear that either Gordon Brown does not know what he's doing or he does not know how to tell us what that is. I leave it to you to work out which you think is the answer.
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