I very much liked GB£'s Comment of the day, but it reminded me of something I've been meaning to note for a while. This Labour government keeps going on about the "global downturn" caused by a "global financial crisis" as if that somehow absolved it from blame. But London has in recent years been the world's top financial services centre - overtaking New York following the Sarbanes-Oxley farce. In many financial sector markets we hold huge shares of all global business.
So (setting aside for a moment all the points I've made before about our government having failed to prepare us properly and the contentions of others that our recession will be worse than those elsewhere because of particular imbalances in our economy, and also setting aside the argument I've offered many times before that it is likely that causality runs mainly from real economy problems to financial sector problems and not the other way around (i.e. that the financial sector is having problems because of a significant real economy downturn, rather than the real economy turning down because of significant financial sector problems)) if it's a global recession caused by a global financial crisis, that would not mean that it's not Labour's fault. It just means that (insofar as governments are to blame at all - and, of course, people always tend to exaggerate the extent to which government failings cause recessions, as opposed to these failings reducing the extent to which governments are able to mitigate the effects of recessions) Labour's failings, particularly in terms of its incompetent management of financial regulation, have had broader impacts than those just on the UK. The most it could mean is that it is both Gordon Brown's and George Bush's fault - but if that's Gordon's ambition in these phrases (the ambition of sharing blame for screwing up the world economy with his US counterparts) he's welcome to it!
We certainly shouldn't let him get away with strutting the world, claiming to be a global mover and shaker when it's convenient for him and he's claiming to have had beneficial impacts, and then claiming to be just a small bit player of little impact when we are talking about his massively significant and globally important failings. In the financial sector, when Britain and America sneezed, the world caught a cold.
