WHEN the history of the past decade - and more particularly the past few weeks - comes to be written, academics will struggle to make sense of the public mood. They will study the surveys of voting intentions recently published and ask themselves if drug addiction to the point of cerebral incapacitation was even more widespread than their researches had previously indicated.
As Gordon Brown brooded over the opinion polls last week, only his gargantuan ego prevented him recognising that their most startling feature was not the expansion or contraction of his lead over the opposition, but the fact that so much as one solit
ary voter in the 44 million electorate was prepared to endorse him. No one in British parliamentary history has micturated into the nation's consommé so impudently as Brown, yet there are people still willing to vote for him. Even the least favourable polls - and the worst ones appear to have been so bad they persuaded him not to call a snap election - reflect the certainty that he enjoys the support of millions of actual and potential pensioners. That is masochism of an unparalleled intensity.
Brown precipitated the pensions crisis: Brown, personally and directly, bears the responsibility, far more even than Blair. He raided pension funds of £5bn a year, then rising to £7.3bn. His total take now approaches £100bn and overall he has cost British investors £270bn in lost equity values. For pensioners, the dream of retirement to a cottage with roses round the door has turned into a nightmare: Gordon has torn off the thatched roof and blighted the roses. That in itself, destroying the sunset years of hard-working citizens and forcing them to toil on into their seventies to supply the index-linked pensions of privileged public-sector parasites, is an aggression against the prosperity of Britons fully equivalent to the Tories' Black Wednesday.
Yet the pensions meltdown is only one aspect of Brown's multi-faceted fiscal nihilism. It is complemented by the tax burden with which he has progressively crippled enterprise. Under his stewardship tax has risen from 39% of GDP to 43%. In his cringe-making, hammed-up conference speech he quoted from one of his father's sermons: "We must be givers as well as getters." The arrangement, accordingly, is: we give, Gordon gets.
Obedient to the paternal injunction, however, Gordon is a giver too, though invariably of other people's money. His Heath-Robinson contraption, the tax credit scheme, has squandered £9.6bn of taxpayers' money since 2003, mistakenly paying out £6.6bn and being defrauded of £3bn. In the last tax year 5.5 million families received £18.7bn in tax credit payments.
This is the system that Polly Toynbee, whom the cerebrally challenged Greg Clark recommended the Tories adopt as guru in place of Churchill, gleefully described as "a brilliant device. Its main intent is a noble redistribution of income..." Indeed, it is almost impossible to evade Gordon's largesse: families with incomes of around £70,000 are beneficiaries of child tax credit, but that is all right - it is only public money and it makes even more people dependants of the state.
Brown's squandermania reached a climax in 2002, when he stood at the dispatch box and gabbled tax-and-spend projections totalling £510bn, wiping £55bn off share values even as he spoke. And he called this Prudence. In those days, Labour voters were able to delude themselves it was all being skimmed off those elusive entities - "fat cats" - for the benefit of the ordinary citizen. Leaving aside the propensity of fat cats to move their saucers of cream to the Bahamas or the Caymans when their whiskers detect a spasm of fiscal banditry, tell that now to the holders of worthless pensions, those who queued outside Northern Rock, those facing house repossessions and small businessmen who have gone to the wall.
The Big Lie was always Gordon's legendary financial competence. He most famously demonstrated this when he sold more than half of the United Kingdom's gold reserves at the bottom of the market and against the advice of experts and the "independent" Bank of England, at a cost to taxpayers of £2bn. Gordon talks a good game on neoclassical endogenous growth theory; but put him on the trading floor for 24 hours and he would lose his shirt. He boasted to the Labour conference: "We should take pride that, under a Labour government, Britain - this small number of people on this small island - is the fifth-largest economy in the world." Some boast: until the end of 2005 - on Gordon's watch - we were the fourth-largest.
The other big lie is that Brown is a "change" from Blairite spin. The Bunker around him - Miliband, Balls, Alexander et al - is one vast spinning mill. It spun a skein too far with last week's notorious Iraq withdrawal scam. Of the 1,000 troops to be "withdrawn" from Iraq, it transpired 270 were already in Britain, 230 were already scheduled to return and 500 were in Germany, which few people regard as the Middle East. Total number of new troop withdrawals: zilch. Likewise credibility. That was pure Blair.
So was Gordon's embarrassing Son of a Preacher Man routine at his party conference. After the Parable of the Talents we had 'Suffer the little children...' Here was a truly creative piece of scriptural exegesis. Pastor Gordon explained he could not end fiscal discrimination against marriage, on biblical grounds. As we should all know, if we lived in a less secular age, the Bible is heavily down on marriage, so it would bruise Gordon's Christian principles to promote it. Even Blair would have hesitated to pull that one.
Britain must be in a state of catalepsy to countenance this latest charlatan. He was partner in Blair's schemes, besides implementing his own. Now Mrs Rochester has escaped from the garret. Smiling, folksy Gordon? Get real. Brown has never "given" anything to anybody. He is a power maniac. His lust is to control our lives. Like all politicians, he serves only himself: a scowling, nail-biting, introverted obsessive. This is a thoroughly nasty piece of work; but countries get the rulers they deserve.
The full article contains 1037 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
