The real credit crisis: the nation refuses to give any to Gordon Brown

By far the stickiest moment of my journalistic career was the time I interviewed a foul-tempered Michael Howard on his battlebus between Bristol and Cardiff during the 2004 European elections. But I’m sure I would have fared worse, much worse, if I had ever attempted to cross-question Gordon Brown. As it is, I’ve never even stood close to him: the only time he invited me to Downing Street — for a charity reception of which he was the nominal host — I accepted promptly, only to receive a photocopied letter telling me the event was oversubscribed and my invitation withdrawn. I’m sure this curt snub had nothing to do with Brown himself, but it seemed somehow in character. I’m sure also that lack of propinquity is a positive advantage in offering a comment on what the nation thinks of him on the eve of his last Budget. Like most of you, I’ve never shared a can of lager with him in front of Match of the Day and felt the warmth of his wit or the burning aura of his inner sincerity. Like those of you who bother to tune in on Wednesday, I will listen to his machine-gun spray of self-congratulatory statistics and think: this distant, difficult, driven man hasn’t done half as much damage to the economy as we might have expected from a committed socialist and hasn’t been half as dishonest as many of his colleagues — but what a grim, uncomfortable prospect he offers as Britain’s next PM.

Faint praise

‘Hasn’t done half as much damage…’ is faint praise for a man hailed by his own propagandists as the greatest chancellor in modern times. But faint praise is what Brown naturally attracts. At an Editorial Intelligence seminar last week on the question of whether Britain has lost its innovative edge, I was taken aback by negative reactions to some mildly approving remarks I made about Brown’s commitment to government spending on science — which according to the DTI has more than doubled in real terms since 1997, and according to Sir Richard Sykes, who’s in a position to know as the rector of Imperial College London, has helped to put us ‘streets ahead of the rest of Europe’ in fields such as bioscience. Given the absence in this country of US-style endowments and venture capital networks to back early-stage development of exciting ideas, this is an area in which state funding has a vital role. I could carp about red tape in the grant system for university research and the R&D tax credit system for smaller companies, but the carping would not be echoed by most scientists and inventors. So credit where credit’s due, but my audience looked surprised and sceptical.

No admission

Even Brown’s own propagandists have never claimed his Budget speeches to be great oratory. This 11th and last could be the dullest of the lot if, as expected, he saves all the fireworks for his first 100 days as prime minister. It will swiftly become a blur with its ten predecessors and their accompanying phonebook-thick Treasury reports — which offer the only sure way to understand these speeches at all, given Brown’s habit of announcing eye-catching measures far in advance, then re-announcing them, while concealing unpalatable tax tweaks in the small print. The only speech that might be called historic was the first, on 2 July 1997, which the Independent hailed as ‘brilliant… prudent, managerial, responsible’. But few of us that day grasped the true impact of one short passage: ‘The present system of tax credits encourages companies to pay out dividends rather than reinvest their profits. This cannot be the best way of encouraging investment for the long term… Many pension funds are in substantial surplus… so this is the right time to undertake a long-needed reform. So, with immediate effect, I propose to abolish tax credits paid to pension funds…’

As Sir Martin Jacomb argued here last year, the real effect of that £5 billion-a-year raid was that it made shares less attractive, contributing to the stock-market slump of 2001–2003, to the pension-fund deficits which afflict many companies today, to the switch into gilts which robbed many funds of the full benefit of subsequent share rises, and to the demolition of final-salary pension schemes. No one has ever claimed that the raid succeeded in the stated objective of ‘encouraging investment’: in fact, it did the opposite, and to his eternal discredit Brown has never acknowledged the damage caused to what was once the best-provided private-pension system in Europe. The moist-eyed Clintonian confession and the ‘masochism strategy’ of Tony Blair may be nauseating features of modern political life, but Brown’s stony refusal to admit mistakes or give straight answers to questions about them is just one more reason why the nation doesn’t love him.

Jazz focus

Over the weekend I conducted a focus group on personal responses to Gordon Brown, to check whether I’m right about this. I can’t claim it was scientific; the participants were all jazz musicians with whom I happened to be drinking. But only one showed signs of being a Tory, and I put the rest down as floating voters — except for Keith, the double-bass player from Essex, whose unprovoked rant about profiteering bastards on the privatised railways sounded distinctly Old Labour. ‘Used to be,’ he agreed, ‘but I got no time for this bleedin’ lot.’ His views on Brown? ‘Unprintable’, which indeed they were, the rub being that the Chancellor was responsible for the destruction of Keith’s dad’s mate’s pension. Significantly, none of the others spoke in Brown’s defence, or admitted to admiring him or feeling good about his impending promotion. Professionally conducted focus groups anywhere south of Scotland’s central belt would, I suspect, elicit similar results. Brown’s public persona is so off-putting that the nation refuses him credit for his achievements or his deeply held beliefs — which makes him the very opposite of Blair and Cameron, and must fuel the brooding anger which in turn makes him even more rebarbative. In a way it’s tragic, but perhaps I can cheer him up with a wholly irrelevant sample of trad jazzmen’s rhyming slang. ‘Where’s yer Vlad, Martin?’ Keith asked, draining his glass after another expletive-strewn tour of the political horizon. I looked blank until the pianist whispered: ‘Keith wishes to visit your cloakroom. Vlad, Vladimir Ashkenazy, khazi.’