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Pre-Budget Report - The Day After

Coventry Green Voice, Tue, 25/11/2008 - 11:50am

- Only £3 billion of the £20 billion "reflationary boost" of the pre-budget report is capital spending. If we want a long-term boost, for long-term economic benefit, this isn't the right way to proceed.

- Two Doctors points out that Brown's 2005 conference speech proclaimed Labour as the party of economic stability ... precisely when we had a housing bubble, and all the sub-prime-shenanigans were starting to build up.

- Hamish McRae, in the Independent, says that when Japan was in crisis, "the more the government borrowed, the more frightened people became and the more they felt they had to save." He goes on to express alarm that the government is talking up the crisis as unprecedented. "The danger of talking up perils is that people will believe them. It is the reverse of Franklin D Roosevelt's phrase that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – between them, Messrs Brown and Darling are trying to make us more fearful, not less." It's the need for a crisis that I talked about a few days ago. Once the crisis is over, people will turn to the soft/cuddly leader for "peacetime" - Cameron - rather than the Churchill/crisis figure of Brown. Brown needs to keep us afraid.

- There was no emphasis on grassroots financial arrangements (credit unions, co-operatives) in the Pre-Budget report. We need to get people saving in a sustainable way again. Instead, Labour are turning to the very institutions, High Street banks, that got us into this mess.


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