It is rare for a senior politician to knock around long enough to really reap what he has sowed. Not so Gordon Brown. Pretty much every bad move he has ever made is coming back to haunt him.
Consider the strike at Grangemouth. The obvious villain in the case has been Jim Ratcliffe. But the strike was actually about the closing of the company’s final salary pension scheme to new employees and the increased contributions about to be demanded from current employees. And who made generous pension schemes almost impossible to finance by removing the dividend tax credit from them 11 years ago? Gordon Brown.
Then there is the nonsense about the removal of the 10p tax rate and the mutterings from big companies about following Shire and United Business Media to Ireland in response to our relatively high, very complicated and unstable (who knows what Gordon will do next?) tax system. And who has been in control of that tax system for the last 11 years? Gordon Brown.
Next look at the fuel protest in London on Tuesday this week. Much of the press would very much like to blame the cost of petrol in the UK on the global oil price and on the shockingly exploitative greed of the likes of Shell and BP. But while both of those things obviously play a part, the real problem in terms of the price we all pay to fill our tanks is the amazingly high taxes levied on fuel in the UK (currently around 75% of the price of a litre and the highest in Europe). And the reason those taxes can’t be cut? The horrible state of the UK’s public finances.
Thanks to what think tank Reform refers to as Gordon’s “flash flood” spending over the last decade, things are so bad here that the EU monetary commissioner says he is going to start proceedings against the UK for exceeding the EU budget deficit ceiling of 3% of GDP. There isn’t much the EU can actually do about our deficit, but the whole business is pretty humiliating (we’re in a worse fiscal position than Italy for heaven’s sake), and it also means that poor Gordon has no leeway to cut any duties at all, let alone cut them enough to satisfy the demands of truckers spending £1,000 a week on diesel.
Finally there is, of course, the housing market. The writing has been on the wall for a while, but now several separate surveys have finally shown that the average house price today is lower than it was one year ago, something that means thousands of people are in or on the edge of negative equity. You might think I can’t blame Gordon Brown for that. But I can. As I think we say almost every week, house prices are more about the supply of and the price of credit than about anything else. And who has kept interest rates low for a decade by insisting that the Bank of England target an inflation measure that doesn’t include housing costs and that is consistently lower than all other measures? Quite.
Gordon Brown said this week that he is learning on the job. It might be a bit late for that.