Spin and spend
Share
Sad as I am, I spent the festive period musing over what I’d buy Gordon Brown for Christmas and wondering what kind of New Year’s resolutions he’d be making.
It wasn’t that I was pre-occupied by such thoughts – I just felt they might distract me from dwelling on other things that are inevitable at that time.
You know what I mean, the media round up of the year, or worse with 2010 then nigh, a wind up the year and the decade.
So what would I have liked to give our PM?
Well, I thought a self-improvement book might be right up his street – Teach Yourself Economics appealed but I also thought something on leadership mightn’t go amiss.
Then my mood darkened and I wondered if I should send him a copy of the Ancient Mariner with a little note – “Dear Gordon, can you ever remember shooting an Albatross”?
No, that’s a tad juvenile, I decided and feeling a little brighter settled on Russian roulette for one instead.
As for New Year’s Resolutions, I felt that a commitment to build more houses might be a practical gesture but then I recalled that he had yet to save the planet from global warming, though he got pretty close last month.
Then, of course the jury is still out on his kiss of life for the UK economy, an observation that brings be neatly to the round ups of the decade which pundits for one reason or another has tagged as the noughties.
I suppose it’s got a ring to it but to my way of thinking tagging the decade by a letter might be more useful but what letter? First I tried C for credit crunch, credibility, and capital adequacy but it didn’t work that well. I played around with other letters too but final settled for B.
For starters consider Bush, Brown, Blair, Balls, Bin Laden, the bombing of Baghdad, the British in Basra, Basle and the banks, and the basket case banks and building societies, most notably Northern Rock, Royal Bank of Scotland, and to show that I’m not losing focus, the Bradford & Bingley.
Then you have the failures of the bureaucrats at the FSA and the regulators in Brussels, roadside bombs and bombs on planes, and then nearly half of all our MPs being brought to book by the Daily Telegraph’s expose on their fraudulent expenses.
Could the letter B hold up well in 2010 and beyond? I suppose if Labour win the next general election we’ll have more Brown and Balls but if that’s the case we’ll probably also have another long spell of spin and spend but that’s another story.
