Thank you for that but your reply begs more questions then it answers.

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Why have we not heard you or anyone else in the party mention any of these remedies before on the media, or in parliament?

Come too think about it, we still have not.

Could you give a summery of what they where/are?

I run a small manufacturing company, and would be thankful if you could give me any confidence that this can never happen again under any circumstances.

I like yourself know my Adam Smith. Therefore I know that without a high level conspiracy or two going on between big capital and world or national governments to deliberately bugger up the system, what is happening now is technically impossible.

I trust free markets. Unfortunately it seems that a free market in banking where lenders take as much responsibility for their actions as borrowers, is not what we have now, if indeed we ever did.

Governments bailing out criminally dishonest or vastly incompetent lenders using future tax revenues, is not just a very likely criminal scam of biblical proportions, it could turn out to be the end of the world as we know it.

Reply: See the entries under the Northern Rock tab of this blog – that will show that I have been olfering very different advice to that adopted by the government over the Credit Crunch, and did get some limited opportunity to say so on the media.

Brown – Infamy. Infamy. They’ve all got in for me.

Redwood – Just sort it out.

When people like George Soros say the British economy is doomed. Its like John Wilks Booth predicting the assassination of Abe Lincoln.

John

All very sensible stuff as usual, but I cant help thinking that you have missed out more then you have included.

I think it would be nice if you could have reassured us that we would not be in this mess in the first place is you for example had been in charge for the last 11 years.

Would you have done any different when it comes to allowing the central banks to have operated like a cartel of mafia bosses hell bent on destroying sound money and rational sane banking principals?

What practical measures would you have taken not to have allowed a deliberately created boom and bust situation to happen yet again?

I have only a grade B O’level in economics, but even I could see the BIG CAPITAL letters written on the wall 10 years ago. So why couldn’t Eddy baby and his team of so called economic experts?

This is a serious question.

Do you really think you can trust The Bank of England with even the tuck shop funds, given their past record?

Because I personally would not trust a bankster with more then 50 pence or my own money, even if it was attached to a long piece of string, linked up to 24 hour Red Care.

Reply: I have set out at some length the very different approach to Money and Central banking I recommended over the last decade, which I think would have produced a better answer for the UK. It would not have avoided sub prime in the US, but would have greatly reduced the excess borrowing in the UK especially in the public sector.

When Brown came to Downing St and invoked the well worn mantra of ‘change’ this was just code for somehow being different from that guy who took us into Iraq and reducing our status in Afghanistan to digging irrigation wells.

Oh and maybe abolishing a casino or two.

There was to be no change in the way the economy was to be run. Would any new Labour PM do anything different? Whats seems to be coming clear is that no one has had a clue about whats really been going on, has no clue about what is happening now and no clue about what to do in future.

The ‘change’ which is the current mantra means different things to different people. A leadership election now, especially one which was properly examined by the media, would split Labour umpteen different ways to Christmas. Oh, and who would fund it? Even the John Smith Institute is not a bottomless pit.

Conservatives better be hoping the crisis gets worse sooner rather than later, Labour will be doing everything possible to delay the effects.

If we want to save money the mantra of the outside consultant has to be driven out the public sector.

Indeed as peoples disposable income is falling they feel the real effect of the rising burden of taxation.

I was in America last week and what impressed me was that the government had rebated tax its citzens , interest rates had been cut and its industry was refocussing on the export oppurtunities afforded by a weakened Dollar, By contrast we have rising taxses, interest rate cuts that are on hold to stem inflation and a much reduced manufacturing sector.

I doubt Labour will get rid of Gordan Brown as their Leader and its a shame we have to wait possibly two years in which People will find life increasingly tough to get rid of him. However the is an element of poetry that his downfall will lie in the deterioting economy: economic problems that are the result not just of the world economy but from his tenure at the Treasury.

But Brown has a point about “international turbulence” which is not addressed.

Exactly, how would a Conservative administration deal with the credit-crunch and rising commodity prices, most notably, oil.

Easy to say, as regards the credit-crunch, that we would have never got into that mess by ensuring there was a properly regulated banking system. But history suggest Conservative administration have been equally subject to bouts of “irrational exuberance”.

Easy to say, as regards the other factors beyond domestic control that we would have ensured, by operating proper Prudent domestic controls, that the worst effects on the UK economy were better managed.

History suggests otherwise. Surely, boom and bust and stagflation have been enduring features of the Britain’s economy for the last 100 years.

Brown hasn’t managed it but neither did Barber, Lawson, Howell, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all.

Reply: This site has set out an alternative way to handle the credit crunch that could have avoided the run on the Rock and offered support for UK banks at a much lower cost than the government did. I have proposed reducing the tax component of the petrol price to fofset some of the increase. I would have not fiddled the inflation index before the last election and kept interest rates as low as they did. I would run the economy with less waste in public spending and less borrowing.

Reply: I am talking about savings throughout the UK public sector because it is borrowing too much, and squeezing the rest of the economy with high taxes.

Of course the lefties want to give the windfall tax to taxpayers: using it to pay off government debt would doubtless seem a waste of money – leave the debt for the Tories is presumably the idea!

When will politicians realise that a large public sector is too costly to run when it comes to wages which, because of the nature of the state sector, cannot be improved through productivity and increased profits. Anyone taking a job in the public sector is doomed to watching their wages fall behind the rest of the country. The biggest argument against a big state sector is wages. It amazes me how people cannot see this glaringly obvious axiom.

He is, I believe, the first Labour leader to have spoken well of Adam Smith & does have the potential to be a great PM if he would only do the things he clearly understands should be done.

The good news for him is that Michael Meecher has said he ought to go & Labour should get back to its traditional values (like windmillery). Anybody who does the opposite of what Meecher says can’t go that far wrong.

The trouble is that the bedrock belief of New Labour is that it isn’t what you do, it what you are shown (in the all powerful press) to be doing that gets you re elected.
The second bedrock belief is that the only way to solve a problem is to feed it with more and more money. Anything else is just hypocrisy, they believe.

You are challenging these beliefs. That is why the cabinet all seems to agree with Gordon Brown’s actions. Look at the way George Osborne was attacked (he had to go into hiding) when he suggested a tax cut before the last election.

What these out of date men and women are totally unconscious of is that times have changed.