A missed opportunity to cut government waste?
In his first big speech as shadow chancellor this morning, Alan Johnson tried to refute the Coalition's suggestion that Labour is responsible for the budget deficit.
Mr Johnson might like to read a passage in Jonathan Powell's excellent new book The New Machiavelli.
Mr Powell, who was chief-of-staff to Tony Blair, throughout his 10 years in Downing Street, explains that in the final year of the Blair government they tried to conduct a Fundamental Savings Review (FSR), to cut out some of the extra waste which he says had "inevitably built up in the years of increased public spending".
The failure to carry out the FSR, Mr Powell says, "was probably the most damaging example of the 'stand-off' between Blair and Brown".
"Gordon refused to allow it to happen while Tony was still Prime Minister," he says.
So the waste-cutting exercise never took place. "As a result," says Mr Powell, "we missed an opportunity to put the country into a better fiscal position going into the economic crash of 2008".
And I have just noticed that in his recent memoirs Tony Blair says:
"we should... accept that from 2005 onwards Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit. The failure to embrace the Fundamental Savings Review of 2005-6 was, in retrospect, a much bigger error than I ever thought at the time."
I'm Michael Crick, and I'm Newsnight's political editor. My guiding rule is that in any story there's usually something the politicians would prefer the world not to know. My job is to find that out. Follow me on
Comment number 1.
At 18th Oct 2010, DebtJuggler wrote:Crick,
Why do you persist in peddling such obfuscation?
Were Labour also responsible for the budget deficits in Ireland, Spain, Greece and the US as well?
All three main political parties in the UK now are pro free-markets i.e. libertarian.
It's an internationalist/cosmopolitan/non-dom thing. We now live in a fascist state.
Labour ceased to be the only true opposition party when they dropped clause 4.
All three parties supported the bank bailouts (and hence, de facto bailout of big business as well).
Think of it this way...as far as libertarians are concerned, it's always 'heads, big business wins - tails, the taxpayer loses!'
(aka privarised profits, socialised losses)
All that your post above (as well as the current political establishment)endeavours to achieve is the perpetuation of the illusion of democracy in the UK all in the name of the one god - PROFIT!.
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Comment number 2.
At 18th Oct 2010, offpat wrote:This was not the first opportunity to cut waste they missed -
deciding not to stuff doctors with financial incentives would have been another good one - now they don't know of any other...
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Comment number 3.
At 18th Oct 2010, cping500 wrote:Me thinks... a fight beyond the grave. The caravan has moved on ...leaving the corpses to rot and the hacks to pick the entrails before the trolls break up the bones. No hope of a resurrection for a year or two me thinks.
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Comment number 4.
At 18th Oct 2010, barriesingleton wrote:'GENERAL' HAGUE IS DETERMINED TO WASTE MONEY ON GLOBAL MILITARY POSTURING
It seems Hague doesn't do vague. HE KNOWS (just as Tony was certain) the future will be just like the present: full of megalomaniac leaders posing money-no-object threat, globally. His response? MONEY NO OBJECT arming, with stuff that will either be redundant (in a fundamentally challenged world) or obsolete, in face of sci-fi weaponry. In a phrase: FOOL OR KNAVE.
But then, Hague is going for his Black Belt in Globopoly, so home-orientated, common sense and pragmatism is sidelined.
Oh - it's all going awfully simplistically.
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Comment number 5.
At 18th Oct 2010, jauntycyclist wrote:shows brown was never for the people but was for himself. poor guardians. shameful guardians.
new labour must be the worst govt the uk has ever had. left it financially crippled and with never ending unwinnable wars.
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Comment number 6.
At 18th Oct 2010, DebtJuggler wrote:#5 bookhimdanno
we can't judge him on that score just yet.
as a certain poster on here opines....we can't judge them on their rhetoric...but only on the outcomes of their actions. aka behavioural analysis...
if he continues to provide charitable aid to africa (at his own expense) or he joins an iternational/world bank organisation will be the decider....only after then will we be able to judge him.
good or bad?
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Comment number 7.
At 19th Oct 2010, barriesingleton wrote:DONT JUDGE BROWN - ASSESS HIM. (#6)
Consider his desperation and fury at being thwarted by Blair. His odd mix of largess and cheating. Finger nails chewed to oblivion.
I suggest he was split in a Jekyll and Hyde way - seriously flawed, and unsuited too high office.
Do not lose sight of the fact that WE continue to supply aid (UNcharitable in my case) to Brown AND EVEN TO BLAIR. I suspect Brown finds aid to Africa easy; his aid to smooth government, while in office, he simply could not manage.
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Comment number 8.
At 19th Oct 2010, stevie wrote:it pains me to say it as I was not a fan but a hundred years from now Brown will be seen as the statesman of the century ....when the 'real' truth comes out in fifty years
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Comment number 9.
At 20th Oct 2010, JunkkMale wrote:Mercifully I am unlikely to be around in 50, much less 100 years, so I will be spared the odd notion of it taking a further five decades for folk to 'see' something, presuming any truth, which one presumes by definition is inherently real, does transpire.
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