Is Voda's Colao the new Gordon Brown? Come July Vodafone will have a new boss, one who has had his eyes on the top job for half a decade and has strong ideas on how the company should be run. But he takes over a company that has been expanding abroad while cutting costs at home - two strategies he's unlikely to be able to sustain in the long run. Tony Blair will …
"Gordon Brown is not entirely responsible for the state of the UK economy, he just inherited an unsustainable position,"
Sorry, but it seems to me that everyone forgets that before he was PM, Gordon Brown was Chancellor for TEN years. If the chancellor isn't responsible for the economy who is????
AC - Because you never know when the 'Great Leader' might be listening.
Come on now, let's not forget no more cycle of boom and bust from the Iron Chancellor. It must be true, he said it often enough, although curiously not often of late.
Stop sign as it represents the most positive forecast for the British economy over the next couple of years.
|we didn't elect him prime minister."
Correct, though by my simple reconing, we don't directly elect prime ministers anyway.
Pretty sure we elect our local representative in parliament, and the party with the most representation get's to have a 1st or "prime" minister.
The fact that TB behaved like a president and made it more about personality* then policy shouldn't be either here or there.
I will agree that GB appears to be lacking a "stateman" quality.
Correct me if I'm wrong but Gordon Brown should actually be proud of the state of the British economy - pretty much the longest period of growth, lowest inflation, lowest unemployment, etc, etc in my life time. The fact that the house price bubble is bursting (and rightly so) due to incompetent investment bankers is hardly down to Gordon Brown.
This is technically true, but hasn't represented reality for many years, if it ever did. Government in this country is top down. The PM and his circle set the party line and the MPs are expected to toe it, including on local matters.
When someone elects their MP according to what the leadership candidate says, they aren't going against how politics works in this country, only how it's supposed to work. Which is entirely rational.
So yes, having an unelected prime minister, who plans on holding office for more than a short caretaker period, and refuses to hold a general election to give himself legitimacy, is an absolutely hideous state of affairs.
Paris Hilton wonders where the Vodafone angle is.
I really am fed up with this trite little argument about not directly electing "Prime" Ministers. Whilst we may not get a direct choice we all know damn well who it'll be before we put our 'X' in the box. Are you seriously trying to suggest that it came as a surprise to you when Tony Blair became PM? If not, your argument doesn’t hold any water.
And as I'm on a role anyway, if you want to get all pedantic about "Prime" Minister the original, correct term is First Lord of The Treasury.
> The fact that the house price bubble is bursting (and rightly so) due to
> incompetent investment bankers is hardly down to Gordon Brown
so nothing to do with Brown, who's policies encouraged the housing / debt bubble to keep people feeling affluent while he raises taxes in the background to keep his tax and spend rubbish alive
And when the economy turned people couldn't clear their 'debt' by sticking it on their house so easily and are trying to live within their income and finding that a huge chunk is disappearing to the government and ends they thought met dont
The general public aren't the only ones having this problem coming out of a 'feel good' economy, the people who we're meant to be managing it are having the same problems, wanting to raise taxes to make up a shortfall but realising that its political suicide at the moment. Wishing that they kept some back during the goodtimes for the moment when the economy did slow
And that prosperity is due to which of Brown's brilliant policies? Certainly not higher and increasingly complicated taxes, certainly not because of the child tax credit fiasco, certainly not because he sold large amounts of our gold for a song. The only thing he did right was to start off following Conservative plans (including the independence of the Bank of England). Britain is prosperous despite Brown, not because of him.
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