Brown failed to adopt the reforms. Instead, he fostered the state of denial that led Blair’s spin doctor, Alistair Campbell to write: “Dear Fred, I am a little bemused as to why you believe this country’s economic policy is ‘a shambles’.”

Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling, through the strategies in their budget on Wednesday, are  using the same technique to camouflage the policy failures that will deepen the depression.

The Renegade Economist team is releasing the letters that the Prime Minister doesn’t want you to read because they establish his guilt as the architect of the worst recession in Britain since the 1930’s. Read and judge for yourselves.

Here is the correspondence:     The Renegade Economist Letters

Gordon Brown is determined to “make sure tax secrecy is a thing of the past”. He denounces tax dodgers who deprive the public purse of billions of pounds every year. If he gets his way, tax havens will be forced to open up their books – subject to international scrutiny.

This, from a man who administered policies that lose Britain fortunes that dwarf anything that the tax dodgers can keep out of the hands of the taxman.

Deadweight Losses

Economists call the causes of losses to the public purse “deadweight”. They know that certain taxes damage people’s incentives to work, save and invest. As Britain’s new Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997, Brown had that harsh fact of life explained to him in forensic detail.

So what did he do? No transparency from Gordon Brown! He persisted with constructing a nightmare labyrinth of stealth taxes that systematically deprived the exchequer – and everyone else – of fabulous wealth.

I have calculated the losses. Over Brown’s 10 years at the Treasury, his policies lost Britain a sum equal to one whole year’s income. During that decade, he assiduously refused to open his books to scrutiny.

Recently, opposition Tory leader David Cameron was forced by the speaker to retract his accusation that Brown was a “phoney”. I am not bound by Parliamentary conventions.

Gordon Brown is a phoney.

The Prime Minister is scheming hard transmit his tragic syndrome for when they arrive in London on April 2.
Brown will cajole them into focusing on a narrow set of strategies. He wants them to think that the cause of the crisis is international – and entirely due to America’s sub-prime mortgage scandal. It isn’t.

If he succeeds, he will have conned these nations into misdiagnosing the problem. And that automatically means their “remedies” will be so far off the mark, that they are bound to fail.

“Don’t blame me, Guv”

During his visit to Washington, to bask in the reflected glory of Barrack Obama, Brown refused to apologise for his due diligence failures whilst he was steering the UK economy. Why should he? After all, there was nothing wrong with the British economy! Or so the Prime Minister would have us believe.

In the briefing for the G20 summit, Brown authorised an account that will for years to come be studied as a key document in the black art of state propaganda. This is how the UK is portrayed in Road to the London Summit:

“The global economy was growing strongly when the sub-prime crisis hit. In the UK, the economy was close to trend, inflation was close to target, public sector debt was relatively low and unemployment remained low. The US economy was the first to slow, but the crisis quickly spread to other advanced economies.”

The State of Denial

Brown’s head is buried so deep in the sand, that he could be confused for looking for oil. During his 10 years in the Treasury, he repeatedly lectured people on the risks of a housing boom bust. Over the previous 30 years, he emphasised, instability in the property market was always followed by recession.

The Treasury documented the price volatility. In one of its reports (Housing, Consumption and EMU) we read… “the UK stands out with one of the highest trends in real house prices and more volatility than in Germany and France”. What happened? UK house prices soared into the stratosphere in 2006-7, floating away on a bubble that had to end in a bust of classic proportions – which it did, on time.

But Brown was by now so heady with his own concoction of laughing gas, that he just could not see what was happening in the world of reality. Nor could his closest acolytes. Fir survival he was schooling his mind into the state of denial.

Britain’s home-grown disaster was replicated throughout the rest of the world. Global property markets were synchronised along a single path. But if the correct fiscal policies had been adopted over the previous decade Britain could have opted out of the property crash.

To prevent it happening again, the G20 should look closely at the land market, and the taxes that affect house prices. But that would be too close to home, for our fantasist Sub-Prime Minister. He prefers to distract us with the size of bankers’ bonuses and pensions - every illusionist needs a diversion. But let’s allow Brown to speak for himself on regulation:

“The better, and in my opinion the correct, modern model of regulation – the risk based approach – is based on trust in the responsible company, the engaged employee and the educated consumer, leading government to focus its attention where it should: no inspection without justification, no form filling without justification, and no information requirements without justification, not just a light touch but a limited touch. The new model of regulation can be applied not just to regulation of environment, health and safety and social standards but is being applied to other areas vital to the success of British business: to the regulation of financial services and indeed to the administration of tax. And more than that, we should not only apply the concept of risk to the enforcement of regulation, but also to the design and indeed to the decision as to whether to regulate at all.“ Gordon Brown, 2005

* Walter Mitty is a James Thurber character who lived a life of fantasy. The name is now used to refer to an ineffectual dreamer.

The Bank of England is up to the same game. It is cultivating a climate of opinion to persuade people that action is being taken to prevent future financial crises. Senior economists at the Bank point to Spain, commending that country’s regulatory system. Again – where are the embarrassing questions?

The Spanish property bubble did not inflate on the back of 100% mortgages – or 125% loans, as in the case of Northern Rock. In that country, borrowers routinely had to put down 25% deposits. And yet, that did not stop a bubble inflating that was every bit as dangerous as Britain’s. So why does Gordon Brown think that a cap on loans in Britain will stop the next bubble?

Regulating till the cows come home

It’s true that the Spanish have a tougher regulatory regime for their banks. But, again, that did not stop their construction industry expanding all the way to a precipice – before tail-spinning into one of the worst contractions in Europe. So why does the Bank of England now tout the Spanish financial model as worth importing into Britain?

These initiatives are the huffs-and-puffs of people in power who do not want radical reforms that would prevent financial crises. Their tactic is to shape the public debate by chanting slogans that distract people from root causes.

Unhappily, the media is allowing people like Brown, and Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, to get away with it. Journalists are not asking the questions that pinpoint the source of the problem. There is a weakness in the market economy whose roots go straight back to the Treasury and the taxes that are applied to raise revenue.

We are not Simpletons

The 24-hour news cycle does not encourage the debate that is needed, to peel back the answers to relevant questions. But millions of people are now frightened for their futures. They are not Simpletons. They are waiting to read and hear the interrogations that explain why the western economy was run in a slipshod way.

So why don’t journalists take time out to reflect on what they’re all missing? Right now, the best story in town is the one that pins the guilt on the individuals, and agencies, that sought the power to shape our futures.

Politicians say that the global crisis is so critical that they don’t have the time to look for scapegoats. That’s another tactic to avoid personal responsibility.

I am not suggesting that we turn the lunch mobs loose.  But if we fail to demand a full account of why the lawmakers and regulators were asleep at their wheels, we will allow them to tout the snake-oil remedies that will nourish the next land-led boom/bust. And if we allow them to get away with it, this time, we will only have ourselves to blame.

First, Brown repeatedly promised to prevent another house price boom – the inevitable consequence of which is mass unemployment and terrible personal suffering.

Second, I provided Brown with all the information he needed about when the UK’s housing crisis would occur, how it would occur, and exactly why Britain would be locked into an economic downturn in 2008. He was also fully briefed on how to construct a counter-cyclical strategy.

The Facts, and Nothing but the Facts

That was back in 1997. Brown failed to act. The full story is told in Renegade #1: The Cover-up, a documentary on this website’s YouTube channel.

If you want to express your views to the Prime Minister, you can write to him at: 10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA. You may think it morally reprehensible of someone to shift responsibility onto others (Brown has cast America as the fall-guy for his policy failures).

We all make mistakes – if we behave correctly after the grave error we can expect to be forgiven. Wouldn’t it be decent of Brown to apologise to the people of Britain for not ending boom/bust?