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 Asian Development Bank warned on Monday that an estimated fall of $50trn in the value of financial assets worldwide might have been exceeded. This is equivalent to a year’s global economic output.

The Renegade Economist prediction was published six months before anyone else got round to doing the sums – a necessary exercise to help governments that want to combat deflation. So what does their silence say about the state of the media?

Buffet

People tend to quote pearls of Warren Buffet wisdom, but one insight of his insights is constantly overlooked: dumb down journalists and you get a dumbed nation. I’m not saying that British journalists are ‘dumb’ – they are not. But one cannot help suspecting that British hacks are more compromised at a time, ironically, when they can communicate freely to the whole world. As ‘news’ channels continually propagate the banal, the consequences of journalists failing to do their job are grievous.

On that sleepy Wednesday last October, $45,000,000,000,000 wiped out globally was surely the biggest story in town? Sadly, it wasn’t, in London. Arbitrary defence cuts, celebrity tattoos, Brown vacillating over the banking crisis, some politician’s expenses and footballers with three nipples took precedent.

But to whose detriment?

A Missed Opportunity

Yes, journalists are compromised – some because of a desire to fly on the Prime Minister’s plane and eat vol-au-vents in the inner sanctum, others because of the vested interests of morally bankrupt media magnates.

But we all lose when they fail to stand back and understand the fundamentals.

Journalists should know there is no necessary connection between the rate of inflation and house prices. If reporters understood the basics, Brown would not get away with his outburst at 30,000ft.  ”House prices were high because of a lack of supply,” he said. “If inflation is low, people are going to borrow money to buy houses. You can’t stop that. You don’t understand it.” Rubbish – you could have had him!

We need stronger journalism. Most journalists are too worried about their careers to put Gordon Brown on the spot.

“Smelly Little Orthodoxies”

Context, dissent and independent thinking are not to be sneered at as some quaint privilege from yesteryear. Once great liberal newspapers whose journalists produced a pioneering charter of editorial independence are now purveyors of what George Orwell called “smelly little orthodoxies” wrapped in saccharine lifestyle supplements. This simply won’t do.

If we allow the state media circus to become a freak show, all of us will be killed by weapons of hysterical distraction and be rest assured – that won’t be reported.