I hate to disabuse you, but Gordon Brown is not for turning.
As Andrew Rawnsley wrote in the Observer today about the 10p tax issue
He has never been notorious for his tolerance of contradiction, never famous for being porous to other views when he has made up his mind about something. Mr Brown found it especially hard to accept that he had got this wrong because it collided so completely with his image of himself
and this was when it was obvious. He is not just a convinced Atlanticist with neocon sympathies, he is a complete Freiman-ite Free Market convert with a side order of Straussian/Ayn Rand-ism. He didn't hesistate to nationalise Northern Rock because he was scared of being slagged off by Murdoch, it was against his every intellectual belief. keep to the Fen Causeway
I think TBG and Metatone have a better view than I, but maybe I ought to write a diary with my view on causes and timeline and then let battle commence in comments them correct me . At the end of which we might have a proper narrative. keep to the Fen Causeway
BTW, what is the Fen Causeway?
However the Fens are a low lying marshland in Cambridgeshire/Lincolnshire. So it seems like good advice to keep to the causeway in order to avoid getting wet. keep to the Fen Causeway
Yes, but this makes an assumption that, confronted with this stark reality, the British Government will have a Damascene conversion and reverse the idiotic privatisation of infrastructure policies of the last 30 years.
I read the piece as saying that the policies of the Anglo disease have these kind of ill effects, not as saying that anybody in power would recognise that fact any time soon and do anything to change course.
That is:
Countries that do infrastructure well (and which include people in what is meant by "infrastructure") are likely to do a lot better in the long run.
Countries have in the past held onto failed economic ideologies and have thereby driven their economies into the ground.
So the fact that the current US and UK approach to the economy is one that is doomed to fail in an environment of rising energy costs and ever-increasing importance of energy and material efficiency is not a prediction about whether the US and/or the UK will change course ...
... its only an observation that they should. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
