by Bo-Gilly » Sat Oct 03, 2009 9:30 pm
[quote]After only a few seconds you say it's factually full of holes....hmmm...which facts would those be?...do tell
Well I would have rather left it at that, and not laboured the point. But since you ask the question, then I think you deserve an answer.
Twenty seconds was enough for me. In those twenty seconds the subtitles stated as follows :
I am the cause of all this
This whole mess. It's fundamentally my fault. Really. Me.
It's the failure of my loose monetarist policy as Chancellor.
This disaster has been on the cards for years. The interview is about the global recession. Gordon Brown is not responsible for the global recession. It is recognised the world over, that the global recession was caused when some major US financial institutions went tits up. The crises was not predicted by the the US treasury, nor the IMF, nor the World Bank, nor any other government in the world. And not even by the way, the Tory Party.
Now it could be argued that Britain should have been better prepared to deal with a global recession. But that is not the same as saying that the British government is responsible for the global recession. Furthermore Gordon Brown has been praised by other governments for his response to the crises. Indeed even the previous Conservative administration in the US took their cue of how to deal with the crises from Gordon Brown.
There is no doubt that Britain was particularly badly placed to deal with the global crises. But the reason for this is very clear, and has been publicly stated by the IMF. The IMF has said that recession will last longer in the UK because of the British economy's over reliance on the financial sector. Countries who's economies rely less on the finance sector, and more on manufacturing, will emerge quicker from recession.
Many have argued for a long time that it was a mistake to more away from manufacturing and to look to the finance industry for growth, and clearly Gordon Brown was wrong to ignore this. But this move away from manufacturing and into finance, did not start in the couple of years since Gordon Brown became PM. It started 30 years ago as result of deliberate government policy. The then Prime Minister promised us that this was were the future lay.
Gordon Brown is not blameless, but he is not responsible for the global recession. His guilt lies in the fact that he deluded himself in to believing that he could make the failed thatcherite experiment of deregulation and "the market always knows best" work.
[quote]Not really a political thread
The subject matter of this thread is an interview which Gordon Brown gave. Now I'm pretty sure that Gordon Brown is a politian. So this thread is about a politian giving an interview on contentious political issues, to a political commentator on a political programme. How much more political do you think it could be ?
So in the interests of impartiality and balance let's poke fun at the Tories, and see what their ball-gazing capabilities are like. This what the new and much loved Tory pin-up boy Dan Hannan had to say in oct 2004 :
Three years later Iceland was bankrupt.......officially. And local authorities throughout Britain were owed £billions by Icelandic banks. So much for the "economic miracle" and business acumen of Gordon Brown's much vaulted nemesis.
But hey, let's have a hilarious video in keeping with the thread's topic. Here the darling of the Tory Party in a live interview is telling the American people that the British National Health Service makes people "iller" as he puts it, and has been a "failure" for 60 years. This is despite the fact that all opinion polls consistently show that the people he claims to represent, consider the NHS to be one of, if not the most, loved British institution.
[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiSPRkq28iU]Dan Hannan MEP rubbishes the NHS on Fox News[/url]
But enough about politics, let's talk about something that we can all agree on - cycling !
Question : so how come Dark Side riders can't see the fun of "getting dirty with your bike" ?