Economies: Brown to leave a poison pill

Alistair Darling appeared to go off-script when he admitted that the UK's bank bail-out plan would involve borrowing.

Now his next door neighbour, who as Prime Minister is supposed to let Chancellor Darling run the Treasury, is planning to leave his successor with a massive poison pill.

In 1997, Brown took over a UK economy that was in rude health. He has increased taxes, particularly indirect taxes, to a degree that on some calculations, more than 80% of a middle manager's salary goes on taxes of one sort or another. And that's not taking into account that more than 10% of his gross salary is paid in another tax by his employer.

Brown has squandered the national insurance scheme - a ponzi scheme created by his party in order to provide old aged pensions. The theory was simple: today's employees pay the pensions of today's retirees. Great plan but it fails when there are more pensioners than employees. Brown has admitted that the pension system is doomed.

He sold 25 million tons of gold two years ago: he didn't put that into the National Insurance pot - he just spent it - just like he has spent all the extra tax money. He has started schemes to harass those using offshore accounts in UK banks - not bothering to join up information within two sections of the Revenue and causing distress and costing the time of many non-residents who are nothing to do with the UK tax system.

Under Brown and his pal Tony Blair, government has expanded to bigger than ever before - with qangos proliferating at an alarming rate - many staffed with their pals outside the government pay structure.

As the current stock market crisis destroys - for the second time since 2000, the value of units in savings and pensions plans, Brown wants the ordinary worker to stump up yet more to support his profligate habits.

But all of those are nothing compared to his plan to make sure that whoever takes over from him takes over an economic situation that is so bad it will take a decade for improvements to be felt.

First - the amount which he and Darling announced would be available for supporting the UK's financial sector is - wait for this - half of the UK's GDP. Not, note, half of its tax revenue: half of its GDP.

Later today, Brown will announce yet more government spending. His government proposes that there should be more "talking therapies" for those suffering stress. It is a traditionally left-leaning group that believe that the world's problems will go away if someone says "how does that make you feel" often enough. More jobs for his pals and supporters, then.

Brown will today set out "his" economic plans. Reminder: he's the Prime Minister, not the finance minister. He's not the one who is supposed to be setting out economic plans. The reality is that, save that there remains a head of state (not a state of affairs he is particularly happy with) Brown is the UK's first president.

Not only has he sold the gold, spent the money from that and his extraordinary plundering of the pockets of the people, and not only has he risked years of financial stability by risking half of the nation's GDP on his favoured industries, but now the man who said his policies were prudent and the UK economy would remain broadly in balance under his stewardship wants to borrow more money to try to spend his way out of a recession.

Just six months before the looming crisis finally hit London, Darling had said that he expected to keep the UK's public borrowing to GBP43 milliard and a budget deficit of GBP10 milliard. But borrowing is now running at double the rate last year -

His plans are those of a bankrupt intellect in charge of a bankrupt country. Giving more money to his friends to waste as they have wasted the resources of the eleven years is just another example of how utterly lost Brown and Darling are.

Surely the correct stimulus is to cut the qangos, sack the hundreds of advisers that cluster around Labour like flies on, er, ....., merge National Insurance with Revenue and Customs and simplify the tax structure, cancel the reviews of almost everything, get rid of marginal spending plans and if there is to be money spent by government to put it into real medicine and real education; reduce MP's pay (in a world where Brown advocates no bonuses for bankers, his government has voted to increase pay every time the chance has come up, and now he's masterminded a substantial bonus for the disgraced Peter Mandelson to move into the House of Lords - once more promoted out of a job he can't do in the face of accusations of misbehaviour.

It's not hard to work out what to do. But Brown hasn't the courage to do it.

===========

Nigel Morris-Cotterill is the Head of The Anti Money Laundering Network group of companies, one of which is the publisher of The Chief Officers' Network.