"Gordon is the sort of person who will give you Saturday's winning lottery numbers on Sunday afternoon and expect you to believe that he has done something clever." "Things soon got to the point where, if you could see Gordon's mouth open, you knew he was either lying or he was at his cosmetic dentist and a self-serving and totally bogus press release about his pain threshold was on the way." "When the going gets tough for Labour, Gordon disappears." "Gordon is clearly a student of the Enron School of Accounting and a member of the Robert Maxwell Institute of Pension Administration." "As a politician, if you can fake sincerity, you've cracked it. Gordon showed, when Blair announced that he was stepping down and would quit in 2 months, that he still has a long, long way to go as his speech in praise of Blair was a masterclass in insincerity. Similarly, when he heard that he would not have to go through an election to become the next Labour leader, his protestations of humility, which drew laughter from the attendant journalists, were another model of insincerity." "Gordon suffers from the belief that he's the bee's knees. Luckily, no one else shares his delusion." "Gordon Brown was put on Earth to remind us how good Tony Blair was." – Lord Desai, 2008/04/17 "Gordon will be remembered as the Chancellor who inherited a healthy economy from the Tories and ran it into the ground in less than a decade through his Stealth Taxes and his failure to pay off government debt during the good times."

The Ten-Pence Tax Rate Swindle When it was introduced, the 10p tax band was offered as a brilliant way to ease people into paying tax. When it was abolished in the 2007 Budget; unheralded to let Gordon Brown grab a headline by reducing the 22p rate to 20p; it took over a year for the Labour party to realize that 5.3 million people would be worse off.    Brown's response to this situation was bluster and it took the threat of rebellion by his own back benchers to force him into a humiliating U-turn and vague promises of compensation packages for the people who had been swindled.    That U-turn took concrete form in an announcement by the Chancellor, Alastair Darling, that government borrowing would go up by £2.7 billion to give 4.2 million of those affected by the 10p tax grab some compensation later in the year. This left a further 1.1 million out of pocket. Armed Forced Betrayed, Military Covenant Broken Like the rest of the New Labour sheep, Brown went along with Blair's foreign wars. But he failed to budget enough money to let the armed forces maintain sufficient numbers to be effective and buy the equipment that they needed to survive.    As a result of Brown's negligence, troops were inadequately trained, they were sent to Iraq with insufficient supplies of essentials like body armour, their out-dated communication systems didn't work and lives were lost whenever British troops faced up to landmines and roadside bombs in unarmoured Land Rovers.    The Navy has been run down to the point where it would be hard pressed to summon more than a couple of rowing boats, and the RAF is shrinking to vanishing point. Auditor General's opinion on Brown Sir Jon Bourn concluded in July 2006 that Brown's 'flagship' tax credit system is a failure, which wastes £1.3 billion per year on mistakes, fraud and cynical attempts by the Treasury to manipulate official statistics. Brown's reckless expansion of means-testing was branded 'ridiculous'.    Sir Jon's other assessments included: Network Rail's £23 billion debt, which is underwritten by the Treasury, belongs in the government's accounts but it is excluded only to foster the illusion that Brown is able to stick to his own spending rules. Brown's constant meddling and rule changes, which are designed to put people off claiming benefits, are the source of increased errors (as officials struggle to keep up with ever changing rules) and fraud through criminals taking advantage of the opacity of systems for claiming benefits. The means-testing for Brown's pension credit puts the scheme's administration costs at 'a ridiculous level' relative to the overall cost of the scheme. The Office of National Statistics should be an independent office of the House of Commons and its figures should not be subject to 'checking' and fiddles by the government. Benefit Trap Retained Brown's 'flagship' tax credit system was supposed to give poor families an incentive to send someone out to work and get off benefits. But the 'reforms' introduced since 1997 add up to a disincentive for poorer people to find work, an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown. Brown's endless meddling with the system, and his passion for means-testing, has left poorer families in a state where if they earn more money, they lose large chunks of their benefits.    Two million workers on low pay lose more than half of any additional earnings through corresponding cuts in benefits, and for some 160,000 of them, the state reclaims over 90% of their additional earnings.    The tax credit system has the highest rate of error and fraud in government. "It is incompetence on an industrial scale." "Gordon's speciality is creating benefits, making the rules so complicated that less than 20% of those entitled to the benefit actually claim it, then lying about how successful the scheme was." Black Hole Brown – the Reckless Gambler Treasury documents released in 2006 under the Free of Information Act show that Brown was well aware that he could be creating a huge black hole in private pension funds if he abolished tax relief on share dividends in 1997. But he went ahead and did it anyway, gambling, with pension fund members' money, on a rise in the stock market. He lost his gamble when share prices plunged in 2001 and 2002.    Private pension funds would be £110 billion better off today if Brown had been fiscally responsible in 1997.    UPDATE : Under Gordon Brown's 'prudent' administration, and as a direct result of his tinkering and obsessive complication, blunders by the people administering the benefit system now cost the taxpayer MORE than fraud.    UPDATE : The latest estimate of the private pension shortfall caused by Brown's tax-grab (February 2006 figure) is £160,000,000,000.    UPDATE : The black hole in public pensions has shot up from £24.2 billion in 2005 to £81 billion in 2006. The government, of which G. Brown is a member, has opted not to set aside cash to cover this requirement. The hole will be filled in using future taxes. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!    UPDATE : Brown got the government's borrowing requirement wrong (underestimated due to terrible Treasury forecasting) in each of the last 8 years – that's how good he is at his job.    UPDATE : Brown has created £35 BILLION of UK debt and a 2006 trade deficit of £7.5 BILLION.    UPDATE : A calculation in October 2006 has found that Brown's predation on pension funds has reduced their value by £100-150 billion. The £100 billion figure is over TWICE the combined deficits of the country's 350 largest companies and Brown is now recognized as the direct cause of the death of the final salary pension scheme. in 2007, just 4 million people can expect this type of pension compared to 11 million in 1997.    UPDATE : Documents released in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act show that Brown was warned of the consequences of stealing £5 billion/year from private pensions by civil servants at the Treasury. But he went ahead and did it anyway.    When the truth came out, Brown scuttled off to Afghanistan for a photo opportunity, leaving his spin-doctor Ed Balls to trot out the line that the CBI lobbied the government for the tax grab which destroyed the best pension system in the world. That lie was quickly nailed by Lord Turner, who was the chairman of the CBI in 1997. "The problem was that Brown decided it would make him look good if he pissed the nation's reserves up the wall with reckless spending. But all he achieved was to create a monstrous Brown Hole in the nation's finances." The "Brown Bottom" That's what experts are calling the point in the gold market where Gordon Brown elected to sell off one-half of Britain's gold reserves as one of his early failed gambles. He chose to make the sale at the bottom of the market, and he compounded his blunder by announcing the sale well in advance, which ensured that the price had fallen even more when he began the sell-off. He obtained an average of $275 per troy ounce in 1999/2000. The price of gold had climbed above $1,000 per troy ounce by 2008, and Brown is calculated to have cost the nation £4 billion with this piece of political foolishness. Concealed the true cost of the 2012 Olympics In July 2005, Britain 'won' the right to stage the 2012 Olympic Games.    In October 2005, the civil service warned the government that VAT would raise the Games enormously; they had been 'sold' to the public with a budget of £2.4 billion. Chancellor Gordon Brown and Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell were also warned that the true security cost, and a contingency fund, had not been included in the original budget.    In November 2006, New Labour was finally forced to admit that the 'bid price' for the Games had been kept artificially low and Brown was insisting on adding VAT at a further cost of £1 billion and also a contingency fund amounting to 60% of the total budget.    In March 2007, New Labour announced that the likely cost of the Olympics would be £9 billion and that funds from the National Lottery would have to be raided mercilessly and good causes punished as the price of Brown's deviousness. Council Tax Doubled Brown's participation in New Labour's drive to impose more and more duties on local councils, and his grim determination not to find the money from standard taxation to pay the cost of the new duties, have combined to see Council Tax soaring year on year, and reach double 1997 values by 2005/06. Demographic Disaster From 2010 on, the number of people retiring and becoming 'no longer economically productive' will increase rapidly. A prudent Chancellor would have built up pensions and national savings following the change of government in 1997 in anticipation of the forthcoming 'demographic drag'.    Gordon Brown, in contrast, has been damaging pensions and removing all incentives to save via his raids on pension funds and his Stealth Taxes. He is also responsible for a huge rise in government borrowing, which will have to be paid for somehow in future years – and long after he has been booted out of the Treasury. Destruction of Savings Brown launched another sustained assaults on savings schemes in parallel with his assault on pensions. His objectives were: to wipe out all tax concessions, to make holding savings pointless and to encourage people to spend surplus cash to give the economy an artificial and unsustainable boost.    He also announced a Self-Investment Personal Pension Scheme in 2004 to make savings sexy, only to cancel it in 2005 when he realized that middle class people could benefit from it. "Brown's control freakery and passion for means testing pension eligibility has made saving pointless." Economy mismanaged & tax collection botched Gordon Brown inherited an inflation-free economy which was in excellent working order from the outgoing Tory Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke. He then proceeded to dig a black hole in it through feckless expansion of the public sector and its pension requirements while telling everyone who would listen that he was making decisions for the long term.    He pretended to be wed to Prudence but that was just a sham marriage. He pretended to pass control of interest rates to the Bank of England but continued to interfere with the process of setting the national base interest rate.    He pretended to have a Golden Rule, which required him to borrow only to invest, not to finance current spending, over "the current economic cycle" – which turned out to be an elastic concept. When he seemed in danger of breaking the Golden Rule, Brown cynically got his minions to add a couple of years to their guess of what constituted the current economic cycle.    Another of his fiddles was to exclude the liabilities of Network Rail and debt due to Private Finance Initiatives from the Treasury's calculations of the size of the National Debt. The taxpayer has underwritten Network Rail to the tune of £17 billion and PFIs to the tune of £25 billion.    Under Brown's Brown's alleged stewardship, 11% of the people in Pay As You Earn income tax schemes are being charged the wrong rate; the Treasury overpaid more than £2.2 billion in tax credits; the Revenue department had a deficit of £9.6 billion of uncollected taxes in 2005, 40% of which had been outstanding for well over a year; and as for National Insurance contributions, the deficit was £24 billion at April 2005.    Update, December 2007 Add on £60 billion set aside to cover the Northern Rock Bank's liabilities. Not to mention £250 billion to cover public sector pension obligations.    Update, August 2008 Brown has brought the British economy to a standstill. Economic growth hit 0% in April-June 2008, ending 63 quarters of sustained growth going back to 1992. The situation is made worse by Brown's persistent failure to save for a rainy day when the economy was doing well. Final Salary Pension Schemes Destroyed Brown's immediate raid on pension funds via assaults on tax concessions have raised in excess of £5 billion per year since 1997, a great deal of which New Labour paid to cronies or client organizations or wasted, and made the final salary pension scheme a phenomenon which ended in the 20th Century. Foundering 'Flagships'  • Brown's 'flagship' working tax credit system rapidly became a morasse of bunging by officials; predation by fraudsters; over-payments due to excessive complication in the method used to calculate tax credit entitlements; and distress and frustration for the people whom the scheme should have helped. Claimants were overpaid £2 billion in both 2003-04 and 2004-05, most of which has been written off as unrecoverable by the Revenue & Customs Dept.    A further £1.3 billion was lost to fraudsters, much of it because Revenue & Customs officers were told not to challenge obviously dodgy claims to boost the uptake of the scheme for New Labour propaganda purposes.  • Brown's 'flagship' pledge in the 2006 Budget to raise spending per pupil in state schools to the level achieved in the private sector received maximum publicity as the Chancellor tried to build up his credentials as a prime minister in waiting. The whole thing was quietly sidelined as a unaffordable 'aspiration' three months later. Means-Testing Mania Half of all pensioners can claim the pension credit, but they have to undergo a mean test first. Anyone who dares to apply for the credit has to fill in a lengthy, over-complicated form which, Brown hopes, will put pensioners off making a claim. The system is also a real disincentive to saving. Gordon Brown has established himself as a road block to pension reform through his mean-spirited obsession with micro-management. Moral Cowardice in Office Brown refused to sign the Lisbon treaty in December 2007 with the other EU leaders, having claimed all sorts of worthless opt-outs, lied about the impact of the treaty and reneged on a promise to hold a referendum on it. He also 'bottled out' of holding a general election in October 2007 then lied about being influenced by the state of the opinion polls. He denied being responsible for the regulation failures which led to the Northern Rock collapse. He denied bungling the fusion of HM Customs with the Inland Revenue, which put in place the laxity which let HMRC lose the personal and banking details of 25 million British citizens. And he kept pretending that he wasn't there for the Iraq war and every other catastrophe of 10 years of New Labour. The Northern Rock Catastrophe The abject failure of Brown's regulation system allowed the bank's management to get away with more or less criminal recklessness, and the crisis spun out of control while Brown was dithering over whether to call an early general election. By the time he bottled out of the election, the damage was terminal.    There were further delays while Brown dithered over nationalizing the bank. He opted instead for letting the taxpayer take over Northern Rock's financial liabilities and putting the management into private hands. It's the same system that applied to PFI projects, which are notorious for ripping the taxpayer off mercilessly due to serial commercial ineptness on the government side. And, of course, Brown doesn't count the £50 billion liability as part of the national debt for the usual dishonest reasons. "Not me, Gov!" Syndrome Brown suffers from this as much as any New Labour hack. His guesstimates of government borrowing have always been short of the mark by around £5 billion but he is not to blame for that. And the increasingly huge Black Hole in his accounts, which now looks likely to include the fallout from a huge reduction in Britain's rebate from the European Union budget, is also positively nothing to do with Mr. Broon.    Revenue gathering is a responsibility of the Treasury but Brown's excessive complication of tax declaration and tax concessions has ballooned the list of regulations and around one-third of all tax demands sent out are wrong. Similarly, New Labour's Tax Credit system has been an unmitigated disaster, which resulted in overpayments and people being required to repay thousands of pounds without notice and without delay.    Mr. Broon finished 2005 trying to pretend that he wasn't consulted about the prime minister's EU budget giveaway (for which he got nothing in return) even though Treasury officials were members of the team which stitched up the dirty deal and they were in constant communication with the Chancellor. Promises & Lies Before the 2005 general election, Brown promised to cut the number of people employed by the public sector. In his March 2006 Budget speech, he bragged that he had trimmed the public sector by 31,000 bodies. But in April 2006, the Office for National Statistics released figures showing that the public sector had grown by 62,000 bodies in the last year. One of them has to be lying . . . Red Tape manufactured by the mile Brown continually promised to cut red tape and remove the burden of excessive regulation. But by nature, he is a confirmed meddler, who delights in micro-management, creating more pointless regulations and requiring a mass of information, which has to be correctly filled in on a form of rain-forest-slaying proportions, if one of the little people dares to claim a concession.    Thanks to Brown's nit-picking and obsessive meddling, the annual Finance Act (a summary of the tax changes in the Budget) has grown from 300 pages in the 1980s to 10,000 pages in the Brown era. Smugness, Lies & Propaganda Mr. Brown had no problem about falsely claiming the Tory legacy of an inflation-free economy in good shape as his own work. He also persists in excluding items like the soaring cost of hospitals built under the Public Finance Initiative from the National Debt even though taxpayers will be paying for them for the next couple of generations.    Brown has no problem over issuing promises to cut back the ever-growing ranks of the civil service while the civil service continues to grow year on year. Stealth Taxes He's created hundreds of them because it's in his nature to be underhand. See our feature on them. Tax Perks for Criminals Brown's 'flagship' tax credit system also applies to those criminals, who are allowed out of gaol during the day to do a low-paid job. They qualify for a top-up of their income. (But criminals who do work in gaol aren't).   #