Mandy’s McAvity memory loss on the origins of the Euro crisis
Posted on November 11, 2011Peter Mandelson has been industriously digging himself a hole over the Eurozone crisis. Normally a fervent debater and a nimble performer when it comes to picking his words carefully, he got a bit of a shoeing from Paxo on Newsnight last night.
It can’t have been comfortable for the Prince of Darkness, but there are further troubles ahead if he sticks with the line of attack that he has chosen.
We’re choosing to be outside [the Eurozone] and not showing up at those Councils and bodies where the decision-making and economic discussions of the Eurozone are taking place
The problem he faces on this one is a curmudgeonly, sociopathic Scotsman called Gordon Brown. Back when Brown was Chancellor he was notorious for not bothering to attend the meetings of ECOFIN – the council of EU Finance Ministers. When the group met, McAvity Brown more often than not was nowhere to be seen.
Gordon Brown, Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, has not been to Brussels for a single meeting this year….Mr Brown has the worst attendance record, going to barely half the meetings since 1999. In 2004 he made it to a little over a third of meetings.
The difference between then and now is that while today’s Government are refusing – rightly – to take part in building a new Euro bailout package, which would be as expensive as it would be unpopular, back then Brown was skipping the very meetings which sowed the seeds of the current Eurozone crisis.
Around that table in the late 90s and the early years of the 21st Century a consensus developed that it was acceptable for the vast majority of Eurozone countries to brazenly breach the Stability and Growth pact, running huge deficits and piling up vast national debt mountains.
Now that is crashing down on all our heads leaving Britain, Europe and even the whole world to pay a heavy economic price.
Brown opted out of those meetings, passing up a chance to warn of the consequences of the Eurozone countries’ actions. Then, of course, Mandelson went on to help him limp on as Prime Minister for three miserable, costly years.
Does the good Lord really want to start this argument?
Tags: Britain, Brussels, Coalition, Conservatives, David Cameron, ECOFIN, Economics, EU, Euro, Eurosceptics, Eurozone, Eurozone crisis, Gordon Brown, Guido Fawkes, Labour, McAvity, New Labour, Newsnight, opinion, Paxman, Peter Mandelson, Politics, Referendum, Socialism, Westminster
Categories: Economics, Opinion, Politics, Westminster
Always a pleasure to read the blog, Mark, but shouldn’t Euro-sceptics be annointing Gordon Brown as their new patron saint? His work in keeping Britain out of the Euro, when the prevailing mood created by Blair, Clarke, Kennedy in 2002 was otherwise, surely makes him the most effective British Euro-sceptic of the last two decades?
15.11.2011 16:59
Thank God Tony didn’t think we should stay out…
15.11.2011 17:04
I beg to differ – if he’d attended these meetings and persuaded a few other countries not to join the Euro, the current fiasco might not have happened at all.
15.11.2011 17:26
Hah! He didn’t keep the UK out of the Euro due to some prescient and incipient understanding of iots flaws. He kept us out of the Euro as he knew that membership rules would entirely curtail his own mad tax n’ spend massive deficit policies. He knew that his control freakery would be undermined by Euro members like Germany.
15.11.2011 17:40
He kept us out to spite Blair – HE wanted to be the The One who would sell us off to the EUSSR.
Fortunately, after Brown throwing our money around like a drunken sailor on shore leave, we could never meet the joining criteria – and were they loose.
16.11.2011 18:17
Just think how much worse the crisis would have been if Mr Brown had been attending the meetings….
15.11.2011 17:07
Get real Craig Jones. Brown kept us out because to have entered the Euro would have diminished his power base in the Treasury. He needed this base to fight his mate Tony.
15.11.2011 17:14
Indeed, Brown kept us out of the Euro, but that wasn’t because he was some prescient economic genius – he just did it to p*ss Tony Blair off.
15.11.2011 17:20
Craig Jones: Gordon Brown didn’t keep us out of the euro…….. the last Tory government brought in legislation to make sure we couldn’t join.
Another Labour fantasy.
15.11.2011 17:26
Craig – you seem to have forgotten that, if Blair was for something, Brown was automatically against it. More luck for us, I would say, than Brown’s judgement, which we now know to be an attribute he never had. Of the many complaints this former Labour voter has about the last shower, the worst is that, knowing he was a nutcase, they still waved him into Number 10. Treason, or not far short of it.
15.11.2011 17:31
So the point would be that if someone says: “No!” to everything someone else says, eventually “no” will be the right answer?
16.11.2011 07:04
To paraphrase “Withnail & I” – even a broken clock is correct twice a day.
16.11.2011 10:04
I think Brown’s anti-Euro stance was becuase he thought that, rightly or in a mad fit of paranioa, that if TOny Blair took the UK into the Euro, he’d be a shoe-in for European President, and that would shit all over Brown’s dreams of being PM, even if he achieved this.
Funny old world, when Brown’s paranioa may have been closer to the plan all along…
15.11.2011 20:48
Around that table in the late 90s and the early years of the 21st Century a consensus developed that it was acceptable for the vast majority of Eurozone countries to brazenly breach the Stability and Growth pact, running huge deficits and piling up vast national debt mountains.
And you think Brown would have objected or even could have done?
He was behaving just as irresponsibly as the others, building a structural deficit into Britain’s national spending long before the crash came. The only diffrence was that Britain remained outside the euro and thus had greater freedom of movement when the proverbial did hit the fan.
16.11.2011 06:38