My thanks to our blogging colleague Old Holborn for bringing our attention to the following youtube clip of a speech by Professor Stein Ringen, and thence, by extension, the rather longer version below it. The subject is a book by Professor Ringen called “The Economic Consequences of Mr Brown”: quite a subject…
The good Professor is quite right when he calls it a paradox. It certainly is, especially when he says that Labour weren’t incompetent, but that they made so many bad decisions. Er…
Nonetheless, well worth a watch, and a very interesting perspective on 13 wasted years and a whole bundle of wasted money. Enjoy:
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2 Comments
Generally I agree with what he’s saying. If you take it purely in the context of social equality, his policies were broadly neither good nor bad. I have to assume that he doesn’t intend to include economic policy, because we know that in most cases (non-entry to the Euro excluded), Mr. Brown was not an economically sound Chancellor.
The general consensus is that constantly improving school results in terms of exams are not the same as broadly improved education, but he doesn’t mention which he means.
Too much money has indeed gone in to hospitals, though he neglects to mention where and how it has been wasted and what the consequences were. Bureaucracy was not mentioned in any of the sections, and I feel that has been one of the major blights on this administration. All part of control though, I suppose.
Obviously this is merely a taster for his book, and a very good one too, so there are bound to be things missing or glossed over.
As to whether someone can possibly be competent but make consistently bad decisions, I’m not really sure. Personally I’d say that you can’t. SirSkunk(Quote)
Quite…
The two glaring things for me were that he charted that educational achievement appeared to be rising, but didn’t seem to appreciate or report that by general consensus that’s because standards were dropped. A lot.
Also, the competency thing. I fail to see how a series of poor decisions by pretty well every Labour Minister, for the entirety of their terms as Ministers, can lead one to conclude that the Government was broadly competent. Clearly it was not. lsb(Quote)