Sep 2009 13

New Book Reveals the Total Cost of Gordon Brown’s Mishandling of the Economy as £3 TRILLION (or £3,000,000,000,000)6

That’s £50,000 for every man, woman and child in the UK

In their new book Fleeced! Matthew Elliott, CEO of the TaxPayers’ Alliance and David Craig, author and management consultant, expose the financial, fiscal and political crisis resulting from a decade spent under the stewardship of Gordon Brown. The book is a devastating indictment of Gordon Brown’s time as Chancellor and Prime Minister. The authors bring together for the first time figures of Government spending before and during the recession, and Government losses since the recession began and argue that the cost of Gordon Brown’s mishandling of the economy has hit an eye-watering £3 trillion.

The authors, who were the first to reveal the shocking truth about Brown’s overspending since 1997 in their previous books, show that:

• Since 1997 around £1.5 trillion of taxpayers’ money has been squandered on an acceleration in profligate government spending fuelled by the economic boom; and around another £1.5 trillion has evaporated in the bust

• Government spending has more than doubled in real terms since 1997 to the extent that even if the next government tries to trim spending by 5 or 10%, it will take years, probably even decades, to bring it back under control, and could cost upwards of a further £1 trillion

• Gordon Brown has taken public spending to the level reached by Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in 1976 – when the country went bankrupt and needed the IMF to bail us out

• Gordon Brown’s failure (as both PM and Chancellor) to tackle the public-sector pensions time-bomb means that the estimated future costs of public-sector pensions have risen from around £360 billion in 1997 to, at the very least, £880 billion today, and some estimates believe it could reach £1.2 trillion

Fleeced! How we’ve been betrayed by the politicians, bureaucrats and bankers…and how much they’ve cost us is the very first book to bring together the total cost of government spending, the bailouts, the banking crisis and Westminster expenses scandal in one comprehensive book. The book lays bare the terrible truth about Gordon Brown’s criminal miscalculations and will add to the pressure currently being placed on the Prime Minister in the run-up to Labour Party Conference.

The authors have been charting the massive waste at the heart of government for the past three years in the Bumper Book of Government Waste, published in 2006 and updated and extended in 2007, and 2008’s Squandered; warning readers who were enjoying the credit boom of the dire potential consequences of unrestrained government spending.

Now, during the deepest recession in Britain since the Great Depression, they reveal the horrifying mistakes, jaw-dropping incompetence and widespread greed and malpractice in Whitehall and the City which will cost British taxpayers over £3 trillion – which if measured in £10 notes, would make a pile larger than the House of Commons.

HouseCommons

Fleeced! also shows how Gordon Brown is not the first Labour Prime Minister to have bankrupted the country. In the 12 years since 1997, Gordon Brown has almost exactly copied the 12 years from 1964-76 when James Callaghan increased spending as a percentage of GDP to almost 50% forcing Britain to go to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout, granted on condition that the then Labour government would make significant reductions in public spending.

IMF bail out2

To make matters worse Government borrowing to make up for the collapse in tax revenues due to the recession will be at least £703 billion; and could escalate very quickly if the UK does not make Alistair Darling’s very optimistic return to sustained growth of over 3% by 2011.

Matthew Elliott, Founder and Chief Executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said,

‘It would be easy to dismiss the figure of £3 trillion as being too big to contemplate or unreasonably high, but to do so would be to ignore the sheer scale of the financial disaster that twelve years of Gordon Brown’s tax-a-lot and spend-more policies have done to the British economy.

‘In the light of our analysis, £3 trillion is actually a best possible scenario and relies upon the UK making a far quicker recovery than most expect. We hope that Fleeced! finally ends the Prime Minister’s oft repeated and frankly slanderous claim that Britain’s credit crunch began in the United States. Had this Government not spent at levels far beyond our means while the economy was booming, the UK would have been in a much better condition to withstand the collapse in the US markets.

‘This is the third book I have released in three years warning of Gordon Brown’s financial incompetence, the only difference this time being that Britain is in its first recession for a decade, the government is as unpopular as swine flu and the number of those out of work is close to 3 million. I can only hope that this time the Prime Minister finally sits-up and takes notice.’

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  • Mark M

    Excellent. I shall keep my eyes open for a copy. Keep up the good work exposing the rotten state of spending from this and all subsequent governments who dare to waste untold billions of taxpayers money.

  • Connor

    A sad indictment on how far Britain has fallen in the past 12 years. Shame on Brown, Blair & Labour.
    Connor [Windlesham]

  • Steve Robson

    You didn’t need to write this. Polly Toynbee and David Walker have already revealed (as you put it) the cause of our problems in “Unjust Rewards – Ending the Greed that is Bankrupting Britain”. Ok, I know its about your school chums and backers and their £20million+ pa salaries, but reading it could just have saved you the trouble of mistakedly blaming the public sector and public servants.
    How do you do it, you spin everything and then accuse the government of spin. Something bad happens in the public sector, conclusion: the whole public sector is bad. Something grotesque happens in the private sector, conclusion: the whole public sector is bad! Only in TPA land; may the public one day see through you and realise what your aims really are.

  • James

    Steve Robson – what a pathetic critique.
    This is no longer about who is good and bad. It is about what can be done to save this once great nation from a bankruptsy that is likely to be infinitely more painful than the last one.
    Political activists like yourself are missing the point. The government is spending about £1 for every 60p it gets in tax if you include pension liabilities. That means it needs to cut it’s costs by about £200B and that’s only if they can find an extra £100B in taxes.
    I personally can foresee a Russian style crisis where all of a sudden the money runs out and nobody gets paid.
    If you think that is ridiculous, ask me again in 5yrs when the IMF are looking after things. At the moment I just can’t see any other scenario.
    Even if a hardline government made 2,000,000 people redundant (1 in 3 in the public sector) the redundancy payments alone would be tens of billions plus tens of billions more in benefits. Possibly hundreds of billions all told.
    I’m certain a bond strike is a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’.

  • Eugene

    I do not understand why people should blame the government (any government) for the fact that they did not save for their own pensions.
    The banking collapse was a global issue. If we had applied rules in this country to prevent banks from dodgie dealing then they would have upped sticks and move to another country. Thatcher and Ragan removed restrictions on the banks. Everyone was jumping up and down to get dividends from the sale of the mortgage company shares. It was all wrong. Now the time has come to pay the piper and everyone wants to find some one to blame.

  • K Lidington

    Just read the book. At £8.99 it will not break the bank, and is an ‘easy read’. Check-in + flight, + check-in + return flight should polish it off. I also recommend Eats Shoots and Leaves and An Appeal to Reason.