Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Gordon Brown on You & Up Yours

When Gordon Brown appeared on Radio 4 this lunchtime with Julian Worricker, it wasn't so much You and Yours, more You and Up Yours. He came very close to losing his temper when asked why he won’t say sorry and when accused of making wrong judgements. He tells Julian Worricker and the caller that they don’t know what they’re talking about.

GB: … I’ve just explained Julian what light regulation that you were talking about meant. It meant that where companies were doing well and there was no problem associated with them why should we be heavy handed? Where companies were doing badly the FSA was under responsibility to be heavy handed …
JW: But the judgements were wrong, look at where we are now.
GB: … in some cases the banking crisis that spread right across the world affected good banks as well as bad banks, they couldn’t escape being polluted by what was happening across the world. So I’m happy to take responsibility but if you do not understand and others don’t understand what the problem we’re dealing with, we’ll never solve it, we’ll never solve it.
JW: Let me go back to Melanie Abbot.

You can listen to the programme HERE. The rag losing comes from 24.56 minutes into the programme.

23 comments:

JoeF said...

Yes Gordon, if we don't recognize all the issues that led to this crisis- not only "US housing bubble" and "international financial problems"- but also e.g. UK housing bubble, poor UK banking regulation for last 11 years and poor control of public spending for last 6 years, for example, then we will indeed have trouble getting out of it!

Not a sheep said...

I only caught the end of the GB interview and was struck by how GB just repeats his learnt phrases over and over and over again; like some sort of security blanket - it really is most odd.

kenny murphy said...

I've listened to it several times and i'm struggling to hear GB coming close to losing his temper.

It sounds more like a passionate defence of his position.

Not at all saying i agree with him but i think to suggest he's coming close to losing his temper is with respect patently nonsense!

Alex said...

He deliberately avoids the problem, that the "global banking freeze-up" was a failure of wholesale markets, and that created a failure of liquidity in banks with a risky borrowing profile (NR, B&B & HBOS). Liquidity risk is not an extraordinary risk. It is something that the Bank of England monitored in every UK bank, based on weekly returns by each bank. Apparently the FSA did not continue the monitoring. That was BVrown's responsibility.

Sue said...

He's a terrible twitterer isn't he? I can't understand half of what he' waffling on about.

It's quite sad when he seems to command so little respect though!

Time to step down methinks!

Rob said...

Good banks as well? I don't recall Barclays or HSBC asking for a bail out here. Lloyds would have been fine too if it wasn't for the shotgun wedding tha Jonah arranged between them and HBOS. Northern Rock was over a year ago, he had time to pull the other banks in and get them to reduce their exposure without alarming the public at large. He said that he ended boom and bust or as he clarified later 'Tory boom and bust'...actually I think I preffered theirs. Far less damaging.

I don't want an apology, I'd rather he ceases to speak in public at all as everything he says is either spin or damage control.

Alex said...

He was pronbably relieved that nobody pulled him up on the point that the rest of the EU decided against the sort of massive stimulus that he wanted to propose at his Lnodon G20 meeting. That was at the meeting that Darling said he was attending to "prepare for G20", in fact just another EU finance ministers talking shop:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cbc200e6-0cda-11de-a555-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

Richard said...

Listening to this made me quite angry. All of the calls were negative yet Gordon simply followed his 'you all don't get it' logic assuming everyone but him are wrong.

ArthurBea said...

He was clearly rattled by the repeated calls for an apology and had to stop himself from losing his rag.

One of his favourite vocal tics is the odd 'this next period of time'. Which allows him to be as vague as possible, to cover his cluelessness.

Glyn H said...

He claimed at one stage that ‘most pensioners don’t pay tax’. Is this verifiable?

Dick the Prick said...

It ain't rocket science. Perhaps some of the vehicles to sell debt and transfer risk have been made purposefully opaque and the acknowledgement of where that debt now sits has been intitutionally and personally hidden but the more they lie and hollor, the more contempt and derision they adopt.

Let the banks fail and then nationalize them. Life's tough in the ice cream business but vanilla always sells more.

Utter tossers.

Alan Douglas said...

Via your link, or via BBC R4, the clip stops dead at 25.19. Deliberate ?

Also Glyn says "He claimed at one stage that ‘most pensioners don’t pay tax’. Is this verifiable?"

Don't know, but my mother, who died last June, is still being regularly pursued by the tax man, despite being told many times. They fined her £ 100 for not putting in a return while she was dying in hospital. Death AND taxes.

Alan Douglas

Man in a Shed said...

The problem with the interviewers is they don't remind Brown that the regulators did warn, but feared a lack of political backing.

That is the most damning criticism of all as has been made by both the FSA and BoE.

People should confront Brown with that !

The Grim Reaper said...

I think it's time that the Tories adopted a different approach with Gordon Brown. The man is notorious for his short temper - we've all heard about how he likes to throw mobile phones at walls when things go wrong. If the Tories can portray him like this more often - a man who can't be trusted to make calm, sensible decisions, portray him for what he is basically - I think it would be encouraging.

Prodicus said...

There is nothing he could say to me now that I could possibly believe.

I switched the delusional speak-your-weight machine off before he damaged my cardio-vascular system with his tractor stats and his protestations about it being all my fault, or something. Me and my evaporated pension pot.

Under pressure, was he? Diddums. Roll on the GE campaign. I can't wait to see him campaigning. His personal qualities are going to give Dave a landslide. Be careful you're not standing under it when it starts to move, Gordon. But don't go just yet. We love having you around. Your daily humiliation, so much of it self-inflicted, adds greatly to the gaiety of the nation in these dark days of recession.

Richard Edwards said...

Orwell put it well:

"We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

For battlefield read political wilderness.

Anonymous said...

cheers for the clip ..its a rare occasion to hear Gordon trying to answer a question

Twig said...

the record's stuck, the record's stuck, the record's stuck...

The right thing to do is to bore people into submission with stupid buzz words, and repetitive stock phrases.

God help us.

DiscoveredJoys said...

If Gordon Brown refuses to acknowledge his responsibility for his involvement in the building financial crisis, then:

a) he is stupid and doesn't understand what he has done
b) he is ignorant and doesn't know what he has done
c) he is wicked and doesn't care what he has done
d) he is too proud to admit what he has done, or
e) he is not responsible for managing the problems (despite being Chancellor and then Prime Minister)

You choose.

Mirtha Tidville said...

Clarkson was right.......

aproposofwhat said...

Once, long ago, I was proud to be British.

To hear that utter Hoon 'defending' himself makes me sick - he obviously understands nothing at all about economics.

But why should we be surprised? He's just another politician that's never had a real job in his life - like most of the Neues Arbeit scum.

Phil Woolas is one of the worst - and Joachim Straub (the Blackburn Dhimmi) isn't too far behind.

Gits.

JoeF said...

Well, Gordon is doing well for someone- up to £311m profit for just one hedge fund shorting Lloyds/HBOS

see http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHmYg8dgEgrY&refer=home

Maybe Paulson will give him a job next year.

Andrew Cooper said...

I wonder if Brown has ever watched The Caine Mutiny. He sounds more like the paranoid Captain Queeg every day.

The 'if you don't understand, this will fail' line is bizarre. No doubt when he's booted out of number 10 and the cognitive dissonance kicks in even harder, that will be solace: 'I was too good for them, these puny mortals didn't understand me...'