Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Cruddas: Brown Must Abandon Outdated Slogans

Following on the news that the unemployment figures have risen by 140,000 over the last quarter, the Bank of England has now predicted that the economy will shrink by 2% next year - that makes it the worst recession since 1981. Andrew Neil just put it to Jon Cruddas on the Daily Politics that this blows the gaffe to the assertion that our economy is better placed to fight the recession than our main competitors. Cruddas, rather to my surprise, agreed, and said that a lot of the slogans which have been used in recent weeks need to be abandoned. I suspect this is a point David Cameron is about to make in PMQs.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Cruddas, rather to my surprise, agreed, and said that a lot of the slogans which have been used in recent weeks need to be abandoned. I suspect this is a point David Cameron is about to make in PMQs."

Is this the start of another falliing off in Labour MP support for GB then? Brown is the principal user of these slogans afterall ....

Anonymous said...

It's Andrew Neil, not Neill - though the wags at Private Eye would prefer us to believe otherwise (just to annoy dear old Brillo :-)

Anonymous said...

Shock, horror - Labour lefty snubbed and ignored by party leadership and members has a pop at centrist leader.

Anonymous said...

One ohrase I would like to see repeated time and again is,

"Gordon Brown, who hasn't balanced a budget since 2002....."

over and over again so that ill-deserved reputation for economic competence is smashed, dashed, shattered, battered and utterly destroyed.

Pete Chown said...

The economic problems are now starting to feed through into the wider economy, which is going to cause problems for Brown. For the last few months, people have been thinking, "We were hit by economic problems that started in America but I still have a job, so Brown's plan must have worked."

Osborne must now show that the economic problems did not start in America. The UK followed similar policies to America, and ended up with similar problems. The fact that the problems were first noticed in America is irrelevant.

Osborne also needs to do a better job of explaining how the Tories would tackle the crisis. The impression I have as an outsider is that the Tories have no coherent alternative. I am sure people trust Osborne more than Brown/Darling in terms of long term prudence, because Labour have already demonstrated their imprudence. However, we also need to know what the Tories would do right now, as a short-term fix.

Anonymous said...

'Cruddas, rather to my surprise, agreed...'

Me too - he seems to be a very decent chap.

What's he doing in Zanulabour?