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Nick Cohen on Brown

I\’ve said it before but I\’ll say it again. We\’ll get that nice Mr. Cohen over the boundary line from left liberal to classical liberal one of these days, as sure as eggs is eggs.

David Craig, whose previous investigative work showed how Brown\’s Treasury had let management consultants plunder the public sector, has a new book out this month: Squandered: How |New Labour are Wasting Over One Trillion Pounds of Our Money. To spell it out, New Labour has spent an extra £1,229,100,000,000 since 1997 and will have spent £1,700,000,000,000 by the 2010 election. Its most tangible monument is \’a political and managerial culture where mistakes are never admitted, failings are always covered up and mind-boggling bungling is rewarded by promotion, honours and generous inflation-proof pensions\’.

In other words Brown couldn\’t be further from a Dickensian miser if he tried. For 10 years, he has thrown other people\’s money around with the abandon of a Roman emperor or Renaissance pope.

Truly \’unforgiving\’ writers wouldn\’t show Brown as a reassuringly old-fashioned pillar of the kirk, but as a demented spendthrift who stuffed the pockets of bureaucrats, IT salesmen, management consultants and hospital consultants while the patients whose money he had taken lay in NHS beds slowly dying in pools of their own excrement.

Nick, you might start your reading leading up to your public conversion with this.

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