Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Brown?

In his New Year message to the nation our Prime Minister told us that in the coming twelve months we must display the blitz spirit.

And just as the British people faced up to the German bombing we now have no choice but to summon up our stoicism, grit our teeth and see it through.

We were supposed not to be able to spot the big lie embedded in this patronising guff ---the idea that the catastrophe which awaits us in 2009 is the doing of some outside enemy, some force beyond our control and certainly beyond the Channel.

And in believing that the enemy might be in a bunker in Berlin we were supposed to completely overlook the fact that the guilty man is in fact in Number 10 Downing Street.
Gordon Brown has had his hands on the economy of this country for the past ten years.

It was Chancellor Brown who told us he had seen off Boom and Bust while presiding over the biggest unsustainable boom in our history.

It was Chancellor Brown who talked of "light" control of our banking and financial system when the whole edifice was being eaten away by the worms of greed, recklessness and worse.

It was he who put in place the new financial supervision system which was supposed to control dangerous excesses and to spot looming crises and which miserably failed to do either. Even the Bank of England now admits the system was woefully inadequate.

It was Chancellor Brown who encouraged growth based on private and public debt, who poured billions into public expenditure excesses when he should have been putting aside reserves.

He brushed aside pubic warnings that our monstrous mountain of unstable debt was threatening to become a disastrous landslide.

He oversaw a massive expansion of public sector jobs and a vast benefits free-for-all to hide the continued shrinkage of real employment.

And when the inevitable began to happen he told us that our economy was in better shape to weather the storm than any other on the planet. Another lie.

The size of that untruth can be judged by the fact that our public borrowing-- which he told us would be £25 billion this year --will instead reach £100 billion at least. And experts predict that our economy will suffer a bigger economic contraction than any developed country.

Now facing a New Year in which 1,000 people a day will lose their jobs, tens of thousands will lose their homes and untold numbers of firms will go bust he has the effrontery to tell us that we need to summon up the old British pluck. And break into a couple of choruses of Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Hitler? I suppose.

Even the normally somnolent Church of England has woken up to the enormity of his failures and misjudgements. There is hardly a Bishop in the country who has not condemned his policies as morally corrupt.

Given what this man has done to this country we all have a perfect right to be out in the streets demanding his immediate resignation, at least.

And calling for a full police investigation into the financial chicanery that got us into this mess.

An end to the lunatic policy of attempting to spend our way back to a position from which we got into this mess in the first place.

And for our politicians to come up with a vision of a future that might be both morally acceptable and economically sustainable.

And singing "Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Brown?"