Gay Gordon, Gloomy Dave

I was having a thought this morning. Just a little one, but it kicked off a lot of other thoughts like someone dropping a pebble on a neatly arranged cluster of marbles.

Gordon Brown is a vilified figure, to the extent that it's embarrassing for Labour a politicians to be seen to have been too close to him (The Guardian this morning felt the need to point out that Shadow Foreign Sec Douglas Alexander had "fallen out" with his former mentor) . Biographies and documentaries paint him as a bullying monster and a raging megalomaniac. I'm not in a position to argue with any of these things, but it's interesting to compare one aspect of him with his shiny faced successor in Number 10.

When the global financial crisis - which most people who don't have foam dripping from their mouths will concede was mostly born of reckless behaviour by US banks - hit Britain, Gordon had a choice. He could immediately blame said American institutions and start warning us how terribly, terribly bad the whole thing was going to be. Gordon didn't do this, however, understanding as he did that the more terrible he told people it was going to be, the more terrible it actually would be. This is a fairly basic part of economics that even duffers like me understand - if people are terrified of the future they stop spending, making any contraction in the economy that much worse. Or he could be upbeat - Mr Brown insisted repeatedly that Britain - although hugely reliant on the financial services sector since the 1980s - was actually well place to weather the economic storm.

"Tell 'im he's dreamin'" was the basic response from many, but although the financial crisis hit us harder and longer than most countries, we did actually start to pull out of trouble at a decent lick in early 2010.

But this was too late for Gordon. By insisting that we would be all right, he left himself in a weak position when it came to blaming international causes. If Britain is "uniquely well placed", then it's different to other countries. If it's different to other countries, recessions of international causes do not necessarily have to happen here. If they still *do* happen here, it must be the Government's fault. However, there's a very real chance that the recession was less severe because of the constant reassurance issuing from Number 10. Alistair Darling couldn't stop himself from prognosticating gloom, but at least he kept it to newspaper interviews rather than banging on about it in every speech opportunity that came his way.

David Cameron is a superb political operator. There's no way he's going to make the same mistake as Gordon and leave him unable to blame international circumstances for the floundering state of the economy. The only problem is that Gordon's approach wasn't a mistake. It was the right approach. We've now had weeks of Cameron and Osborne warning us that the Euro-crisis would precipitate some sort of financial Armageddon that Britain cannot escape. On top of high inflation and wage cuts (in real terms or just real) and with VAT increases and far rises, we're now being prepared for some sort of economic pebble to drop down right on our neatly clustered marbles. It's hard to imagine consumer demand recovering any time soon.

In seeking to avoid responsibility for the problem, Cameron is very likely to make it worse. And if duffers like me get the consumer spending (and company hiring) link to confidence, so should he. He should accept that if the economy fares that badly his chances of re-election are pretty slim anyway and 'take one for the team'. He should start acting as if Britain has the ability to fight off the effects of the Eurozone crisis, even if he doesn't really believe it, because if he doesn't it's going to be a whole lot worse. If even "power hungry" Gordon can see that, surely Dave can.

SR

PS: Maybe I'm wrong - maybe Dave is an avid reader of Paul Krugman and refuses to believe in the Confidence Fairy. If so it's a shame he hasn't spotted the defence of counter-cyclical Keynesian spending while he's at it, though.