CITY AND SUBURBAN
He must have thought that if the Tories could run the economy, anyone could
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Itend to lose count of Gordon Brown's budgets and budgettes, but I make next week's the sixth. It will look forward to next year and tell us all not to. He hinted as much in Washington this month when, in between putting the International Mone- tary Fund and the rest of the world to rights, he touched on the British economy. It was not going to grow at 2 per cent or so, as he had said it would in his third (I think) budget in March. He gave us the impres- sion that 1 per cent would be more like it. Some think we shall be lucky to see any growth at all, and next week we shall know how he bets. How different it all must have seemed when he gave us his fourth budget, in June, and even his fifth, in July. Then he threw open the floodgates of public spend- ing in the apparent belief that meeting all those new bills would be easy. I asked a friend in Opposition what made the Chan- cellor assume that the economy would trun- dle happily forward and pay for everything. `I imagine he thinks', (said this Tory), 'that if the Tories can run the economy, anyone can.' At the time I likened a chancellor's lot to that of the privy-builder in The Specialist. He might dig a hole and perch on top of it, proud of his handiwork. Then the wind would change and bring him the unwel- come message that sooner or later he would have to dig again. This Chancellor is apt to talk as though the wind would never change. No more boom and bust, he keeps saying. Chancellors cannot hope to abolish them, though they can always find ways of making them worse. Next week's budgette will be a trailer for his seventh budget in the spring, and I do not look forward to that one, either.
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