Economic smoke and mirrors of Blair and Brown exposed in a new book

[Joe Chi Minh]

entitled, Fantasy Island, "offers a devastating new analysis of Blair's Britain - a hollow kingdom where we make nothing, but believe everything....", written by the paper's economics editor, Dan Atkinson.

The review begins:

"We all know what the Germans are good at. They do precision engineering: all those quietly humming washing machines and sleek cars. We also know that Germany is a country in serious trouble, failing to embrace the need for flexibility in the tough new global environment. We know this because Gordon Brown has told us many times over the past ten years that the European model is washed up.

Germany was so abysmally competitive last year that it ran a record trade surplus and was the biggest exporter of any country in the world.

We also know what the Japanese excel at. In Tokyo and Nagoya there are world-beating electronics companies. We know too that Japan, like Germany, is a country in serious trouble, persisting with an industrial model that may have worked in the Sixties and Seventies, but is an anachronism in 2007. Poor Japan ran a trade surplus of £50 billion last year, as it found a ready market in China for its exports.

And so it goes on. The French have an ultra-competitive manufacturing base that specialises in food and drink; the Scandiavians are a dab hand at mobile phones; the Americans do computers (I thought they were made and sold by outsourced staff?), aircraft and films. So what is Britain good at? That's simple. We count the money and we do the bull s***."

But read the full review here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=457858&in_page_id=1770&in_a_source=

Two points I would make re the above excerpt from the review:

I believe I am correct in asserting that the author and the newspaper would both have been among the most fanatically vociferous supporters of Thatcher and her squalid gang, who started it all, and the ushered in the quarter of the century plus of the most morally bankrupt and anomian government and national ethos;

And even for generalisations, I would consider the author's ascription of those national industrial specialisations as gross over-simplifications. Those countries all have an industrial base that we would now consider awesome.

In his classic non-fiction best seller, The State we are in, former Guardian economics editor and later editor, Will Hutton, stresses the importance to a nation's economy of the possession of a strong industrial base.

Apparently, hairdressers take pride of place in our national industrial pantheon - absolutely booming.

Reminds me of those lines in Chancer, an old TV series in the UK:

"Actually, I've got a lot of time for Magaret Thatcher. She found a small country down on its luck and turned it into an industrial giant. Unfortunately, that country was Japan."

and

"She's turned Britain into a vast shanty-town of hamburger stalls".

[pretzel4gore]

1. the important thing is they gott away with it...

besides, they were socialists...

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. Yep. Like just Hitler was.