Time to move to Sweden

There is nothing like the righteous anger of lentil-wearing Grauniad readers like myself at the gradual dismantling of the paper's soft left, hard politics stance. It was never perfect, taking the SDP claret drinking approach to politics and centering itself on the money pit that is London, but consistently delivered some of the best writing and journalism (not necessarily the same thing) in the world.

Sadly, what's left now is a lot of desperate 'down-with-ver-kids' type stuff about how cardigans are trendy again, page after page of dreadful whimsical tosh from the the likes of Zoe Williams, the worst TV critic in the world in the shape of Sam Wollaston, and dreary Blair defending from the likes of Polly Toynbee and Michael White.

Thankfully there are still a few gems in the rough; Charlie Brooker usually delivers to goods (when reviewing telly anyway), Timothy Garton-Ash frequently makes you step back and look at things from another angle, Richard Norton-Taylor makes good use of Freedom of Information requests.

The reason I mention all this is due to an surprisingly good piece in yesterday's paper by the economics editor, Larry Elliott. It essentially boils the economic disaster Brown and Blair have created down into easily readable form. Pretty devastating stuff:

"...Britain under Blair has become Fantasy Island, where for a decade government and people have convinced themselves that what would once have been seen as weaknesses are in fact strengths, and that hard choices can be margarined away by adherence to an illusory middle way.

"When the Attlee government committed British troops to Korea in 1950, the defence budget was around 6% of GDP...Britain now spends only around 2% of GDP on defence, yet the government maintains the fantasy that this is adequate to maintain the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Ever higher levels of borrowing have been justified by ever higher levels of house prices. Rather than save up for a new car or a holiday, consumers have been able to re-mortgage their properties and withdraw the equity. Labour used to have quite strict, even moralistic views, about the perils of personal indebtedness, but it has been the willingness of consumers to live on the never-never that has made possible the uninterrupted growth."

Basically it boils down to this: our economy for the past decade has been based on a combination of Daily Mail headlines about house prices, cheap consumer credit, and a massive trade deficit. When the shit hits the fan, it will do so big time.

So much for the 'Iron Chancellor' and the late, lamented Prudence.