What Gordon Won't Be Doingfor You

摘要

These are exceptional times and require exceptional measures. It requires action now to help people, and action now to build a stable economy. We have made our choice." So said chancellor Alistair Darling in his pre-Budget report (stroke emergency Budget) last November. And the action he announced was the government's biggest economic stimulus package since the Second World War.rnThe plan was to take ￡3bn of capital investment earmarked for 2010/11 and spend it in 2008/09 and 2009/10. Most of the money was to go on construction projects in education, housing and transport, and the aim was simply to offset the fall in private investment, with all that that implied for Britain's social wellbeing and Gordon Brown's chances of re-election.rnAlthough the initiative was broadly welcomed, there were murmurs that Whitehall departments might not be able to spend the cash in time to realise the dream of a v-shaped recession (it was certainly too late for the 71,000 people who had alreadyrnlost their jobs in the construction industry). Darling was having none of that defeatist talk: "I've looked at these programmes in detail, and I know they can be delivered on this revised timescale," he said.