UK:THE GLOBAL financial crisis hung over the Conservative conference yesterday as George Osborne sought to burnish his credentials as a future chancellor to bring what he called Gordon Brown's "age of irresponsibility" to an end, writes Frank Millerin Birmingham
Mr Osborne echoed party leader David Cameron's readiness to talk constructively with the Labour government about ways in which to protect banks and peoples' deposits. But he criticised the Bradford Bingley nationalisation and insisted the taxpayer should not be left "exposed to a multibillion pound bill for the mistakes of the management and the big money that backed them".
The shadow chancellor adopted a conversational manner to discuss with conference a mood of "national anxiety" and "crisis of confidence" in the eye of a financial storm that had seen Mr Brown's boom end in bust. Declaring the party over, Mr Osborne said Britain, like America, had forgotten "that an economy built on debt is not an economy built to last".
Having electrified last year's conference with his announcement of a massive increase in the inheritance tax threshold, Mr Osborne's headline-grabbing initiative yesterday was a plan to freeze English council tax bills for two years.
While it was "the aspiration and ambition" of Conservatives to leave office with taxes lower that when they came into power, however, Mr Osborne made clear that his overriding priority would be "to end Britain's dependency on debt".
Mr Osborne also likened his proposed new Office for Budget Responsibility to Bank of England independence. "This independent office will stand in judgment over our commitments, hold us to our promises," he said: "It will let the whole country know if we try to wriggle out of them. No more fiddling of the rules. No more dodgy statistics. No more hidden PFI [Private Finance Initiative] borrowing. Chancellors will be forced to behave responsibly with the public finances or face the public consequences."
While he was not going to blame everything on the bankers alone, Mr Osborne said neither would he "excuse them of their responsibility, or allow them to think that things can carry on as before". While he likewise would not claim that every problem facing Britain was the fault of government, he continued, nor would he let people forget "who sat in the treasury for 10 years while the regulation failed, the debt soared and no one called time" on what Mr Brown himself had called "the Age of Irresponsibility".
Mocking Mr Brown's claim to be the man best placed to lead Britain through the crisis, Mr Osborne said: "He says he's going to campaign as the candidate of experience. Let him try. He's going to find that we've had quite enough of the Gordon Brown experience."
In Manchester last week Mr Brown acknowledged that some people thought him "too serious", presenting this as a virtue in times when there was "plenty to be serious about".
Mr Osborne, however, said Mr Brown simply didn't "get it". The problem was not that the prime minister didn't smile enough: "His problem is that he promised 'prudence' and then spent and borrowed his way into a record budget deficit. His problem is that he promised 'fairness' and then cynically posed as a tax cutter on the backs of the poorest with the 10p tax rise . . . His problem is that he told us like some Old Testament prophet that he alone had abolished the economic cycle. Gordon Brown told us he had ended 'stop-go'. No more 'boom and bust' he promised. Well, now the boom is over and the bust has come. And the message for Gordon Brown from the British people is simple. Stop. Go."