Much digital ink is being spilt this Sunday over George Osborne, Gordon Brown and the country’s economy. The press, continuing to play their part as the rats to Mandelson’s Pied Piper, have their knives out for George, while the bloggers are wondering why anyone is questioning him when he’s talking so much sense .

Even Labour MP Tom Harris agrees, with caveats.

The strangest thing about all this is Brown’s assertion that Osborne is being ‘partisan’, and that being partisan is somehow bad. He used a similar line against Cameron at PMQ’s on Wednesday, suggesting he was turning the death of a baby into a ‘Party Political issue’. While Cameron clearly wasn’t making any party political comment, George Osborne arguably should be making more of a partisan point than he is doing. The problem with what he’s saying is not that he’s talking down the pound1. The problem is that he’s not doing enough to stick the blame for the ‘financial ‘crisis’ on the PM, nor to point out that Gordon’s New Clothes aren’t made of such fine material.

And anyway, Gordon’s got cheek, seeing as he’s the man who in 1988 gave one of the most partisan speeches on economic troubles in living memory:

In the midst of a withering attack against Nigel Lawson’s management of the faltering economy, the Labour front bencher pierced the Tory’s façade with deadly accuracy: ‘This is a boom based on credit.’ Labour MPs frenziedly cheered as Brown artfully mocked the forlorn-looking Chancellor for allowing consumption to spiral out of control and for offering consistently wrong forecasts. The Chancellor’s boast about his ‘sound management of the economy,’ scoffed Brown, was worthless. ‘Most of us would say that the proper answer is to keep the forecasts and discard the Chancellor.’

Partisanship is part of the point of politics. If we didn’t have partisanship, we wouldn’t have competition. If we didn’t have competition, we wouldn’t have democracy. If we didn’t have democracy, the government would do whatever the blazes it wanted regardless of the will of the people.

Gordon Brown should grow up.

  1. He isn’t talking down the pound, anyway, he’s making a prediction on possible side-effects of the Government’s financial plans [↩]