Did Gordon Brown save the world in October 2008? He famously claimed to have done so in the House of Commons in December 2008, to jeers from the opposite benches. But some economists agreed: two months earlier, the British government had persuaded the US and Europe to recapitalise their banks with public money, narrowly averting a global disaster. The UK had been days from losing two of its biggest lenders, and more would have followed. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, warned that the banking system itself – and with it, the deposits, mortgages and salaries of everyone in the country – was “close to collapse”.
He may have averted that crisis, but Brown failed to address the problems that had caused it in the first place. Labour looked away from the dangers of failing to regulate Britain’s financial institutions properly – he would come to regret that none of the bankers responsible were prosecuted – and he could not get a sceptical public to understand how close they had come to finding themselves suddenly without access to money. At the next election, David Cameron was able to claim that Brown had frittered away the nation’s money on “Labour’s debt crisis”.
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