Man in a Shed: Beneath the spin - something lurks in the water

Must get more work done today - so I'll just pass you on to two articles and a post today and leave you with this questions;

What is really going on beneath the spin with Gordon Brown ?

Article 1: The Prime Minister with no reverse gear - Richard Ehrman (The First Post)
Article 2: Now it's spin with a puritanical twist - Alice Thomson (The Daily Telegraph)
Arctile 3: Issues Rather Than Personalities? - Iain Dale (his blog)

Can you spot a developing theme here ?

Update: Tony Sharp can - as you can see here .....
Even the Lib Dem bloggers think Gordon Brown is getting an easy ride in the press - see Andy here. (He reads the Guardian - so you don't have to ! )

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman