It might actually be Gordon Brown's fault

Boris Johnson explains why Gordon Brown and not George Osborne might be responsible for the UK economy going tits up. Here's an extract, do read the rest and point out the facts to any BBC "journalist" you may meet:

"what has intensified my rage is the Government's unbelievable suggestion that any further fall would have something to do with George Osborne and his decision to point out what is happening.

Ooh, say the Labour MPs, he's being disloyal! He's broken the "convention", they hiss. The shadow chancellor has been "unpatriotic", say the henchpersons of Gordon Brown - and how?

He has simply had the guts to point out that past Labour governments have collapsed in sterling crises, and we must all do our best to stop it happening again.

How can there possibly be a "convention" that stops shadow chancellors from pointing out the baleful effects on sterling of an irresponsible fiscal policy? Surely that is the very definition of his job.

This is insanity, and the Labour attempt to accuse Osborne of "talking down" the pound is the most ludicrous and desperate attempt to evade the blame since - well, since 1992, when the Tories tried to blame the Bundesbank's Helmut Schlesinger and Hans Tietmeyer for the fall of the pound on Black Wednesday.

If Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling are right, and our economic difficulties are identical to those of developed countries the world over, then why the hell is it our currency that is taking such a pasting?

Why is the pound at a 12-year low against a basket of other OECD currencies? Who is to blame for the cost of my vin chaud?

I tell you who: it's you, Gordon. You did it, by running the largest budget deficit in the world, now hanging round all our necks at more than £100 billion.

You wasted all that money in the good times, water-cannoning our dosh with so little thought or restraint that only Hungary, Pakistan and Egypt are suffering from comparable indebtedness, and Hungary and Pakistan are already in the hands of the IMF.

You weakened the pound, Gordon, because you expanded the public sector without reforming it.

You weakened the pound because you bloated the state pay-roll, and then you added the private finance initiative and the nationalisation of the Bradford & Bingley and Northern Rock, and all the time you somehow believed your own lunatic propaganda that you had personally defied the laws of economic gravity.

You really thought you had created a new paradigm in which you, and only you, had beaten the economic cycle and gone "beyond boom and bust", and that you were therefore free to take whatever fiscal risks you wanted, and the markets looked at the whole thing, sucked their teeth and said, baloney.

They saw a man simply adding to his country's obligations, while doing little or nothing to make the countervailing savings in expenditure."