730am and I’ve been up for two hours trailing the end of a football match (God bless GMT +8) while keeping half a mind on this profusely-watered down essay on how to save the euro (God bless Jean-Claude Trichet), and I am acutely reminded that it was Gordon Brown who saved the global financial system. It was Gordon Brown who averted the same kind of global financial meltdown our great grandparents saw. It was Gordon Brown, invited to the Eurogroup crisis meeting in that autumn day in 2008, who thrusted solidarity into the picture. The same solidarity that must now lend itself in Japan, in Libya, in Ireland, in New Zealand.
Call me an ideologically-tainted economist, and I suspect I’m more left than I supposed I am, more Keynesian that most liberals, and more socialist than my background would suggest, but to any decision that has so far come out of Westminster or Brussels I affix the one framing question, “What would Gordon have done? What would he have thought of that policy?”
Ah, yes… Britain is poorer in compassion without a world leader on its helm. What insight this becomes for my essay.
