Little Green Men Won't Save Brown

Deluded Brown is pinning his hopes on little green men to save his skin after digging himself into a fiscal stimulus hole, promising a new deal on jobs on which he cannot deliver and strutting around a G20 summit exposed as a con. 

With no green shoots of recovery to cling on to,  it's time to play the green' card, so Brown once again goes green, promising this month's budget will plot a "green" route to economic recovery". Little green men washed down with greenwash may well come to his rescue but only in his dreams. 

"A philosophical man down on his luck and running out of time" is how the headline in the Independent sums it all up, after an interview with Andrew Grice.

Brown's  empty suit was laid bare as he  told the newspaper what everyone knows. The cupboard is bare, the country bankrupt and there ain't room for a further painful fiscal stimulus on borrowed time and borrowed money.

Instead with sleep-inducing naivety, he said the April 22 Budget would be "a job creator, a quality of life improver, and an environment-enhancing measure."

But Brown's greenwash doesn't wash. It reveals a deeper problem as B-day approaches. 

In a refreshing bout of frankness his own hapless chancellor Darling has been forced to back-track on a misguided and misleading pre-budget report forecast and forced to admit what everyone else knew that the recession will be much worse than he expected.

And to top it all, the bank of England governor is breathing down his neck. As the Orange Party noted at the time, that leaves the Brown with little wriggle room on a road to nowhere. 

Brown has previously called for an international "green new deal" to stimulate growth and has said that moving the UK to a low-carbon economy would create 400,000 new jobs over the next eight years. But that is then, this is now.

Trials of electric cars, a roadside network of vehicle-charging points and incentives for environmentally-friendly carmakers are among the whizzo plans churned out in a half-baked eco-daze.

Half a million green jobs over eight years - that's 50,000 a year. A drop in the jobless ocean with 3m unemployed. 

The G20 summit has been exposed as a sham. A clever piece of grandstanding footwork which cut no ice with the Orange Party and many others who saw through the $1 trillion as nothing more than a smoke and mirrors magic trick. 

But one good thing that did come out of that G20 mess was that talk of a global fiscal stimulus is now dead in the water. 

As Simon Jenkins in the Guardian puts it: "It put 'global fiscal stimulus' back in the statist box and said to the citizens of the world: we have made a total mess of your economies and are leaving it to you to get out as best you can. Now those citizens have a chance."

Once again it has to be shouted from the rooftops ad infinitum, ad nauseam. The key to long term UK economic recovery is UK manufacturing, now at its lowest ebb since 1981. 

If Brown can save his banking buddies then why not UK industry and the thousands of jobs which go with it? 

UK industrial output, accounts for nearly one fifth of of the country's economic output. It's now slumped at the fastest rate in nearly 30 years. But UK manufacturing was already on its last legs as the government deliberately switched to the  now discredited economic boom growth based on their greedy pals in  the City. 

Output  slumped by 2.6 per cent in January, compared with the previous month, double the expected fall. This pushed the annual rate of decline to 11.4 per cent, the worst fall since 1981.

But any talk of saving UK manufacturing cuts into political dogma with a nasty whiff of protectionism. 

Exactly the kind of protectionism that's already being practised by 17 out of the 20 countries at the G20 summit and being used effectively by the French and Germans. 

Brown has dug himself into a hole from which there is no escape. Building up false hopes for the G20 summit which could not deliver on a highly spun false promise. Taking his eye off the ball of the domestic economy he strutted around saving the world with his New World Order and plotting his exit strategy with the IMF. 

All that's left now are a few hollow and boring eco-droppings. 

With the last gasp of a dying man, Brown told the Independent: "It is not just what we do to give real help to people and business now, but about setting a path for the future as well ... We always take into account both what we need to do now and what is the best future for the fiscal position."

Hardly the words of comfort and cheer, inspiration or confidence needed now for the thousands of people worried sick about their jobs, their livelihood, their businesses and how they are going to make ends meet.

The April Budget is the last roll of the dice before June's crucial local and Euro elections and the long-awaited general election. With that kind of meaningless grandstanding 'green' rhetoric, Brown has blown it.