We need proactive government

[Andy Hunt]

Watching Gordon Brown on the news last night, being interviewed about his performance as PM, he said one thing which summed up the entire situation for me, and that was,

"I have to deal with these issues as they arise".

No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!

You have to have such an in-depth knowledge of your subject matter (i.e. running the country, the world economic situation, the outlook for energy prices etc) that you can anticipate these issues before they arise, and put plans in place to tackle them before they become a real problem!!

Knee-jerk government . . . we're all doomed.

[Ludwig]

Watching Gordon Brown on the news last night, being interviewed about his performance as PM, he said one thing which summed up the entire situation for me, and that was,

"I have to deal with these issues as they arise".

No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!

You have to have such an in-depth knowledge of your subject matter (i.e. running the country, the world economic situation, the outlook for energy prices etc) that you can anticipate these issues before they arise, and put plans in place to tackle them before they become a real problem!!

Knee-jerk government . . . we're all doomed.

Do you think that there's anything he could have done, that the electorate would have stomached? I don't.

Remember MacMillan, when asked what the hardest thing was about government: "Events, dear boy."

The whole of our civilisation has been on a train it couldn't get off for the past 60 years and there's bugger all most governments could ever do to save their countries from disaster. We were more or less obliged to follow where America led.

[clv101]

Do you think that there's anything he could have done, that the electorate would have stomached? I don't.

Remember MacMillan, when asked what the hardest thing was about government: "Events, dear boy."

The whole of our civilisation has been on a train it couldn't get off for the past 60 years and there's bugger all most governments could ever do to save their countries from disaster. We were more or less obliged to follow where America led.

Just thinking of the last decade I don’t think that the current situation was set in stone and unavoidable. We could be in a far stronger position. We could have built gas storage infrastructure, we could have capped oil & gas exports, we could have started building the tidal barrage, wind turbines and improving energy efficiency 10 years ago... There was no critical reason why aviation and driving had become steadily cheaper and rail more expensive, no reason why house prices had to increase at double digit rates...

And we certainly didn’t have to invade Iraq, the rest of Europe managed not to make that mistake!

There are dozens of things, within the power of government, that could have been done differently over the last decade and would have left us in a significantly better situation than we are now.

We may have been on a doomed train, but it was us driving the train, with every opportunity of at the least slowing the train down. Luckily we are still driving the train and there are still decisions that can be made today which will dramatically affect our situation a decade from now.

[JohnB]

The government seem to blame much of it on globalisation, as if it's something they had no control over. But it's not long ago that they were going on about how we should embrace globalisation, and actively encouraging it. We have to live in the real world, and can't avoid getting sucked into much of it, but surely someone with some power should have thought about what might happen in a global crisis, and make provision for protecting us from the worst effects of it. After all, us intelligent people on PowerSwitch had noticed that things might go wrong.