Don't Say Brown Say Hopeless

5.57.00pm BST (GMT +0100) Wed 2nd Jul 2008

A year ago this week Gordon Brown MP became Prime Minister having been responsible as Chancellor for a decade of economic growth built on cheap credit and personal debt and as Labour looses its deposit at the Henley by-election his chickens have truly come home to roost say Liberal Democrats.

Playing on a brown bread advert, "Don't say Brown say hopeless" was the jibe given to another beleaguered government minister 40 years ago. Then George Brown was Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson's Government and in the end he was forced to resign. Lib Dems say the same can be applied to the current Prime Minister and will his fate be that of his namesake?

Commenting on Brown's performance Jonathan Chatfield the Lib Dem spokesperson for South East Cambridgeshire said:

"The one good thing he did was to take the control of interest rates out of the hands of politicians and give it to the Bank of England, but even that wasn't his idea - it was Liberal Democrat policy which Labour and the Tories opposed at the 1997 general election.

"We now have a situation worryingly like the oil crisis of the early 1970's which led to hyper inflation, a four day working week, food shortages and strikes which brought down the Conservative Government.

"Equally worrying is the fact that those that have done well out of selling debt to those who can't afford it are massively bank rolling the Tories and making it impossible to have a level playing field when it comes to political debate.

"We are all seeing now that the observation by our shadow chancellor Vince Cable that Gordon Brown has gone from Stalin to Mr Bean is more than just a jibe it's actually frighteningly true and not what you want when people are struggling with debt and the wheels are coming off the economy."