What would you buy with £8.09?

Gordon Brown's decision this weekend not to take advantage of favourable conditions and call a General Election means that the UK will have to wait even longer for the change that it so desperately needs.  But at what cost?


David Cameron said on Sunday, that "every day Brown is running this country is a grey day for Britain", and he was right.

Gordon Brown is currently borrowing £277,719 a minute to keep this country afloat.  This equates to £16,663,140 an hour, £399,915,360 a day, and an astonishing £145,969,106,400 a year.  If Brown waits until the last possible day to hold a General Election, he will have borrowed an extra £37,412,637,366 between now and when polls close at 2200hrs on June 3rd.

And your share of this debt?  £8.09 a day (based on there being 49,416,348 citizens over the age of 16 in the UK).  That's an extra £8.09 that you will have to find when this debt has to be paid back.

So what does Gordon Brown have to gain by doing this?  Personally, nothing.  However, two words best sum up his intentions:  scorched earth.

As mentioned in a previous post, Brown is on borrowed time and he knows it.  Rather than magnanimously admit defeat, much as John Major did in 1997, he is determined to make sure that whoever replaces him is faced with the worst set of circumstances imaginable; a massive national debt, a colossal budget deficit and a hamstrung economy.  With that achieved, he will be able to sit comfortably - either on the sidelines, or on the opposition benches - and criticise whoever is running the country as they have to make the difficult and controversial decisions to get our economy back on track.

However, Gordon Brown seems to have forgotten the most important rule of operating a scorched earth tactic; you only use it as a last resort when all hope is lost.  Looking at the opinion polls, which suggest that there is an outside chance of this being Labour's 1992, then this tactic will have seriously backfired.  All of a sudden, it will be he and his party that will have to clear up the mess, with no-one to blame but himself.

So if Gordon Brown really does have this country's interests at heart, and truly is a public servant, then he will go to Buckingham Palace and call that General Election.  Not on May 10th, not on April 12th, but today.

In the 32 minutes it has taken me to write this blog, Gordon Brown has borrowed another nine million pounds in our name.