Gordon Brown was on the World at One today being interviewed by Martha Kearney and for the poor woman it was like being faced with a high speed train that couldn't make its mind up. His training scheme was going to different from the Tories, although it sounded the same, because he had employers on his side and they didn't. Says who? Northern Rock, a 100 per cent state-owned bank as opposed to majority-owned RBS and 43 per cent owned Lloyds HBOS couldn't lend to small businesses because that wasn't its "business model" and it wasn't lending to housebuyers either although that had been it's business model (because it was crap at it apparently). So-called "quantitative easing", the Bank of England buying government bonds and the like to pump more money into the economy, was appropriate for the US but not the UK because their interest rate was zero and ours isn't (yet). Which is complete tosh because it's clear that even lower interest rates in the UK won't make a blind bit of a difference to the country as a whole, only to the lucky few thousand who have tracker mortgages without a 'collar' limiting how far they can fall. The only thing that was clear was his constant assertion that this was an "international crisis" because he prefaced every statement with it. Brown is said to be clever but this kind of performance wouldn't get him a third class economics degree. What a pity the Beeb never manages to line up an economist to take him on.