"For Britain and Brown, reversal of fortunes; Economic woes weaken leader's shaky standing" by John F. Burns, New York Times News Service | September 21, 2008
LONDON - In the 1960s, Harold Wilson, another embattled Labor Party prime minister faced with a disastrous economic crisis, coined a phrase that has come down the decades as a measure of the cruel vicissitudes of public life. "A week is a long time in politics," he said.
In the past week, Gordon Brown, No. 10 Downing St.'s current occupant, has faced an economic crisis in Britain's banking and mortgage sector as severe as anything that confounded Wilson, and the buffeting it has given the government has further weakened Brown's shaky standing in the Labor Party and with the electorate. Only 15 months after he succeeded in his long effort to push Tony Blair into retirement and take the prime minister's job, he faces the threat of being driven out himself.
Over the spring and summer, he declared that Britain's economy was fundamentally sound; that the threats it faced were global in nature, stemming primarily from the United States; and that the country was better placed than any other in Europe to weather the downturn.
But those claims now stand widely discredited. Increasingly, the view among British economists is that Brown, in tandem with Blair, allowed Britain to float on a sea of debt, much of it tied to an unsustainable boom in housing prices, with the government blithely reluctant to step in and apply the brakes. Among those critics, Brown is regarded now as a man in denial, a criticism that gained momentum last week when he said he was committed to "cleaning up the financial system" and curbing "irresponsibility" by banks and investment houses, without even a glancing acknowledgment that the excesses occurred on his watch as finance minister.
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