Does anyone know?

Is it possible that Gordon Brown is not so much dishonest as we thought, but rather he really doesn't know, despite his show of omniscience?

There is little doubt that he tells porkies, and persists on under-reporting government debt, but as to how much more debt we shall rack up he really has no idea. I suppose his general approach could be summed up by the phrase "as much as it takes".

Quite apart from the wasted £12 billion to reduce VAT unnecessarily and the £37 billion to provide the banks with liquidity, which they have not apparently used, there are the siren voices claiming special treatment (i.e. money) for their industry because of the number of jobs at risk, to preserve resources ready for the upturn whenever it comes, to maintain exports, to keep our world lead, etc.

Choose any one or more from the list to justify subsidy from the Treasury. So far, in fairness these pleas do not seem to have been heeded, but they have not gone away.

Finally, there is the ignorance about off-balance sheet items in the banks' accounts. The Treasury Select Committee recently demanded a comprehensive disclosure by the banks. Each bank suspiciously eyes the others and hesitates to lend or borrow because trust has gone in the face of the poisonous assets which each believes the others have. It seems, according to Peter Oborne in the Mail today, that last autumn when pumping £37 billion into the banks, the Treasury do not seem to have made detailed enquiry into banks' loan books!

In November an estimate was made that the combined liabilities of all our banks amounted to be about £7 trillion, or about four times our annual output. These liabilities are supposedly backed by assets. This is serious, but the government final destructive button to press, to expand money rapidly, will lead to inflation and a reduction in the real value of these liabilities.

What is really worrying is that as much as £4 trillion, that is £4 million, million, is actually denominated in foreign currency, and there is no way the printing presses can reduce the value of these.

There are a growing number of people who see the future of the UK as either a basket case which applies to the IMF for a bail-out or else a limping economy like that of Japan for many years.