Public didn’t want to know about bank crash – Brown
● More interest in ‘game shows’ ● Impact felt for years to come
Public trust in the political system was put at risk over a failure to explain the Government’s handling of the financial crash, former prime minister Gordon Brown has said.
The ex-labour leader said people were “more interested in game shows than the financial crash” as he dealt with the collapse of RBS, but admits he “didn’t explain to people properly what we were doing”.
Mr Brown was prime minister when the banking system in the country was brought to its knees as a result of debts racked up over so called “subprime” mortgages issued to unsuitably low income people in the US who could never afford to repay them.
It brought RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock, among others, to their knees and only taxpayer funded bailouts saw them survive.
Mr Brown tells ‘The Decade of Distrust’, a radio documentary on BBC Radio 4 this Sunday, that his government struggled to communicate its response to the financial crisis.
“We didn’t communicate properly, and therefore, I think trust was put at risk as a result of that,” Mr Brown said.
“I look back to Roosevelt in the 1930s when there was a huge financial crisis in America, and he was doing a Saturday night radio broadcast, and I kept thinking ‘what is the medium through which we can actually get our message across?’.
“Clearly, radio had not got the same influence. TV ... people wanted game shows when there was peak viewing, they didn’t want to listen or hear about the financial crisis.”
Mr Brown would have told the British public “it’s going to be okay and we are taking drastic action, but the drastic action may be reflected in a bigger deficit for the time being – but that’s the right way of dealing with a crisis”. George Osborne, who became Chancellor in 2010, told the documentary that the impact of the crash was “profound”.
“We were thinking, my God, this is completely changing the political world in which we operate in, and I think we were also just human beings thinking, my God, what’s going to happen to our lives and to the lives of our families and the like,” he said.
“So it was a really dramatic moment and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more powerless in politics, just sitting there watching the TV, saying ‘there’s nothing that we can do at this moment’.”
He said the Tories “made a mistake” in opposing the nationalisation of Northern Rock, but later rectified this by supporting the taxpayerfunded bailouts of Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds.