Why Gordon Brown has his part to play in the causes of recession

Today's editorial in the Observer I think sums up some of the reasons behind the economic slump that we have entered.

The implication is that recession is a foreign ailment that the UK only contracted through its exposure to global financial markets.
But for a decade, the government promoted the City of London as the international centre of financial services. A financial boom poured cheap credit into the real economy, with Britons taking on vast levels of personal debt - more than in any other developed country. Loose money stoked a housing bubble bigger, according to the IMF, than the one that burst in the US, triggering the crisis. A disproportionate amount of British wealth is borrowed and tied up in assets whose value is falling; a disproportionate number of jobs are in services that are vulnerable to a fall in consumer demand. The credit crunch may have started abroad, but it was custom-made to hurt Britain.