Ah that old tripe. Again.

Even Gideon's own permanent secretary described what happened as a "banking crisis, pure and simple" so what part of this did Brown etc actually cause?

Perhaps if he had heeded the warnings about issues within the banking sector rather than compounding them by relaxing regulations that might have helped reduce the impact?

Running a deficit in 'boom' years left us ill prepared when the downturn came.

What is this stone tablet all about?!

Your mates Camoron and Gidiot were urging Labour to cut regulation of the banking sector even further during the entire period running up to the collapse. Not forgetting Gidiot championing the Irish economy as a model we should aspire to.

Marketing.
Like cornflakes but with a smaller budget.

George Osborne, writing for The Daily Telegraph in June 2006Quote I fear that much of this regulation has been burdensome, complex and makes cross-border market penetration more difficult. This is exactly the wrong direction in which Europe should be heading and it threatens the global competitiveness of the City of London.[/i



David Cameron, March 2008
[iAs a free-marketeer by conviction, it will not surprise you to hear me say that a significant part of Labour’s economic failure has been the excessive bureaucratic interventionism of the past decade too much tax, too much regulation, too little understanding of what our businesses need to compete in the modern world.[/i

Oh fook, here we go again

The question was what Brown could have done to ease the impact of the banking madness not what the Tories would have done. Given you believe Labour to be so superior to the Tories how come they did nothing? Do you really want the likes of Ed Balls let loose again

I think the answer to your question is "not a lot" considering that the musical chairs game that was the international monetary trading system stopped the music first in the USA, not sure how Gordon Brown could have stopped the sub-prime mortgages or the US recession of 2007/09 that lit the fires underneath the whole pile of con artists.

From Andrew Neil on Twitter
@BBCr4today Miliband claims national debt was lower before crash 2007 than it was 1997. Not true

And? It's like the captain of the titanic claiming it wasn't his fault because if the head chef had been driving he'd have hit the iceberg too! Whatever the Tories said is utterly, utterly irrelevant.

Indeed it was, because the banks were allowed to get away with it.

There wasn't a "global crash" like Labour apologists like to claim, many, many countries didn't enter depression, only the ones that "banked" on financial services to grow the economy. Like the UK. All overseen by Blair, Brown, Balls and Wallace.

That is absolute hogwash. Typical right wing apologist reply of blame anybody or anything but do not take responsibility even though you created the situation in the first place.
History and hypocrisy are the right wing watch words.

...so we should have had a bigger manufacturing base to counteract the banking failures then ?