Deborah Orr - soothscribe of the week

Gad! First I praise Tariq Ali, now the Guardian's answer to the generally well-founded jibe that only plain women are leftist.

I agree with almost every word of Orr's article "How New Labour ate itself". That's a polite way of saying it masturbated to terminal exhaustion, and I applaud the hint of auto-fellatio in Orr's title.

The reality is that such measures as quantitative easing, negligible interest rates, and continued borrowing to support the public sector, have helped to cushion individuals during the recent recession, dealing a less long-lasting blow to consumer confidence than might otherwise have fallen. Yet who really believes that Britain can or should return to conspicuous, credit-driven consumption underpinned by house-price inflation? Only true believers in New Labour, I'm afraid.

Up until his last moments in power, Brown continued to argue for high public spending, because cutting public spending would "take money out of the economy". Somehow, this strange assertion – that borrowing money from the bond markets, then paying the money-men back later, with interest, was "putting money into the economy" – made sense to him. This was the grim apotheosis of New Labour, not a break with it.

Right on, Deborah. Shame about the "hysterical" in the last paragraph - it ain't hysteria if the bloody roof is indeed about to fall on your head and you do whatever you can to prop it up while reducing the overburden.