Product Description

We live in a country fantasising about its ability to run up debts seemingly without end, to enjoy high-paid employment for which it is not qualified, to project military power that it does not possess and in general to assume, in defiance of the evidence, a superior economic and political position in relation to most of the rest of the world. Then there is the apparent conviction that limitless growth can co-exist with environmental protection, that the over-borrowed and abundantly staffed state machine is actually being courageously pruned even while its payroll rises and, finally, that the just-around-the-corner radiant future is one in which will work in the 'creative economy'. Welcome to Fantasy Island. He may be the most spectacular election winner in modern British political history but Blair leaves behind him a seedy dreamworld mired in debt and bankruptcy, drifting into a crisis of employment and employability, hallucinating into existence a diplomatic and military role that it cannot possibly afford. It's time to take stock of the future he and Brown have mapped out for us while there's still time to do something about it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #81716 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Daily Telegraph, 16 May, 2007
'Fantasy Island sets out in exquisite details the lies, damned
lies and statistical legerdemain that define Labour in office'

The Observer
`This is an angry tract, written like a thriller. It captures the public mood of dissatisfaction. Gordon Brown should take note...A thoroughly good read.'

The Times
`Sees the legacy of the Blair era as a seedy dream world mired in debt and bankruptcy'

Customer Reviews

Thought-provoking and educational, but occasionally sloppy
This book contains many interesting facts and arguments which will give the reader much to cogitate over on politics well before the Blair decade, as well as during it. The discussions of personal debt, the Private Finance Initiative and how Gordon Brown made successive redefinitions of the economic cycle in order to meet his `Golden Rule' are particularly educational and thought-provoking, and made me long for more serious coverage of such issues in the mainstream media.

However, journalists' desire to play Cassandra often compromises any serious message they are trying to convey, and at times the book lapses into a hysteria which reduces its credibility. For example, having pinpointed the origins of the 1973 oil crisis in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and a resulting `vast upswing in inflation across all economies', the authors later describe this episode to have been an `environmental-economic catastrophe' simply to tie in with their closing arguments on limits to economic growth. If it was genuinely an `environmental-economic' catastrophe, this should have been mentioned in their earlier exposition. Such occasional sloppy thinking does make one wonder how much of the book's stronger arguments are well-founded.

Brilliant survey of Britain's wasted economy
Larry Elliott, the Guardian's economics editor, and Dan Atkinson, the Mail on Sunday's economics editor, have written a scathing account of the capitalist class's future for Britain. We would have no manufacturing industry, so no services. They cynically note that our so-called growth areas are all talk - barristers (like Blair and Darling), management consultants, spin doctors, PR men, speculators, deal-makers and brokers.

Britain has become a giant offshore hedge fund churning speculators' money, a giant tax haven for the world's super-rich, with four million of us now working `in service', as many as under Victoria. This is no future for a self-respecting people.

The City of London does not work for Britain. It costs 5.3% to raise investment funds in Britain, result, 1% of world R&D in engineering and electronics. In Japan, the cost of borrowing to invest is 1.1%, and they have 47% of world R&D in engineering and electronics. Over half of Britain's R&D money is spent in pharmaceuticals and aerospace, which the government has funded for decades, through the NHS and the Ministry of Defence.

Elliott and Atkinson show how the Labour government has got transport wrong. Between 1997 and 2005, the cost of motoring fell by 6%, but bus fares rose by 16% and rail fares by 7%. No wonder that between 1980 and 2002 road traffic increased by 73%.

Net immigration was 248,300 in 2004-5. Yet unemployment is 4.5 million, so why do we need to import workers? Employers like immigrant labour because it helps to depress wages: as Brown's new Trade Minister, Sir Digby Jones, says, "We have a tight labour market in the UK and yet wage inflation has not been a problem. Immigrants are doing the work for less."

Elliott and Atkinson recommend, "Rebuilding the manufacturing base requires support for strategic industries and, whisper it quietly, the sort of selective protectionism that would be feasible only if our relationship with the European Union were to be radically recast - at present, such assistance would fall foul of EU rules."

They conclude that we must end our `obeisance to globalisation, free trade and unbridled market forces'. And we must ditch the fantasies which hold us back.

Naked Lunch
Too often, economists say the blindingly obvious too late to save the ship -- like generals, they fight the last war.
This book is looking at a process which is still happening.
The writing is clear and direct, as you'd expect from journalists trained to communicate rather than politicians practised at concealment.
What is being argued must be engaged with or we trash our future.
I am a colleague of Dan Atkinson.