I wonder what Gordon Brown thinks, now, of the man to whom he bequeathed the nation's finances. For all Brown's talk, over the past decade or more, or economic growth and stability, not many of the financial headlines are positive at the moment.
The UK's second-largest high-street bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, is to invite its shareholders to a £10bn rights issue to strengthen its financial position; at least that's going to be at the expense of investors (though many of those will, indirectly, be pensions savers);
- The government has already stepped in to bail out, as an as-yet indeterminate cost to the tax-payer, the sub-prime losses of Northern Rock;
- The Bank of England is to assume some £50bn of restructuring liability by offering to exchange banks' risky sub-prime exposure for long-term government bonds... thus hoping to re-inject some liquidity into the markets for the course of the current credit crisis;
- Labour's own back-benchers, and some junior ministers, are rumoured to be revolting over the Chancellor's abolition of the 10% band for low-income taxpayers;
- Non-EU workers in the restaurant sector are protesting that a new immigration 'points' system may threaten the viability of up to 30% of the restaurants they represent - including those staples of British cuisine, Indian and Chinese food...
And against all that as a background, plans to impose an additional levy on 'non-domiciled' foreign taxpayers seem almost certain to cost the economy more than they can possibly raise in tax revenue.
This snippet from a BBC interview with Deepak Malhotra, a "non-doms'" tax specialist, sums it up:
"A typical example of a non-dom client is a family from India worth
several hundred million pounds through their property interests and
private equity funds.
They initially decided to live in the UK mainly because of the
favourable tax regime for non-doms, and because they were happy for
their children to be educated within the British system.
Although they spent some time in the US and India, they spend more
than six months per year in the UK. But they have no particular need to
continue doing so as they have numerous options to base themselves
overseas.
These non-doms contribute a huge amount to the economy through
employment by their companies, tax paid by their employees and value
added tax, insists Mr Malhotra."
Mr Malhotra's other clients include similarly-positioned entrepreneurs from Pakistan.
It's ironic, isn't it, that at a time when so much of the political landscape is shaped by issues of personal migration and global cultural diversity, we seem set to exclude some of those who might otherwise contribute so favourably, through not just their own efforts but also those of their children.
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