The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is: “an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world”. So pretty important then to just about everyone in the world. It’s boss is the Frenchman Dominique Strauss Kahn but he is retiring soon and the word is that Gordon Brown wants the job.

I cannot think of anyone less suited to any job handling economic and financial matters than Gordon Brown. Let’s look at some of his achievements:

• Real average take home pay in the UK went down for ten consecutive years. So British people became poorer whilst the world economy boomed.
• He took much oversight function away from the Bank of England and gave it to the FSA then boasted repeatedly about his light regulation of the financial sector. This led directly to a banking disaster.
• Borrowed and spent on an unprecedented scale so that the British people are now saddled with trillions of pounds of government debts. The interest payments alone on this are similar to what we pay for education.
• Lost control of spending in several government departments, most notable the Ministry of Defence which was squandering billions of taxpayers money that it hadn’t even been given a budget for. Gross financial ineptitude.
• Introduced large numbers of new taxes, especially harming the poor with regressive measures.
• Sold off half our national gold reserves at a record low price. Gold has since rocketed in value.
• Abused the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) system to spend many billions of pounds in a way that made the contracts far, far more expensive for the taxpayer and leaving a toxic legacy that will last decades.
• Made a huge tax raid on the pensions of millions of Britons, ensuring that they will have a far poorer retirement.
• Grew the unproductive and parasitic state sector to be more than half the total economy, at the expense of the private sector who actually generate wealth.
• Oversaw massive house price inflation which makes it cripplingly expensive to buy a home.
• Especially targeted motoring as a tax source, thus reducing the mobility of millions of people and excessively ramping up the transport costs for the companies at the heart of our economy.
• Has admitted a small part of his ineptitude when he said:  “we didn’t understand the entanglements of different institutions with the other and we didn’t understand even though we talked about it just how global things were, including a shadow banking system as well as a banking system.”

There is plenty more but most people reading this will have a very good idea just how bad Gordon Brown was. Certainly totally unsuited to any job at the IMF other than perhaps a bit of light filing. So it was excellent to hear David Cameron, who has an effective veto on who gets the job, saying what he thought: “It does seem to me that if you have someone who didn’t think we had a debt problem in the UK… they might not be the best person……….Above all what matters is is the person running the IMF someone who understands the dangers of excessive debt, excessive deficit, and it really must be someone who gets that rather than someone who says that they don’t see a problem”.

So it looks like Brown won’t get the job. Let’s hope Cameron sticks to his guns. Brown has done enough damage to huge numbers of people for any one lifetime, he doesn’t need to be put in a position where he can do harm again.