Gordon Brown talks a lot about his 'moral compass' but don't be fooled Photo: REUTERS  It is time we stopped suspending disbelief and took account of two things. First, if the current economic miseries are a global problem, why are things so much worse here than anywhere else? Why is sterling taking a more or less unique hit on the world's currency markets? The answer is simple: it is that the fundamentals of our economy are so much worse than almost everyone else's, and that is because of the mess Mr Brown has made of running it, in one capacity or another, for the last 12 years.  Then we need to suspend disbelief about how we best get out of this mess. Why, when Mr Brown created it, should he be trusted to extricate us from it? Isn't that a little like suggesting al-Qaeda rebuild the World Trade Center? Isn't it quite clear that the best thing for Britain is to have these charlatans removed from power as swiftly as possible, even if it means replacing them with the Disney characters of the Tory front bench?  I fear there is one reason above all why Mr Brown continues to get away with it, and it brings us back to the archbishop. It is because too many people are taken in by his son-of-the-manse act, and the "fact" that he has a "moral compass". Mr Brown is an exceptionally immoral prime minister, in fact. It is not moral to expropriate vast amounts of money from decent, hard-working people who probably don't vote for you and instead give it to less deserving ones who probably do. It is not moral to inflict upon the economy the damage this inevitably causes – suppressing the creation of wealth by ensuring resources are wasted rather than properly invested.  It is also not moral, when your policies have caused (and will for some time continue to cause) exceptional hardship to businesses and individuals to shrug off all responsibility for the pain, and to ring-fence your own clientele to ensure that they, unlike the private sector, do not have to endure such unpleasantness. Above all – and this was directly the point the archbishop made – it is not moral to beggar generations of Britons to come in order to create the illusion that the Government is putting matters right now: for as one of Mr Brown's predecessors, Lord Callaghan, once forcefully pointed out, you can't spend your way out of recession.  When Mr Brown was Chancellor he showed his immorality, and moral cowardice, time and again by disappearing from view whenever Tony Blair got into trouble, rather than rowing behind him in a spirit of solidarity. So we should not be surprised by seeing so much of it now, when times are really wretched. And now, of course, he is egged on in this disgusting trait by the completely unscrupulous, twice-disgraced, ex-mortgage fiddler Lord Rumba of Rio, who comes up daily with bogus and expensive "initiatives" to cheer everyone up, and ensures Mr Brown continues to blame the Americans for the mess that, in fact, he has put our economy in.  The so-called cure that Mr Brown, Lord Rumba and their other morally diseased cronies have prescribed for our economy won't work. It might succeed in duping the public into voting for them at an election, especially if it is held soon, and the Tories continue to be utterly clueless about what to do with the economy instead. It is a shame that the constitution forbids Dr Williams from being prime minister: for on this subject at least, he does for once know exactly what he is talking about.  Some will argue that just because the botched inquiry into the murder of Rachel Nickell took place more than 15 years ago lessons have been learned, and things are much better today. I seriously doubt it.  The police are worse than in Rachel’s day  The police are manifestly even more incompetent, and badly led, now than they were then. They exist largely to act as a state-sanctioned weapon of social engineering and choose to persecute people with absolutely no intent to commit serious crime. Several readers have told me in recent days of police in the West Country stopping 4x4s at dusk in case there are people in them with shotguns in the boot, after a day's shooting, who might possibly be over the alcohol limit, and therefore drunk in charge of a firearm (this includes passengers, by the way). No drunk passenger is going to kill anyone: meanwhile, guns are bought and sold freely in pubs by criminals without police interference. Is it any wonder the middle classes now despise Mr Plod so?  Labour will never give us the truth on Iraq  On the enduring subject of political immorality, why should any of us be surprised that the Government is resisting an inquiry into the Iraq war, even though the Prime Minister (perhaps with an election in mind next spring) has signalled our troops' exit from that country? Most of us cannot begin to imagine the welter of lies, misrepresentations and blunders that such an inquiry, if conducted openly and honestly, would expose. We can only begin to contemplate the reputations that would be destroyed by it, not least of people still in senior positions in this administration who were bound by collective responsibility, or who continue to assist Mr Brown behind the scenes.  So bent are the ethics of these people that we can be sure any inquiry would be chaired by a tame old fool who would begin from the position that the Government was always right even in the face of overwhelming proof that it wasn't. Should we ever get a Tory government, it must hold an Iraq inquiry at once.  A wonder Lord Rumba hasn’t experienced  An era has supposedly passed – an era of tat from what I can work out – with the closure of Woolworth's. It's a pity they didn't sell guacamole, for they might have had Lord Rumba of Rio as a customer, and he might have found some more cash from his bottomless pit of taxpayers' money to save them. From next month, 800 stores on high streets will stand empty, like missing teeth in a smile, or tombstones commemorating the Brown Terror and its economic consequences. They will, though, provide a suitable measure of how quickly and effectively the Government's rescue plan is working. I hope some statistician will publish on the first of each month how many ex-Woolies stores have opened up as something else. If half are back in business this time next year, I'll be amazed.  One F-word doesn't apply to Ross  Fans of the grotesquely overpaid Jonathan Ross – apparently he has them – have expressed fears this week that when he returns to the airwaves in the new year he will have lost his "edge". This is because he has been told not to make gratuitously obscene remarks, and to swear less. I think the BBC should go the whole hog and make him present the Daily Service in order to earn his money. I still can't understand why it is regarded as side-splittingly hilarious for somebody to ask an interviewee about his or bodily functions or sexual practices, or to utter the words ---- and ---- a lot. But perhaps it is proof of Ross's genius that he convinced his paymasters that it was.  It will soon be time to sell those euros  It is disturbing to think that the euro will probably have become even more expensive against the pound in the few hours between my writing these words and you reading them. This precipitate fall is bigger than at any time since we went off the Gold Standard in 1931 and betokens a failure in our economy like that of the Great Depression.  Sentiment is now so much against our economy that only a fool would predict where sterling will be in one, three or six months. If the Government lets it go on down, it will be another sign of their dereliction.  However, a visit to Paris this week and talks with officials there made me think the worst may soon be over. The eurozone, too, is in convulsions. Various countries in it would like to leave so that they can devalue. The strong currency is battering their exports and tourism. Signs of optimism are hard to discern here, except that those countries who so far seem to have got away with it may be about to suffer just like us.  Killing runs in this dishonest family  The conviction of the scum who murdered and abetted the murderer of 11-year-old Rhys Jones lifted the stone on the most revolting aspects of our underclass. The murderer's mother was a prostitute. His father (from whom his mother was, of course, separated) was mixed up with drug gangs, one of whose members shot him in 1996. His great-great grandfather was hanged for murder; at least then we dealt with such people effectively.  The cocktail of the destruction of the family, the wreck of state education, the poisonous liberal society and now the rewarding of the undeserving poor through welfare has created a feral group who won't work, won't be honest, and won't conform with the law.  If the Government wishes to prime the economy, it should bulldoze the Norris Green estate in Liverpool, where the murderer and his gang live, and split up the gang by redistributing them around the country, preferably to remote islands. Until we stop paying people to be an underclass, we'll have an underclass.
We are still recovering from his inane observations of earlier this year on    the usefulness of sharia in Britain and the rabble he leads as Primate of    All England could not be a clearer advertisement of his talents. But we must    give him this: what he said about the immorality of the Prime Minister    spending (or, more accurately, attempting to spend) this country out of a    recession was absolutely right.