Gordon Brown: the new James Callaghan?

Over a decade of uninterrupted economic growth and low inflation may have made our lives easy, but it's also made for a very boring period in British politics. Now things are starting to get interesting again.

James Gleick's best-seller Chaos Theory was all the rage in investment circles in the late 1980s. The theory had its basis in meteorology and goes something like this: 'The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen does.' The basic point is that an innocuous change in the initial conditions can drastically alter the eventual outcome. Today in investment circles this theory has a low profile but there are resonances in the political world.

In June 1992 a rag-tag alliance of fringe voters in Denmark set in motion a sequence of events that made the Conservative party here unelectable for a generation. Fifteen years on, the overzealous selling of mortgages to poor Americans is spawning a credit crunch that threatens to pull the rug under Gordon Brown's fledgling government.

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