SOMETIMES, listening to Gordon Brown, I get misty eyed. For those of us who have followed the economy through thick and thin — often very thin — this is a vintage period.

An economy that we came to regard as both accident-prone and inflation-prone, capable of being blown over by the merest breeze, is, he reminded us, enjoying “the longest period of uninterrupted growth in the industrial history of our country”.

An exciting moment, indeed, is looming. In less than four weeks, at the end of December, the economy will have achieved 50 successive quarters of continual growth. That has not happened before — ever.

What happened before when oil prices jumped? Britain suffered from a combination of high inflation and recession — stagflation. What happened this time when oil hit $50 a barrel? The growth goes on, but inflation is just 1.2%.

Even if you are suspicious of that consumer-prices measure, the “headline” rate of retail price inflation is only 3.3%, a far cry from the 26%, 22% and 11% rates at the time of the previous three oil-price spikes.

Our labour market, meanwhile, is in danger of becoming the envy of the world in at least one respect. Mindful of the charge that Britain does well in relation to sclerotic Europe but badly when compared with other Anglo-Saxon economies, Brown produced surprising numbers. In Britain, 75% of working-age adults are in employment, which is higher than America’s 71%, Japan’s 69%, Germany’s 65% and France’s 63%. For Britain to have a higher employment rate than America is staggering.

And just in case anybody has forgotten how it used to be, Brown made some useful comparisons. Since 1997, the base rate has averaged 5.3%, almost half its 10.4% average over the 1979-97 period. Many will say this has nothing to do with the chancellor and everything to do with the Bank of England. He did, however, have the foresight, and the political courage, to give the Bank its independence. Had the Tories done this after the 1992 exchange-rate-mechanism fiasco, they would have been on much firmer ground now.

The effect of a Brown set-piece speech is strangely reassuring. The chancellor is one of nature’s bustlers but on these occasions a kind of serenity takes over. As he sails on like a galleon, short-term worries seem to disappear in his wake.

Take the housing market, the current obsession. Brown said “the expected moderation in house price inflation” will lead to slower growth in consumer spending. But talk of a crash seems alien to him. A section in the pre-budget report document makes a case for permanently higher house prices.

The conventional valuation measure, the ratio of house prices to average earnings, can be “highly misleading”, the Treasury said. The ratio itself appears to be on an upward trend and the limited supply of new housing argues for prices outstripping the growth in incomes. The report’s overall conclusion is that houses are not much overvalued and that in the current stable economic environment they can adjust gradually and painlessly. The words “soft landing” do not appear in Treasury documents, but that is what it has in mind.

What about Brown’s overoptimistic forecasts for growth next year? What about the black hole? And what about the fact that, through regulation, red tape and higher taxes, he is progressively shackling the economy and rendering it uncompetitive?

On growth, there are two issues. The first is that the arithmetic for achieving 3%-3.5% growth in 2005 is more testing than this year, because the economy has weakened throughout the year. But data revisions have come to the chancellor’s rescue before. And the Treasury is not wildly adrift from the independent consensus for growth of 2.6%. When the economy does go wrong, it will be by a bigger margin than that.

Another issue is about whether Brown’s growth, if achieved, will condemn us to higher interest rates. The Treasury does not think so, because it thinks there is still spare capacity to be used up. The Bank may disagree, although it concedes there is a lot of uncertainty about the relationship between growth, inflation and spare capacity.