Evan Davis barely laid a glove on Gordon Brown on the Today programme yesterday. Davis’s style of sweet reasonableness, often highly effective, had no impact on the Prime Minister’s rhino hide. Just minutes before the UK recession was finally confirmed, the PM delivered a familiar version of events. This was an international crisis. All countries were affected. Nobody saw it coming.

That’s all partly true, but the PM is far from innocent. He has to bear responsibility for past policies that amplified the credit crunch and made Britain particularly vulnerable to its cruellest effects. Here are seven points that Davis might have made if he’d been allowed to get a word in edgeways.

1. Britain’s growth of the 1997-2007 boom years was built not entirely on genuine economic advances but on a self-feeding bubble of rising debt and house prices. Many people were warning of the lopsided shape of growth throughout his boom years. Mr Brown’s claim of ten glorious years sounds no more convincing than Hitler, in the bunker in 1945, boasting of five years of military victories from 1938 to 1942. Few other peoples are in as much personal debt as the British.

2. Mr Brown as Chancellor chose to ignore the mushrooming growth of the balance sheets of UK-authorised banks. In 1997, the banks were moderately sized, on the scale of the wider economy, whose taxpayers ultimately underwrote them. Ten years later, they dwarfed the economy. No other major country has had such disproportionately big banks.

3. As head of the Treasury, in charge of City regulation, he fostered the light regime that made London the centre for the creation and distribution of many of the toxic products now congealing in the financial system. Second only to Wall Street, the City’s role in the crunch has left Britain more exposed than other countries.

4. He chose to ignore the housing bubble. He actually called it a “bubble” as early as 2005, but still did nothing to stop it inflating for another two years. That ensured the bursting phase is now all the more extreme. Lending curbs would have been hard, but not impossible.

5. In spite of roaring tax revenues he left the public finances in poor shape for when the crunch hit. If Britain in 2007 had been in strong surplus, it would have been much easier to turn the public spending tap on now without alarming foreign investors.

6. He pushed up salaries in the public sector with little thought for the additional unfunded pension liabilities created, now approaching £1,000 billion. If there is a run on the pound, it may be as much about those liabilities as the bank rescue bill.

7. He made hiring people less attractive. National insurance contributions, a tax on jobs, were raised again and again. Red tape worsened. And using employers as unpaid tax collectors added to the burden. Even those employers capable of hiring are in no mood to do so. Not a happy state of affairs when 2,500 people are being sacked each day.

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