A follow on to yesterday’s post about Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to Washington this week. I find the words used to define solutions sound esoteric and ethereal. Brown speaks of “vision” and a “global new deal” while people are more concerned about rising energy and food costs and how they will pay their mortgages. While leaders speak jobs are lost and the stock market heads south.

I like this paragraph:

At times the whole blueprint sounds rather utopian – a kind of banking version of Esperanto, a nice idea in theory but of little practical use. A Downing Street briefing paper on the London summit calls for “visionary leaders” to act as one. “This crisis is an opportunity,” it says. “The world’s leading economies can come together and lay the foundations not just for a sustainable economic recovery, but also for a genuinely new era of international economic partnership, a global deal, in which all countries have a part to play and all will see the benefits.” That’s not quite how it looks down at Jobcentre Plus.

Pretty soon we are likely to see “tea parties” in England.