Gordon Brown answers questions on the future of the economy, bankers bonuses and global co-operation The UK prime minister, Gordon Brown, has rediscovered his "small-s" socialist roots during the current financial crisis he helped create by forgetting them and thus allowing US-style unregulated risk-taking in UK financial markets. It hasn't hurt Brown in the polls either - where once he had More.. trailed so badly that everyone had written him off, now he's ahead of his Conservative Party rival by 11 points. His credibility on the international stage is high too. He was the most successful treasurer of a Western nation since WW2, with 13 straight years in the black, and is the architect of the current international plan to restore liquidity to the world economy by having governments take equity stakes in banks and other institutions. It's a process known as "nationalisation" but somehow the U.S. media doesn't want to use that word or remind voters that the conservative Bush administration has been forced to socialist policy by its own maladministration. Now, Brown has an op-ed in the Washington Post setting out the next stage of fiscal recovery - international laws to regulate the financial sector. He's even using the words "new Bretton Woods". We must deal with more than the symptoms of the current crisis. We have to tackle the root causes. So the next stage is to rebuild our fractured international financial system. Continue reading » Less..