Counting one’s blessings is not easy in the current context

GORDON Brown has one success under his belt. He set out to campaign, on Saturday, at the emergency meeting of leaders of the biggest EU economies, for a support plan to shove under small businesses like a sheepskin, so they wouldn’t get bedsores as a result of inactivity during the recession.

One would not have expected those leaders to pay that much attention to Gordon, in light of his limited popularity in his home country. In addition, the choosy way Britain commits itself to the European project might, perhaps, influence Europe’s eagerness to bail out Britain’s entrepreneurs. (If Brian Cowen were to have joined him, that would have completely put paid to Brown’s chances of success. Europe was just coming to terms with Ireland’s no vote when we went off and rescued our banks in a spectacularly insular way. Pan-European popularity, at the moment, we don’t have.)

However, the importance of small businesses right across the continent undoubtedly persuaded Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet to pledge to help SMEs in dire need of credit, by speeding up the release of $41.5 billion in European Investment Bank loans.