Brown stresses national action on financial crisis
Prime Minister Gordon Brown will attend a weekend summit in Paris on the global financial turmoil but stresses the need for national decisions on the crisis, his spokesman said Thursday.
Confirming his participation in a summit Saturday with his French, German and Italian counterparts, the spokesman said while there was a “European dimension” to the problems, many of the issues were best dealt with nationally.
“It is right that individual countries would want to take their own decisions, particularly when national taxpayers’ money is potentially at risk,” he told reporters.
He added that French President Nicolas Sarkozy “confirmed to the prime minister that it was not the case that the French were proposing a Europe-wide bail-out.”
This was a reference to reports of proposals to create 300-billion-euro fund to shore up European banks, a string of which have faced going to the wall or being taken over amid the global financial turmoil.
Initial reports attributed the idea to France but Sarkozy on Thursday denied that France had proposed the fund.
The Netherlands said Thursday it had suggested the creation of national — rather than pan-European — funds to help banks in trouble before they fail.
Brown, who oversaw a decade-long boom as chancellor before succeeding Tony Blair last year, has repeatedly underlined the international dimension to the financial crisis triggered by a US-based credit crunch.
At the same time he is widely seen as more Eurosceptic than Blair, insisting on not giving away further sovereignty or decision-making powers to the European Union, of which France currently holds the rotating presidency.