Eureka!

When dour and dull Gordon Brown comes up with a speech (to US House of Congress) which matches Obama's for cadence and alliteration, I see the beginning of a glimmer suggesting the light at the tunnel's end is round the corner. Take a look:
"And let us be honest – tonight too many parents, after they put their children to bed, will speak of their worries about losing their jobs or the need to sell the house.

Too many will share stories of friends or neighbours already packing up their homes, and too many will talk of a local store or business that has already gone to the wall.

For me, this global recession is not to be measured just in statistics, or in graphs or in figures on a balance sheet. Instead I see one individual with their own aspirations and increasingly their own apprehensions, and then another, and then another.

Each with their own stars to reach for, each part of a family, each at the heart of a community now in need of help and hope. And when banks have failed and markets have faltered, we the representatives of the people have to be the people's last line of defence.

And that's why there is no financial orthodoxy so entrenched, no conventional thinking so ingrained, no special interest so strong that it should ever stand in the way of the change that hardworking families need.

We have learned through this world downturn that markets should be free but never value-free, that the risks people take should never be separated from the responsibilities they meet.

And if perhaps some once thought it beyond our power to shape global markets to meet the needs of people, we know now that is our duty; we cannot and must not stand aside.

In our families and workplaces and places of worship, we celebrate men and women of integrity who work hard, treat people fairly, take responsibility and look out for others. If these are the principles we live by in our families and neighbourhoods, they should also be the principles that guide and govern our economic life too.

In these days the world has learned that what makes for the good economy makes for the good society.

My father was a minister of the church and I have learned again what I was taught by him: that wealth must help more than the wealthy, good fortune must serve more than the fortunate and riches must enrich not just some of us but all.
And these enduring values are the values we need for these new times.

We tend to think of the sweep of destiny as stretching across many months and years before culminating in decisive moments we call history. But sometimes the reality is that defining moments of history come suddenly and without warning. And the task of leadership then is to define them, shape them and move forward into the new world they demand.

An economic hurricane has swept the world, creating a crisis of credit and of confidence. History has brought us now to a point where change is essential. We are summoned not just to manage our times but to transform them.

Our task is to rebuild prosperity and security in a wholly different economic world, where competition is no longer local but global and banks are no longer just national but international.

And we need to understand what went wrong in this crisis, that the very financial instruments that were designed to diversify risk across the banking system instead spread contagion across the globe. And today's financial institutions are so interwoven that a bad bank anywhere is a threat to good banks everywhere.
Hear, hear Mr Prime Minister. May I also add that a bad case of injustice is a threat to justice everywhere.
Plenty more to that speech - oddly published in full only by Guardian.co.uk's website.