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GORDON BROWN has a track record of losing. You could say he’s the master of electoral – and financial – misfortune.

Famously, he bust the British economy.

He watched Alex Salmond take power in his heartland and was so miffed he couldn’t pick up the phone to say congratulations.

A year after he became prime minister, a poll showed 59 per cent of Scots thought he was doing a bad job.

Then came the humiliating General Election defeat of 2010.

So I welcome his intervention in the referendum debate.

He says if we maintain the UK in its current unfair form, a future Labour government will make it all better.

That’s just not logical.

Ed Miliband is unlikely to win the keys to Downing Street any time soon.

But there is a more general difficulty. Scotland has almost no influence on how the UK Government turns out – we have only 8.4 per cent of the UK population and less than four per cent of the seats in the House of Commons and the Lords.

The population balance means the UK can never be an equal union – just look at the map.

Brown’s reappearance also reminds us Labour were in power in London for 13 years but did nothing to narrow the gulf in earnings between rich and poor that started under Margaret Thatcher.

Under Brown, the richest one per cent of people tripled their share of national wealth.

Many were bankers who benefited from Brown’s deliberate failure to regulate their behaviour and bonuses.

Labour took us into an illegal war in Iraq.

Labour burdened us with the Tory-inspired PFI model of financing schools and hospitals which handed speculators obscene profits.

Labour commissioned PFI projects that cost £51billion but the public will have to pay back £245billion at least because of interest.

Then there was Brown’s disastrous decision to sell off gold reserves, when prices were low.

He punished the poor by abolishing the 10p tax rate, which he was later forced to admit was a mistake.

Labour introduced university tuition fees of £3000 a year, then commissioned the review that led to undergraduates in England being charged up to £9000.

Brown last year condemned the SNP for giving Scottish students free university education

After the SNP won in 2007, Brown pushed for measures that would take powers back to London.

Labour today have moved even further towards Tory policies – perhaps as a result of their close joint working to “stop” the SNP.

Labour want to scrap the free prescriptions that have helped hundreds of thousands of Scots.

The SNP council tax freeze is a rare glimmer of light for families struggling against rocketing prices but Labour attack that too.

It seems a strange way to go about “saving the union”.

Brown has misjudged the mood of Scots before.

Back in 2006, while he was trying to convince a hostile English press that he wasn’t too Scottish to be PM, he wanted us to celebrate a Great Britain Day.

He even suggested we all plant the Union Flag in our front garden. Maybe he was thinking ahead to UKIP’s success.

It failed to touch a national nerve in Scotland though.

Here, 86 per cent of people say it’s the Saltire which fills them with pride.