Posts Tagged "Gordon Brown"

Fixed Term Parliaments won’t necessarily fix Parliament

Panic-stricken MPs at the epicentre of the Expenses Scandal put out a range of “constitutional reforms” that would be able to fix parliament despite not having anything to do with the problem.

Fixed Term Parliaments have been shelved for a long time now; it was Labour Policy in 1992, but since they didn’t win nothing came of it. The Lib Dems have held on to it for a long time now, but since they’ll never win, nothing will ever come from it. The Tories aren’t really quite sure whether to be in a conservative mood or their “change” mood.

If the date of a General Election is fixed well in advance, we can certainly expect to see an increase of widgets like this:

Though at least they won’t be quite so arrogantly presumptuous as to second guess the Prime Minister, at least this one doesn’t say “countdown to victory” or suchlike.

I would expect the Conservatives to rather like the current system, since they have played it so well. In Opposition, they used the “Snap Election” card to its breaking point. Cameron asking Brown “Can we have an election? When can we have an election? I want an election! Muuuuuuuuuuum!” every week for about three months in Prime Ministers’ Questions came off well for him.

The real advantages to introducing a fixed term parliament in Britain seem negligible. On the part of the electorate, the advantage is little more than psychological as it takes power away from the Executive (and gives it to the Administrative); the flipside is that by taking this power away, the Prime Minister no longer has to take the make-or-break decision.

This puts a stop to the grandstanding and the bluffing over wanting an election and completely removes the debate away from “personal mandates” and other nonsense that people come up with because they don’t understand the difference between a Prime Minister and a President.

It also means the Prime Minister will no longer need to go to the Monarch and ask for her permission to hold a general election, thus removing the Monarchy even further from politics and eroding its case for existence in the 21st century.

With the “PM decides” model, the incumbent has the advantage of being able to call an election when it suits them; they also have the disadvantage of being in government, so logically they really are just trying to pick the least unfavourable date.

There have also been accusations in past elections of releasing a ‘favourable’ budget just before an election, with Fixed Term Parliaments the same practice will go on, it will just be a little bit more obvious.

With Fixed Terms, potentially a government can hold out on the people for three years and then come out all guns blazing in year four. Whether voters have short or long memories is a different debate but my inclination is definitely towards the goldfish end of the scale.

Sarkozy launches a cut in VAT

Yesterday was the first official day a cut in VAT (TVA) came into effect.

Having criticised Gordon Brown not so long ago over his handling of the British economy, President Sarkozy decided to follow suit an implement his own temporary tax cut. Neoliberal Sarko is now nowhere to be found, but then again, it IS Sarkozy we are talking about, continuity was never a strong point.

Here a few ministers (looking pretty smug, it has to be said) gather around for their first coffee at a lower price, including the Mayor of Nice and Minister for Industry, Christian Estrosi (Boo, hiss!) sitting second from left.

The cut seems to be widely welcomed, and comes as a welcome relief to Nicois restaurants (and me in particular) who are quite keen to be able to lower their prices.

However, some establishments won’t be lowering their prices but instead will be using the tax relief to raise wages.

I haven’t seen any directing from the government on which approach is preferable, Brown was quite keen for businesses to pass on the cut to the consumer, though with unemployment as serious as it is in France, I won’t complain against wage rises.

Brown's last, last, last, LAST chance

Brown lives to fight another day following the top secret meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on Monday as Labour MPs chose to back him rather than sack him.

This was a mistake in my opinion, as I wrote on LabourList, but although I didn’t get my way, at least I generated 65 comments worth of debate. Half-decent debate too, not just YouTube “U r gay”.

I’m deeply concerned about dark forces moving within the cabinet, by which I mean Peter “Prince of Darkness” Mandelson, getting titles like “First Secretary of State without a proper brief (I.e. John Prescott was Deputy Prime Minister, so it made sense for him to have it.) It’s a very Vladimir Putin thing to do, secret bogus titles…

I could go into great detail, but this morning’s cartoons in the newspapers capture it perfectly.

A picture saves me writing 1000 words.

Peter Brookes from The Times

Then on Brown’s position (the perfect representation of my analysis):

Garland from the Telegraph

And finally, I watching Prime Minister’s Questions, live for the first time in… ever.

The Prime Minister is in legacy mode: he is destroying 100 years of history for his own ego

Health Secretary Andy Burnham wore a black tie to the funeral of several careers last night, calling the election of two BNP MEPs “a sad day for British politics”.

The Twitterati and Facebookers were the first to console themselves with the notion that the BNP actually had fewer votes than in 2004, and that the result was mainly due to Labour’s collapse. Personally, my response:

“I hereby take responsibility for the election of 2 BNP MEPs and apologise without reserve on behalf of the Labour Party.”

Don’t blame the electoral system, don’t blame the recession, don’t blame it on being in power for so long, don’t blame the turnout and definitely don’t blame “local reasons”. The responsibility for the result rests squarely with us.

By ‘us’ though, I really mean ‘the Labour leadership’. I know that there are so many Labour activists, myself included, who have been swimming against the current as everything we say falls on deaf ears. Conversations on the doorstep were inevitably about expenses and leadership, never about Europe.

Therein lays the problem. The negative attention directed at Labour and specifically Brown will not go away until he does. If he does not go now, another bad event will spark up more calls for him to go. Every issue and event will be seen through the prism of Brown’s weak position, opening up barely sealed wounds. The only way to stop the debate about the leadership is to push the red button.

If he does not do “the honourable thing” then he will have to be kicked out violently, lest the public do the same to the entire party. A war on all fronts, from the backbenchers to the Blairites to the Cabinet is the only way forward. The arguments against removing Brown no longer have weight; the equation has changed and unless we show the public a serious and powerful gesture, Labour will go down with him. As Frank Field rightly points out:

“Labour supporters claiming that the European results were not a catastrophe for the party can only do so by inventing a new meaning for the word catastrophe.”

There are some who say than in every crisis there is an opportunity. With Brown, in every crisis there is an even bigger crisis, and in every opportunity there is a crisis with the opportunity for another crisis.

When it comes to problems for Labour, obviously Gordon Brown is only the tip of the iceberg. However, by getting rid of the tip, the public will no longer see the rest of the iceberg, and at least the net quantity of iceberg will have gone down a little bit.

Short of stepping down, it seems to be that the Prime Minister knows that the game is up, and has shifted into “Legacy Mode”. By painting himself as “the best man for the job” to deal with the economy, he has also remembered how he wanted to tinker with the Constitution. I had heard that he had also hoped to push through the Lisbon Treaty as well. It looked for a while that he was trying to gives his old friends that last leg-up to give his heirs more credibility. Trying to put Balls as Chancellor was a clear example.

Tragically, his legacy will be little more than the man who did worse than Michael Foot. Of course he has made an enormous contribution to the Labour Party, but he is also the man who has done an equal amount of damage to it. If he really is “the best we have”, the Cabinet Ministers should hang their heads in shame. It is hard to imagine anyone being worse than him without deliberately trying to sabotage the party. To allow Brown to stay now is to destroy 100 years of political history for the sake of one man’s ego.

The other favourite argument of the “loyalists” (to Brown, not the Party) is that there is no consensus behind who should replace him. I think we will have cross that bridge when we come to it, unless Brown has already burned it down. We are in an untenable position now and the only way to improve our fortunes, not just in the next General Election but in the future of British politics, is to change this position. A big leap into popularity may be impossible from where we currently stand, but changing something, anything, will be a step in the right direction.

This is not the end of our trouble, but if we want to live to fight another day this is the only way.

We're going to get hammered on June 4th – and videos like these don't help

I am absolutely furious at the disgraceful PPB released last week. There was no mention of Europe for the European Parliament Elections, there was no mention of councils for the Local Elections, and there was barely any mention of Labour either.

The broadcast was 2:40 of pure negative embarrassment. It is an obviously testing time for many Labour activists and with every punch the man in the video laid on that punch bag, it felt like one more blow to my self-respect as a Labour member. David Cameron would do X, David Cameron would do Y. Well what are we going to do? Yes, the broadcast may have been factual; yes, these things need to be said, but Labour comes across as a bully, scaremongering the electorate into voting for it. Maybe I’m a romantic, but I would prefer to ask people to vote out of support for us rather than fear of the opposition.

Before I go on to talk about the Party at large, I want to talk more specifically about this broadcast. Not only was it a more despicable campaign than the one in Crewe & Nantwich, it was also poorly executed. The people who made this video need hurling into the boardroom for a right ticking off from Sir Alan. Given a camera and a tenner, I would have produced a better PPB, and made a tenner. I’m no spin doctor, but I know that the first 30 seconds of a PPB should not be some mystery bloke walking up to a punch bag, and it shouldn’t continue for a cumulative minute throughout. “Where’s yer bloody product?”

Contrast this with, say, the Green Party broadcast: It was interesting, simple, and coherent, struck the right tone, dealt with misconceptions while also promoting their policy, with a decent dose of humour too. Contrast our broadcast with that of the Welsh Labour Party too, which was all-in-all a good PPB because it used the platform to promote the program. Rhodri Morgan talking about people “not getting paid to sit at home, but getting paid to train three days a week and work the other two” is exactly the kind of message we as Labourites should be sending all across the country. He even mentioned the word “Europe”.

“Europe” brings me neatly to the Conservative Broadcast. Too bad for us, it was a stroke of genius and Cameron killed two birds with one stone. He realised that nobody really cares about the European Elections, which is symptomatic of how little priority all the parties have given their MEPs, none of whom feature in our broadcast to talk about what they’ve been up to. He realised that voters want to sort out MPs’ expenses. Cameron confronted this immediately, and on top of that, he managed to avoid alienating half of his party by steering well clear of Europe. (UKIP’s PPB, while giving the impression of a daytime TV accident helpline advert, at least stated their case).

Controversially, offence is the best form of defence. We don’t need to focus on defending record in government which should speak for itself; we do need to show a way for the future. This is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but there is now a Blairite Generation of first-time voters (myself included) who don’t remember first hand how bad the Tories were, and there are even more (myself not included) who don’t even care.

Negative campaigning is both necessary and effective, but it won’t work for us in this situation. Labour is deeply unpopular by itself, so it’s up to us to sort it out, though when I say “us” here, I mean of course “them”, the people like “Gordon”, “Harriet” and “Ed” who keep emailing me to tell me everything is fine and that we’re actually 20 points ahead, it’s just that the newspapers (boo hiss) are bitter, and the PM is actually brilliant, oh and it’s America’s fault too.

There’s an argument I’ve heard around the Internet that “you just can’t attack Cameron” because he is genuinely liked. You’re much better off attacking the run-of-the-mill moat-owning Tory. This is true for the moment, but I believe it may be more effective to paint Cameron neither as a “shallow salesman” nor as “chief economic adviser to the Treasury on Black” when he was apparently little more than an intern. It’s my understanding that he was Michael Howard’s right hand man and chief speechwriter. He’s the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who wrote some of the worst kind of Tory anti-immigration scaremongering. You need a mix of positive and negative stuff.

I do blame Brown for the weakness of the Cabinet and of the Party. For a decade, the government was distracted by his ego, as he as his “Brownites” crushed and pushed any potential rival out of the way and blocked reform at any opportunity. It is for this reason Tony Blair hesitated to promote David Miliband, as much as we say “Brown’s Budget” instead of Alastair Darling’s, why Alan Milburn was sent to the back, and why Blunkett and Clarke had their trigger fingers ready. Dominated by Brown’s “flawed” personality, the legislative program has come to a complete halt.

Unfortunately, Labour’s interests are currently no longer compatible with those of the nation. Of course it is in the interest of the country to have a Labour government (not matter how bad Brown is, I can’t believe that Cameron will be better), but it is not in the Party’s interests to be in government. We need to finish modernising; there will be former Labour activists, who left because of Blair and Iraq and so forth, who have been waiting on the sidelines with their watches out waiting to pronounce the time-of-death of New Labour. This is no time to “go back” to Old Labour, as we so desperately need to go forward. The Old/New Labour divide remains a scar on the party that has to be overcome the PLP has to get over labels, whether they be Blairites, Brownites, Brownies, Harmen, or Milibandistas.

We’re going to get hammered on June 4th (though I’ll still be working faithfully in Regional Office up to polling day). By coincidence, so will our friends in the French Parti Socialiste, who have also had their fair share of leadership issues. They, however, have the advantage of Opposition. It is lamentable that when the world needs a credible centre-left ideology in the wake of an unprecedented economic crisis, Social Democrats across Europe have been caught unawares, despite the relative success of Zapatero’s PSOE; we have heard strangely little from him.

The impression I get from various people is that we are somehow repeating history. We might be in for a circa 1997 landslide, it might be a new Thatcher ‘83. High-up Labour figures suggest that we’re actually back in 1992. None of these seem very appealing to me, for if by some miracle we were to win the next General Election, without a battle plan in “the fight for Britain’s future” it might be better to cut our losses before it gets so bad we’re out for another 18 years. We have to reunite, rethink and be ready to return in four years time.

Article after article on LabourList, I see saccharin phrases like “if we get rid of Brown, that’s just what the Tories want” as if the Tories don’t want a worn out Labour leader who is politically inept, nationally despised and who can’t flash a decent smile. There will be people who will call me a “defeatist” or a “fatalist”; in return I’ll call them “complacent” and “foolish”. I can’t remember where I read it, either LabourList or LabourHome, but the fact we’ve fallen below 30% (20% on some polls) means that even the ‘core vote’ is deserting us. There is no hope that, unlike what the emails tell us, the Tories will come unstuck over policy, because they are not going to face any scrutiny while everyone watches Labour stumble behind from disaster to disaster. The party is at its lowest rating ever and ministers need to get their act together.

Numbers Show a Fourth Term for Labour

Labour could still win the next General Election. Despite poll woes, party troubles and policy mistakes, a Tory Government is no forgone conclusion. Though many are acting as if failure is inevitable, it is still possible for Labour to snatch victory from the (silver-spooned) jaws of defeat. Putting politics aside for the time being, statistics alone point to a fourth term.

Political geography favours Gordon Brown. If both major parties were to perform equally well at the election, Labour would still wins 80 more seats than the Tories. This means that David Cameron would have to win another two million votes to earn the same number of seats. To break even, the Tories require a 6% lead, and an even bigger 10% per cent to earn an overall working majority. This seems like a walkover considering the current double figure lead the Conservatives have at the moment, until you learn the history lesson that every government from the mid-50s to mid-90s that suffered difficulties half-way through the term enjoyed a significant poll recovery. It is highly likely that the Government will close the gap to avoid a wipeout, and there is enough time to tighten the race and prevent a 10-point lead, and perhaps catch-up enough to rob Cameron of the 6% benchmark

Although the label has been applied in many cases, Gordon Brown is not John Major. In the Crewe and Nantwich byelection, Labour lost 40% of its vote. Combined with the same result in Glasgow East, this seems devastating, and foreboding of things to come. That is, until it is compared to the Dudley West byelection in 1994, where the Conservative vote collapsed by a spectacular 80%.

Labour woes are fundamentally different, as Gordon Brown has been a fashionable scapegoat over the past year. The YouGov polling boss, Peter Kellner, presents research that shows that having dealt with floods and other horsemen (whose horses had foot-and-mouth or bluetongue), voters do not blame Brown for obviously international issues like rising food and fuel prices, but still want help from the government. So while the credit crunch is global, current economic problems contrast hugely with Black Wednesday, which was a fully-patented Tory disaster. It marked the beginning of the end for John Major, but Gordon Brown is in a very different position.

The double-figure Tory poll lead is incredibly overrated. All the hype about a landslide of Blairesque proportions is ridiculous as in 1995 and 1996 (the same sort of mid-term time scale befroe the election) Tony Blair earned extraordinary approval ratings which hit 70%. Factor in Cameron’s ratings, which occaisionaly stuggle 50%, and the scale of defeat fizzles out. It seems that while the Leader of the Opposition appears likeable, compassionate and competent, he is exposed as lightweight, shallow and very out-of-touch.

As Cameron is a poor impression of Tony Blair, he cannot win an election by himself. The Old School Tories of yesterdecade still frighten voters who can remember them (as a generation have grown up under Labour, which may explain why Brown’s history lessons of “15% interest rates” and “3 million unemployed” fail to resonate with everyone). Nevertheless, the Tory Party still appears unchanged and Tories still appear as untrustworthy crypto-thatcherites. Unfortunately for Cameron, he cannot even command a successful gagging order on his team, as Micheal Gove released plans to privatise education and the farcical David Davis byelection.

Essentially, the facts point to Brown winning, barely, though probably losing his majority. In the event of a hung parliament it is probably that Labour would remain the biggest party, but what would happen then is uncertain. Lib Dem Nick Clegg, a David Cameron impersonator by profession, has taken the Liberal Democrats to the right, and is likely to act as a Tory puppet. It all depends on Brown re-establishing Labour as the party of fairness on the way to economic recovery

Having been Chancellor for 10 years it seems logical that Gordon Brown is the best man to navigate Britain through turbulent financial waters, but even with the wind in his sails, the captain may well go down with the ship.