It was a very personal speech, which the conference audience warmed to; and indeed it was hard not to do so on that level. What came over was a sense of what really mattered to Brown and motivated him: the passion for fairness in society, his own unshakeable belief in the moral project to which he has devoted his life of remedying injustice and improving people’s lot. But ultimately, that’s all he offered: warm words and tugged heart strings. Not an iota of regret or apology for the incompetence of his government or the myriad things that have gone wrong. Instead, it was back to the future. It was as if Blairism had never been. The vision he offered was the old Labour vision with which we are all so familiar: worship at the shrine of the public services and in particular the NHS, that temple to sentimentality, false promises and hypocrisy that brings the faithful to their feet every time. Who cares that the statistics trotted out as evidence that the NHS is scaling ever greater heights of achievement are manipulated and meaningless? The mere mention of this most sacred of all cows is code for ‘heartless Tories will kill the old and the poor who are only safe with us’. Which of course is precisely what they are not. Then there were promises to nationalise childhood still further by extending child care – his claim that the Tories would abolish the Sure Start child care programme, whose value is less than conspicuous, was made to sound as if they intended to slay the new-born. For Brown, of course, the only way to improve the lot of children is for the state to become Big Nanny. Oh, and give them all free internet access. For me, the most effective bit of the speech was his attack on the Tories where he landed some palpable hits – although claiming that pouring money into the public services answers the Tories’ taunt that he had failed to fix the nation’s roof while the economic sun was shining surely rather misses the point. And his crack about this not being the time for a novice to become Prime Minister was an effective blow not just at David Cameron but also at David Miliband – upon whom the BBC cameras promptly focused to drive the point home. But the really startling thing about that speech was the lack of any serious points about the world’s financial crisis and the absence of any proposals to address it; and no less staggering, the relegation of international affairs to a few references at the tail end of the speech as a kind of afterthought, with no mention whatever of the terrorist threat to the UK and the west, nor of the wars we are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. Doubtless these are less of a priority than giving everyone access to the net. Back To The Future
I am now on the train back from Manchester, having heard Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour party conference. The ‘speech of his life’, as it was breathlessly previewed by the media? Of course not; these things never are. Enough to end the crisis over his leadership? Not that either.
Tuesday, 23 September 2008
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