Britannia Radio

Here's a second worthwhile assessment of the situation - especially 
Brown's position - on G20  -5.

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GUARDIAN 27.3.09
Next on Mr Brown's agenda: invade the Channel Islands
The prime minister's new zeal on tax havens rings hollow, as does his 
grand G20 roadshow. I'm now less sure he can hang on

. Martin Kettle

At the height of the diplomatic frenzy preceding the Iraq war, Tony 
Blair came within a whisker of making a long return flight to 
Santiago in an attempt to get Chile on side. In the end, even Blair 
flinched at the massive imbalance of effort and reward involved. This 
week, though, Gordon Brown has done what Blair did not and has gone 
the extra mile - more accurately the extra 15,000 miles - travelling 
to South America in a last-minute effort to turn next week's G20 
summit from another international photo-opportunity into a political 
triumph.

Brown's massive journey is the latest reminder of how much of his own 
authority and political capital the prime minister has invested in 
next Thursday's day in London's Docklands. But the odyssey has 
simultaneously turned into a reminder of how precarious Brown's 
underlying authority actually is. No sooner was the PM on the plane 
than the governor of the Bank of England made clear that the country 
has reached its overdraft limit. There could be no more loose talk at 
the budget, said Mervyn King, about any further massive stimulus from 
a government whose books are already awash with red ink.

Even Brown had to bend the knee to that. The budget will now be a 
much more austere accounting than he would like; any option of an 
early election has died with it. The speed of Brown's retreat was 
almost as striking as the fact that it occurred. It called to mind 
the old charge that part of this prime minister's political makeup is 
that he is a bottler.

It sometimes seems there are two Gordon Browns cohabiting inside the 
prime minister. On the one hand there is Good Gordon, who 
passionately believes in the benevolence of government, in helping 
the poor, and in the international obligations of the developed 
world. On the other there is Bad Gordon, who adopts positions for 
tactical advantage, is more interested in the news impact of his 
actions than whether they make sense, and who too often says things 
that he knows are either untrue or unattainable or both.

Seen in that frame, Brown's G20 activities take on a less flattering 
light. His recent pressure on the Treasury, now rebuffed, to make 
unaffordable tax cuts next month has loud echoes of the opportunist 
tax cuts he engineered in his last budget, two years ago, by 
abolishing the 10p tax band. Similarly, the long journey to South 
America, like some of the politically calculated trips that Brown 
made as chancellor, may be designed more as an appearance of activity 
than as an effective activity itself.

Sometimes it is not clear which Gordon has the upper hand. Take the 
example of the prime ministerial crusade against tax havens, which 
Brown has helped to elevate into a G20 agenda item, even though its 
causal connection to either the banking crisis or the recession is 
not at all evident. [in fact.  no connection at all - just a bit of 
socialistic populism -cs]
Nevertheless, addressing the European parliament this week, Brown 
again held out the prospect that the G20 will "agree the big changes" 
that will lead to "the end of offshore tax havens and offshore centres".

Was this Good Gordon or Bad speaking? On the face of it, the 
elimination of tax havens and the draining of the tax avoidance swamp 
are magnificently moral objectives for any internationalist social 
democrat. But wait a moment. Was this the same Brown who did 
absolutely nothing about the UK's many tax havens during the decade 
when he was chancellor? Was it the same one who actively encouraged 
them to prosper?

It is hard not to suspect that Brown knows only too well that 
denouncing the offshore world will always be much easier than 
suppressing it. In both Jersey and Guernsey, for example, the 
possibility of a declaration of independence from the UK is a very 
live issue indeed; legislative preparations are well advanced and 
could be triggered if London attempted to interfere with the islands' 
low tax regimes. So is the new crusader Brown ready to invade the 
Channel Islands in the name of ending tax havens? Maybe so, but it 
seems unlikely. Words are cheap.

The worry among some of Brown's Labour critics is that this is 
typical behaviour, and that Bad Gordon always wins out in the end. 
Brown has done many good things during the financial crisis and the 
recession, this argument runs, but he has consistently failed to give 
voters a realistic account of where the government is heading. 
Instead he denounces easy targets like tax havens and the bonus 
culture without the means or even the will to end them; and flies 
around the world talking grandly about the creation of a global 
society, while hesitating to impose an agenda on banks that should 
have been nationalised months ago and while the substance of the 
broader economic achievement - as Mervyn King and Angela Merkel both 
argue - remains still unproven.

Doubtless, enough will be agreed in London next week for the G20 
summit to be trumpeted as a success. It is important that this 
achievement should not be underestimated. Good Gordon - the prime 
minister who spoke so well in Washington the other day - is just as 
real as Bad Gordon. But the summit should not be taken at face value 
either. For, unless Brown's continuing efforts produce a whole series 
of improbably benign changes of mind in the world's capitals over the 
next few days, the likelihood is that the G20 will be a significant 
anticlimax when set alongside the claims that Brown has made for it 
for so long.

This too, though, is recidivist Brown. He has set expectations too 
high. His rhetoric left reality standing. From the moment the summit 
was mooted, Brown bet the whole farm on the rewards of being seen at 
the heart of the economic summit. As a result, Thursday's gathering 
has been seriously oversold as a transformative political event. The 
danger for Brown is that now, instead of being hailed as the man who 
led the global economy out of recession, he risks being dismissed as 
boastful but ineffectual.

Along with most commentators, I had concluded that the return of 
Peter Mandelson to the government in the autumn meant that the 
leadership issue which so convulsed Labour last summer was finally 
dead until the general election. Now I begin to have doubts. There is 
talk again, not much but more than for some months, about whether 
Brown can hold on till the election. The verdict on the G20 will be 
very important here, as will the budget and the European elections. 
It can't just go on like this for another 14 months, one Labour MP 
complained this week. But it can, and it will - won't it?   [Aaarrgh!
=cs]