All sorts of people are busy writing Gordon Brown's political
obitiuary.
First up here in The Times is the former Blairite Peter
Riddell. HE makes a few excuses but still writes Brown off
politically .
Then from the same paper comes their economics guru
Anatole Kaletsky (who - bizarrely - admits to usually being
wrong ! ) . He rightly calls the budget "The longest assisted suicide
in history" but then gets his economics in his usual twist,
recommending total inaction to see what turns up!
I give extracts
only, omitting some cockeyed economic recommendations!
Then there's John Rentoul in The Independent who has summed up the
present situation vis-à -vis Brown admirably though he obviously is
unhappy at the prospect of the Tories and writes up the future of the
LibDems, mainly as part of a new party including half of a split
Labour party.
Then - just for the hell of it there's the ex-editor of The Sun
spitting rage in all ditredctions and suggesting a move to the
Antipodese. He favours Western Australia and particularly Perth. I
must warn our cousins that Sun readers are on their way!
xxxxxxxxxxx cs
================================
THE TIMES 30.4.09
1. Stench of death reminiscent of John Major's last days in office
Peter Riddell: Political Briefing
Gordon Brown's premiership faces a lingering death as painful as that
experienced by John Major in 1996-97 unless he gets a grip quickly.
Long-serving MPs were drawing parallels last night between the two:
the willingness of government backbenchers to defy their leader, a
loss of prime ministerial authority and open fatalism about the
party's electoral prospects.
Yesterday's defeat will penetrate well beyond the world of
Westminster because of the emotive power of the rights of Gurkhas who
have fought for Britain and because of the striking pictures. Joanna
Lumley is probably equivalent to half a dozen by-election defeats on
her own. The issue symbolises what voters dislike about the style of
Mr Brown's leadership. Labour has occasionally been defeated in the
Commons before, but not in circumstances such as last night.
Even the Major administration was never beaten on a Liberal Democrat
motion: government backbenchers normally dislike voting with the
Opposition on their chosen debates so the outcome is a real coup for
Nick Clegg - and should boost his standing as a leader - since he has
been pressing the issue for some time. It was revealing that David
Cameron repeatedly praised Mr Clegg's initiative, an embrace that the
Lib Dem leader will want to escape.
Of course, one debacle on its own does not finish off a government or
a prime minister.
Unlike the Conservatives' disappearing Commons majority in the
mid1990s Labour still has a comfortable working majority, as was
shown by the votes on the Budget on Tuesday.
What matters is the longer-term, cumulative impact, creating the
impression of a Government stumbling in retreat.
It is very hard to recover from, and reverse, the impression of being
a loser. Underpinning last night's dramas are the recession and the
hole in the economy, and the state of the public finances, caused by
the banking crisis and a slump in the housing market.
Labour MPs have been shaken by the Government's tactical ineptitude,
which they trace directly to Mr Brown himself.
There is also a clear link between the defeat on the issue of the
Gurkhas and the debates today over MPs' expenses. Labour can fairly
claim to have eased the entry of former Gurkha soliders into Britain,
but the manner in which the Government has done so has appeared
bureaucratic and grudging. Yesterday's concessions were also
presented in a clumsy way, failing to win over Labour critics.
Similarly, Mr Brown sought to be a reformer on MPs' expenses. He has
rightly recognised the need both for a comprehensive plan and for
speedy action before the damaging disclosures expected in July, when
750,000 pages of receipts of MPs' expenses will be released.
Mr Brown's move to seize the initiative last week, however, was
completely bungled, from his gauche appearance on YouTube to his
failure to line up not only the other parties but also his own
backbenchers.
Even after retreating over a specific plan regarding MPs' second home
costs, his attempt to secure an early decision on reforms over the
disclosure of pay on second jobs and of MPs' staff is being challenged.
The most serious threat today comes from an amendment from the highly
respected Tory Sir George Young and the cross-party membership of the
Standards and Privileges Committee. It proposes that a decision be
delayed until the completion of a review by the independent Committee
on Standards in Public Life, chaired by Sir Christopher Kelly.
Sir Christopher has rejected Mr Brown's plea to complete its work
quickly, an extraordinary snub for the Prime Minister.
Whatever happens today, there is still a need, as Mr Brown argues,
for an early decision and there is no reason why Sir Christopher's
committee should not speed up its work after being publicly inactive
on the issue until recently.
An aggrieved Mr Brown will no doubt protest his good intentions. But
these are not enough in politics. Authority and an ability to lead,
and win, are all.
===============
2. Now for the longest assisted suicide in history [Shortened]
The disastrous Budget is a death blow for Labour - because Gordon
Brown prefers playing politics to proper strategy
Anatole Kaletsky
In 1983, when Michael Foot's Labour Party tried to bring Britain back
to the true path of socialism after what it believed was a brief and
misguided detour into capitalist economics under Margaret Thatcher,
its election manifesto was described as "the longest suicide note in
history". In the same spirit, the death throes of the Labour
Government that started with Gordon Brown's arrival in No10 and
reached its terminal phase in last week's Budget, could be called the
longest assisted suicide in history.
Labour really is dying and Mr Brown could not have done the deed on
his own. To destroy the successful Blair coalition he needed the
acquiescence of the Cabinet, enthusiastic encouragement by Labour's
traditional supporters and shrewd assistance from Conservative
politicians, who have goaded him into suicidal behaviour, while
keeping their own self-destructive tendencies in check.
This really is a self-inflicted demise. It was not inevitable,
despite the depth of the economic crisis. Mr Brown made economic
mistakes, but so do all politicians. And he may well prove to be
right to claim that Britain will withstand the global crisis better
than most other countries. And an economic crisis is rarely enough on
its own to bring a government down, as shown by Mrs Thatcher and John
Major in 1992. Around the world today plenty of governing parties, in
Italy, France, Germany, Canada and Australia, are doing quite well
despite the credit crunch. [None have had elections lately and none
seem secure except Canada and Australia -cs]
Mr Brown's political misjudgments, not his economic decisions, lie at
the heart of his personal tragedy. Consider the Budget. It contained
some economic blunders, the most important of which was Alistair
Darling's excessive emphasis on long-term economic and fiscal
forecasts that are certain to be wrong.
[- - - - - - - - -]
A booby trap Mr Brown was setting for the Tories blew up in his face
- again. His record as Prime Minister is a sequence of self-inflicted
mishaps, such as trying to steal Tory ideas on inheritance tax,
backing a third runway at Heathrow to set the business community
against the Tories and insisting on 42-day detention before charge
and identity cards to show that he was tough on terrorism.
In such episodes Mr Brown seemed to be trying to manipulate public
opinion - and each time he misjudged the public mood. The Budget
revealed a deeper and more dangerous version of this - confusing
transient changes in public opinion with lasting ideological shifts.
Mr Brown, and most Labour activists, seems convinced that the credit
crunch will provoke a permanent revulsion against "the rich" and
boost support for left-wing parties. The evidence suggests otherwise.
Not only in Britain, but in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden,
socialist parties are losing ground, whether in or out of government,
while centre-right parties are gaining support. Only in the US has
the Left benefited from the crisis, and there the movement is really
towards the political centre from a dogmatic right-wing extreme.
The failure of the Left to gain from the crisis is not surprising. In
postwar history, crises usually push politics to the right. When
voters are worried about economics they tend to heed business opinion
and trust politicians with business support. More fundamentally, they
tend to realise that welfare and public spending must be financed by
middle-income taxpayers, not just the rich - and when middle-class
voters are under pressure, they prefer lower taxes to generous
benefits for the poor.
It is actually in economic booms, not recessions, that left-wing
parties with redistributive tax policies gain ground. Tony Blair
understood this and positioned Labour as a party that put growth
first and income redistribution a distant second. But old Labour
never accepted this and it now appears that Mr Brown didn't either.
As a result, Labour is reverting to pre-Blairite wishful thinking,
dreaming that hardship will convince voters to support generous
welfare and higher taxes.
Therefore, Labour strategists hope that even if the Tories win next
year, it will prove a temporary aberration. A Tory victory would be a
poisoned chalice. Labour would have history moving in its favour. It
should regroup quickly and return to power on a tide of anti-
capitalist ideology.
Unfortunately for Labour, this seems like wishful thinking. The
British economy will probably return to decent growth soon after the
election - and a recovery is almost certain during the next
Parliament. In the Labour Party, meanwhile, the mutual hatred between
the Left and the Blairites will become more intense in opposition
than it ever was in government. This divergence will be magnified by
the Left's belief that the heyday of capitalism is over and that
public opinion will shift towards redistribution and a larger State.
If this is wrong, as it was in the 1980s, a radical realignment would
become probable on the British Left. The remnants of new Labour would
probably split off and join the Liberal Democrats who would become
the dominant left-of-centre party, while Brownites and old Labour
activists would form an explicitly socialist party. They could even
reprint Michael Foot's suicide note.
===============================
THE INDEPENDENT 30.4.09
It's all over for our Prime Minister
John Rentoul
We are back to the Seventies in the sense of alternating parties in
government
You know it is over when they laugh like that. Most of the noise in
the Chamber of the House of Commons is uncouth and childish; it is
also often manufactured, designed to harass and demoralise the other
side. But when Gordon Brown headed for the exit after Prime
Minister's Questions, and had to turn round, realising that he was
supposed to making a statement about Afghanistan and Pakistan, the
laughter from the opposition benches - and from some on the
Government side - was genuine. It was because it was genuine that it
was so cruel.
The Prime Minister has lost his way. He has lost his place in the
script. You know it is over when Nick Clegg cuts it as a figure of
moral authority, and Brown is reduced to making up numbers such as
£1.4bn as the cost of allowing all 36,000 Gurkhas the right to live
here. Even if it did come to £1.4bn, which is doubtful, why should we
draw the line there, after £175bn of fiscal stimulus, on the one
immigration issue on which even Empire loyalists are on the liberal
side of the argument?
Brown has lost the argument about the Gurkhas so comprehensively that
David Cameron did not even need to rehearse his Mr Angry act. He did
Mr Bipartisan instead, congratulating Clegg for setting the pace on
the issue. It was a smart bit of tactical cross-party generosity that
diminished Brown further.
No, you know it is over when BBC journalists start interviewing each
other about how much the Prime Minister's "authority" has been
reduced. They were at it this week over the withdrawal of Brown's
plan to reform MPs' expenses. They used to do it to Tony Blair when
he was at bay over the cash for honours investigation, but they
didn't laugh at him. Blair was spared the added humiliation of
YouTube ridicule.
You know it is over when black is reported as white. When everything
is fitted to the template of retreat, disarray and incompetence. Just
a small example from this week: David Blunkett, the former Home
Secretary, repeated his ingenious plan to make identity cards more
palatable by making it compulsory for everyone to have a passport.
This was reported as Blunkett, "the father of identity cards",
calling for the scheme to be scrapped.
We have been here before. In fact, we have been here twice in living
memory. James Callaghan and John Major seemed similarly doomed,
especially in retrospect, as they limped towards their conclusions -
in Callaghan's case 30 years ago this Sunday. But Callaghan retained
his dignity and not even Major cut so miserable a figure as Brown
does now.
Those were "sea change" moments. Although we should be wary of
granting sly Sunny Jim the excuse that he was up against the
inevitable: his observation that there are times when it "does not
matter what you say or what you do" concealed his regret that he had
not gone to the country the previous autumn when he could conceivably
have held on against Margaret Thatcher.
There is always something you can do. Major probably should have
stood down, as he briefly consulted close colleagues about doing,
immediately after the collapse of his ERM policy. Michael Heseltine
might have swashed some buckle and gone to the country. Brown could
stand down now, as even Paul Routledge, his formerly sympathetic
biographer, suggested last week, and let someone else try to limit
the Conservative gains at the election. Routledge and I, who have not
agreed on much for a decade and a half, agree that Alan Johnson is
Labour's best hope.
I think it is worth a try, from a Labour point of view, even if it
succeeds only in cutting the Conservative majority - and the current
state of the betting markets points to a majority for David Cameron
of 62. Some Labour people don't see the point. Their unspoken belief
is that the next election is a write-off, so the party might as well
get used to a long period in the wilderness.
This is sea-change thinking, otherwise known as giving up. My view is
that it is worse than unwise; it is a mistake. It is based on a
fallacy, namely that Labour will have been in office for 13 years and
before that the Tories were in for 18, so whoever wins the election
will occupy Downing Street for a long stretch.
On the contrary, it seems more likely that we really are back to the
Seventies, in the sense of alternating parties in government and
inconclusive elections. To be brutal, the next election is a good one
to lose. The state of the public finances is such that, if the
Conservatives win, as Cameron told his party's spring forum in
Cheltenham on Sunday, they will be "in an age when we're asking
people to put up with tax rises and spending cuts to pay for Labour's
debt crisis". Note that he said tax rises and spending cuts, because
I'm not sure that his audience in the hall heard him.
When the Tory members find out - after, say, George Osborne's third
tax-raising Budget - they are not going to be pleased. Nor will the
British voters be. Cameron can talk the New Labour talk of difficult
choices but when it falls to him actually to make some we are not
going to like it. So it is quite possible that, if the Conservatives
win next year's election, they will be unpopular quite quickly. It is
not as if the electorate are even under any illusion, as they were
when Blair came in with a 93 per cent approval rating, that Cameron
represents a "new politics".
Provided the Labour Party does not fall apart - and it is not divided
by anything like the quasi-Marxism that afflicted it in 1981 or the
issue of Europe that split the Tories after 1992 - general elections
promise to be competitive again. So things are bad for Brown, but
this is not a sea change. There is certainly nothing inevitable about
a long period of Conservative government. Indeed, we could be heading
for a long period of hung parliaments. Yesterday was the right day
for Nick Clegg to shine.
===============================
THE SUN 30.4.09
Will the last young family to leave Britain for Australia or New
Zealand please turn out the lights
by Kelvin Mackenzie
[Quite mad - but I know how he feels! -cs]
I CAN'T remember when I last felt like this. It's probably the best
part of three decades ago. I detest this Government with my heart and
soul and have literally begun to hate the Prime Minister.
For a decade he pocketed our hard work. Slowly, secretly, but without
hesitation he stuck up our taxes. All the time he took credit for the
global boom, never once criticising the bankers, the private equity
guys or the hedgies. [That's because he was urging them on. He even
sweet-talked Lloyds-TSB which was then perfectly sound into buying
the basket-case HBOS, thus making them both insolvent -cs]
He loved them because they paid huge taxes and he was able to conduct
his Scottish social experiment of giving money away to the useless
and the layabouts, making sure that the great unwashed would vote
Labour for ever.
With our vaults deserted thanks to his profligacy, the economic
tsunami hits us and then it becomes a global phenomenon.
His solution is to borrow even more, knowing, of course, he is going
to be thrown out in a massive humiliation next June. [May, actually -
cs] But then it will be Cameron's problem.
Perhaps that's considered, in his twisted little obscene world, to be
clever politics. But perhaps I could remind you, Mr Brown, that it's
OUR money and OUR future you're playing with, not yours.
Well, it's time to do something about it. Normally I would advocate
going up to No 10 and punching him firmly on the nose, but if you
have a family and are under 40 years of age could I urge you to take
another course - desert our country as swiftly as you can and head
for Australia or New Zealand and a new life.
After all, we won't have paid the debts run up by the socialist
swindlers until 2032, so the only thing you will be missing is
rubbing shoulders with the thick and the skint.
The following jobs will get you the points needed for a visa -
mechanics, engineers, nurses, physios, teachers, doctors, cabinet
makers and chefs. Go on to visabureau.com for an explanation of the
points system and what you have to do next. Personally, I think I
would favour New Zealand and you are a certainty to get in if you
choose to live in any other area except Auckland.
Australia has tightened up its immigration rules of late but it is
still looking for 115,000 new immigrants and they do like us Brits.
There are 1.3million expats out there so you will be well at home.
Revolting
I know Perth reasonably well and would urge you to go there rather
than Sydney.
There's plenty of work, the beaches are incredible and, if anything,
it's slightly too hot, but there's a rather nice breeze called the
Freemantle Doctor.
Renting is cheaper than over here except in the better parts of
Sydney and Melbourne.
Such a move will upset your parents, but what with email, mobile
phones and the low cost of flying you'll probably hear and see more
of each other than you do at the moment.
Now is the time to get away. The country, thanks exclusively to the
lying and revolting Brown, is broke and is likely to stay that way
for many years.
Why hang around and watch the country go further into decline?
Cameron will do his best but he can only do so much.
Personally I will miss you because you think like me. You don't want
state handouts, you simply want to do your work, come home and be
with your family without the state constantly looking over your
shoulder or stealing 50 per cent of your money.
Let's keep in touch, but promise me you'll make a break for the open
skies. I'll be thinking of you and wishing I was young enough to have
done the same.
If you see a bald bloke at the airport selling the Big Issue, give
him a smile - it's me.
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