Britannia Radio

I’ve said it before and I’ve quoted enough commentators who agree.  Now here’s the former BBC business editor putting the boot in!  Gordon Brown has clearly lost his marbles! 

Christina

TELEGRAPH         3.7.09 

Gordon Brown's attack on Tory cuts has backfired in spectacular fashion

Labour is in retreat as voters see through its public-spending propaganda and zero per cent spending rise, says Jeff Randall.

"My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted"

– Mark Twain

.

Smell the burning rubber; hear the screeching brakes. Watch in awe as the wheels fly off and the chassis crumples. Then avert your eyes, because the final crash is ugly. As the Prime Minister's bandwagon of deceit slams into a wall of immovable realities, the Government's casualties are piling up. Crushed in the wreckage are the careers and self-regard of Labour ministers who did not see it coming. It never occurred to them that the driver would lose control of their carriage. But he has – and there's no escape.

When Andrew Lansley, the shadow health minister, admitted recently that cuts in public spending of about 10 per cent would be required in order to restore sanity to the nation's finances, while protecting Tory commitments to the NHS and aid programmes, Mr Brown and his fawning minders became excited. This was the moment, or so they thought, to brand Labour as "investors" and the Tories as "cutters". Never mind the quality of analysis, feel the width of an opportunity to brainwash unknowing voters with megaphone politics.

Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, who, despite a Cambridge education, appears to be in need of remedial tuition, blurted out his leader's tactic: "Today, Mr Lansley let the cat out of the bag… today, Mr Cameron became 'Mr 10 Per Cent', and we will hang that around his neck until the next election." The message of "mean Tories" versus "munificent Labour" would be thrashed out daily, until it was established as fact in the minds of a bewildered electorate.

This follows Mr Brown's strict adherence to the first rule of propaganda: dehumanise the enemy. Make them seem like monsters. If, for instance, they oppose unlimited immigration, brand them as racists. Should they talk about reforming education, label them as toffs. And when it comes to protecting the taxpayer from scandalous abuse, portray every penny saved as butchery of the welfare state. Why not? After all, it has worked before. At the last election, Conservative proposals to reduce the growth of government spending by £4 billion (at the time, the entire Budget was about £500 billion) were shamelessly dressed up as an assault on schools and hospitals.

It is as though Twain's frivolous essay, On the Decay of the Art of Lying, has been embraced by Downing Street as political gospel: "No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances – the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying… What I bemoan is the growing prevalence of the brutal truth. Let us do what we can to eradicate it."

Unfortunately for Mr Brown, amid all the dissembling and inexactitudes, he and his little helpers – Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper  [Mr & Mrs Balls! -cs] – appear to have overlooked the second and third rules of propaganda: that it should not look or sound like propaganda; and never believe your own propaganda. This error is proving disastrous for its perpetrators.

Their attack on Tory plans for a more responsible budget has backfired spectacularly. For, instead of undermining David Cameron's claim to a caring Conservatism, it has invited academics, the City and the media to scrutinise Mr Brown's insistence that (in the unlikely event of the party winning a fourth term) Labour will keep state spending on an upward curve.

Few, it seems, accept a word of it. John Kay, Oxford don and founder of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and one of the country's most respected economists, told me on Sky News that spending cuts by a re-elected Labour administration would be unavoidable. "Spending has got to go down and taxes as a proportion of national income must go up. There's absolutely no way of avoiding that as the central truth," the professor said.

As Mervyn King, the Bank of England's Governor, becomes ever bolder in his implied criticism of Government profligacy, the view among Threadneedle Street insiders is that by this time next year, the United Kingdom will be facing either Conservative cuts or Labour cuts. Worse still for Mr Brown, this cool assessment is recognised by the public. Taxi drivers, shopkeepers, cleaners, factory workers, builders and millions of other ordinary people who are braced for hard times understand that the state's binge cannot go on.

And where is the Chancellor in all this? As the man with the shovel, battling with his predecessor's dungheap, Alistair Darling appears to be in no hurry to shore up the boss's credibility. Instead, he is putting the finishing touches to a hybrid White/Green Paper that will reflect on the banking collapse and propose improvements to regulation. While stopping short of criticising the flaws in Mr Brown's tripartite system, the report is expected to leave us in no doubt that the Prime Minister's regulatory edifice failed miserably.

"Fear," said John Adams, second president of the United States, "is the foundation of most governments." In the case of modern Britain, it is more like panic, caused by a fundamental disconnection between common sense and the First Lord of the Treasury's fantastic numbers. Which helps explain why, against all his political instincts, the Prime Minister has been forced this week to begin manipulating the texture of Labour's promises.

As if nobody would notice, key words are being replaced by more subtle substitutes. This is subversion by semantics, the politics of Animal Farm. From the Snowball guide to language and meaning, Mr Brown's hard-and-fast guarantees are now "aims", public spending commitments become "estimates" and the delivery of front-line services gets attached to several big "ifs", including the generation of growth and finding efficiencies.

What we are witnessing is an inelegant retreat. No apology, of course. No admission of failure. Nothing vulgar, like humility or contrition. Just a cynical slip-sliding away from the main plank of Mr Brown's message in last month's local and European elections: "It is vital that people realise they face a choice between our commitment to investment and the Tories' commitment to cuts."

Having been rejected by voters, the vacuity of that proposition was exposed with comedic brilliance by the Prime Minister himself in the Commons on Wednesday. By admitting that "total spending will continue to rise, and it will be a zero per cent rise in 2013-14", he gave us another of those YouTube moments for which his blunder-prone stewardship is deservedly earning a reputation.

For someone who was once the master of the selective statistic, Mr Brown has completely lost his touch. As he bumbled through the rest of his answer, the looks on the faces of his pom-pom girls, Harriet Harman and Tessa Jowell, were priceless: unbridled horror. Their days are numbered.