Brown to Britain: "Crisis? Which crisis?!"

8 December 2007

When Jim Callaghan, the last Labour Prime Minister to lose a British general election, returned from an overseas summit in sunny climes to widespread winter turmoil back in Blighty, he was reported to have asked: “Crisis? What crisis?”.

While this is not yet in the Norman Lamont territory (a horrific minus 57) straight after Black Wednesday, it is well on the way. An MSL poll found Labour had gone from being 30 points ahead of the Tories on the economy at the last election to being in a dead heat. On the question of who has the best ideas, the Tories have a double-digit advantage. Among the under 25s, Labour is 16 points behind; so much for the idea that Mr Brown would renew the Labour party. During the decade in which Mr Brown coveted his neighbour’s job, Blairites whispered that the then Chancellor only wanted power for the sake of it, that he had no plans for what to do with it. At the time, this seemed like unfair factional sniping; after all, Mr Brown’s phenomenal appetite for ideas and new thinking is well known and he has always been guided by strong moral and political principles. As his supporters used to say: “Tony reads pamphlets, Gordon reads books.”

But more than six months into the Brown premiership and we have not seen one big, thought-through idea from the Prime Minister. There has only been positioning designed to appeal to specific groups of the electorate and newspapers – reversals on supercasinos and on liberal approaches to drink and drugs to help attract the Daily Mail and social conservatives; a retreat from public service reform to appeal to the Left and the unions; and a string of reheated announcements (“Reheated Brownies” as Westminster now calls them) designed to target a myriad of interest groups and make Mr Brown feel more comfortable to Middle England.

Not only is Mr Brown not taking the country forward, he is moving it backwards. By the end of his tenure, Tony Blair had enacted some modest but meaningful reforms of public services. These had been greatly watered down due to the opposition of unreconstructed Labour backbenchers – opposition stoked by Mr Brown’s henchmen, Ed Balls and his ilk; but they were at least steps on the way to creating more modern and effective public services liberated from the dead hand of central control.