Is Brown's global mission dehumanising him?

Susan Hill

He sees himself as a Great International Leader to whom Obama will look for guidance. That much is clear. While his mind is on Higher Things he is happy to let Ballsup and Mendancityson worry about the trivia like unemployment.

darsielatimer

So which office leaked this, Balls' or Mandelson's?

Sally Chatterjee

We certainly need a new international framework for finance but these things take years to negotiate, you need to set some officials and perhaps a junior minister on the case for a couple of years before the PM flies in to seal the deal.

In other words, Brown is just beginning a long and slow process.

If you lose your house this month or find your factory closes in April, you won't take any comfort to know Brown sees rejigging the IMF as more important than domestic matters.

A Highland Cow Chewing the Cud

''Is Brown's global mission dehumanising him?''

He was never human in the first place, he's an automaton.

cuffleyburgers

"people want a friend not a calculator" - er no actually, they would like a competent prime minister capable of something better than throwing our money uselessly onto the biggest bonfire in History.

I cannot think of a problem so trivial that brown could possibly be a part of the solution.

Obnoxio The Clown

In order to dehumanise someone, they have to be human first, don't they?

Jim

How bad do Brown's delusions of adequacy have to be for his own party to do the humane thing and gently take him to one side and out of harms way...?

Ignoring for the moment the terrible damage this has done and is doing to our country, how embarrassing does this "I'm saving the world" preening and posturing have to get before someone calls time...?

Helen

I think that's it. Who gives a damn about Obama outside the Westminster Village and a few Guardian readers? It just looks totally desperate running on to a world stage to run away from domestic problems.

As to Ed Balls, don't you love his abandonment of the schools lottery system, piloted first in Brighton, a Labour seat in the south. Ed, mate, I know all the bohemian twerps in Brighton read The Guardian but you don't think they'd actually want to live under socialism, do you?

Oh, yes, you seem to have worked that out now there’s an election due and have dropped the schools lottery system. Nothing to do with being nervous of losing the middle class Guardian vote in Labour seats.

You've got to hand it to them, Brighton's Guardian reading parents and Ed Balls are absolutely shameless. The media, of course, knows all this but never once put it to Balls in his round of interviews on Sunday and Monday. Well… business as usual for the New Labour hacks Jon Snow, Andrew Marr et al.

To the Guardian-reading parents of Brighton whose children have been subjected to the New Labour policies they so affect to support I say ‘now you'll get to see what a Labour 'education' system looks like you ghastly muesli eaters’.

Serves them right.

oldtimer

Just why one of the principal authors of our present catastrophe should be considered to be just the man to find a solution to it is beyond my comprehension.

Maybe Brown will soon be finding himself in a minority of one who believes this within the Cabinet. If so, let us hope the rest have the gumption to rid us of the menace that is Brown and call a general election.

richardl

He still believes there can be no more boom and bust. The quicker all realise that boom and bust is the natural order and move on the better. A childish notion but what else would one expect.

Tiberius

Is Brown a calculator?

If so the batteries ran out sometime in 1994.

Augustus

Brown's inbred arrogance has already dehumanised him and Darling, who may be a numpty, has now to assume the human face of humility.

One by one, each of the laws relating to the operation of finance, both in America and internationally, leading all the way back to the aftermath of the Great Depression, were shredded of all regulation in the drive to appease the growing demand for working class consumption expenditure,
and to sanction sources of finance likely to submerge the working classes in debt for decades to come. This lead to the largest build-up of debt in the US since 1929. In the Great Depression total debt was about 300% of US GDP, in 2008 it reached 350% of GDP. The neo-liberal policies which created it produced a systemically fragile financial superstucture waiting only to implode upon itself when the housing bubble burst. Financial institutions may have been the mice running amok in the barn, but it was the administrators of the nations' financial superstructures which left the door open.

Trumpeter Lanfried

All Prime Ministers eventually succumb to the glamour of international meetings; so much more prestigious and less demanding than the daily grind of managing an unruly cabinet back home. A sort of respite cure. Never does any good, of course.

Will James

Brown's attempts of projecting an image of him as an international statesman, with unparalleled economic experience, reminds me of Richard Nixon's increasingly desperate attempts to portray himself as an indispensable foreign policy guru, as the Watergate crisis enveloped his administration at home.

Compare Brown's desparation of getting his photo next to Obama with Nixon's narcissistic trip to Sadat's Egypt in 1974. Brown's only difference to Nixon is that his 'Watergate' is the prospect of a landslide Conservative victory at the next election.

Bluebottle

I have a feeling that Brown is on a hiding to nothing if he thinks he can get the USA to sign up to some super-national international body that will have some sort of influence or control over US banks or US monetary policy. Is that not the responsibility of Congress-that is to make laws and regulations by which US institutions have to abide?

I'm no expert on the US constitution but I suspect that for the President even to suggest to Congress that they hand over rule making control to an EU like institution which may not have the interests of the US as its primary concern, would be unconstitutional.

Despite his holidays in Cape Cod and his claims to admire America and Americans, I think Brown totally misunderstands them.

TrevorsDen

Huw Edwards pathetic efforts to talk up Browns increasingly pointless visit to Washington continue on BBC.

He interviews a member of the local Washington press pack and is told bluntly that Brown need Obama more than the other way round and even Robinson says Obama is more interested in domestic policy.

Brown still found time to interrupt "Barak" and get his rehearsed sound bite in - 'partnership for purpose' as if it could be for anything else.

Brown looks for all the world like Obama's ... well poodle.

Not that Edwards would ever hint at that.

Hysteria

interesting quote from BO - The prime minister has taken the helm at a difficult time economically" - doh? did his staff not tell him he was the "bloody chancellor?

GB called him Barack once - but picked up that BO always refered to him as "the prime minister" and changed his tack - so he does have some emotional intelligence

but refusal to apologise - closest I heard was " all countries are learning how to deal with a global crisis" - hardly a mea culpa!

Fulsom support from BO for the Special Relationship - he used those words - including praise for the amrmed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq -

The Laughng Cavalier

Type "new world order" into Google and press enter.

Bruce, UK

Fred Goodwin would probably be cheaper to run than any "Global Vision" by that wretched creature Brown.

mckenzie

I have just been watching Brown on the news with Obama. He looked like a girlfriend that was being dumped, jiggling around in his seat, trying his best to snuggle up. You know what what I mean, when you haven't the guts to do the dastardly deed and they keep touching you and telling you they love you: oh the agony!

Mitch

He is Forest Gump without the charm.

jon dee

Brown is beginning to look and sound like a high pressure salesman pushing his "global new deal" to a disinterested world.

His misguided economic evangelism is certainly not helping matters in the UK.

Your headline is a polite statement of fact.

Athesius the Facilitator

I have just watched Browns press conference with the New Messiah. My God! His body language. Eeek! Campbell was right, character flaw, what a sap!

seb

A comment on another site describes Brown as a weird man stranded in perpetual adolescence. The man's a sort of missionary, someone who commits himself, as an adolescent of course, to what he believes is 'saving others'. The sort of personality that drives people to choose this path in life rarely seems entirely human to the rest of us.

David Ossitt

I suppose that one would have to start off as a human being in order to end up dehumanised.

So it is a silly question.