Brown has come full circle since 1988
1 November 2008
Tom Bower, the Prime Minister’s biographer, says that Gordon’s reinvention as the socialist who can save capitalism is just the latest in a series of convenient masks he has donned
Retreating to Scotland to mull his party’s continuing unpopularity, Brown is searching among his roots for salvation. Reinventing Labour’s ‘philosophy’ became Brown’s cause after 1988 and accelerated after Labour’s defeat in 1992. ‘I must come up with some big ideas,’ he told friends, and concocted New Labour. The ideology never changes, only the salesman’s vocabulary.
The story of Brown’s transformation from Christian socialist to capitalist suggests that his cure for Britain’s plight will be an edging endorsement of the only ideology he admires — state socialism sugared with Biblical aphorisms. Fixated by the sermons uttered from his father’s pulpit, the Scottish creed of collectivism and government interference is embedded in Brown’s soul. Only sophisticated opportunism silenced his affection for the values of Jimmy Maxton, the Scottish Marxist whose life Brown chronicled as a graduate. Twenty years ago, before he brilliantly contrived New Labour’s embrace of capitalism, his ideological colours were brazen.
In 1988, Brown railed against the ‘unfettered market’, cursed Thatcher’s ‘promoting the self-improvement of the poor’ and opposed her ‘weaning of the poor from welfare’. Consumed by ‘the rottenness of Thatcherism’, he wrote Where There Is Greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future. Caustically, he attacked the proposed privatisation of prisons, air traffic control and London Transport as a sinful plot orchestrated by ‘the enthusiasms of an extremist tendency too young to care’. He paraded a ‘vision for the new world’ to replace the Tory’s ‘bleak, gigantic marketplace of self-seekers, each in lonely competition with each other’. Only the state, Brown argued, could save the poor and regulate the markets. Contrast all that with Brown’s speech to the Mansion House last year when he eulogised London’s ‘light-touch regulation’. Now, as Brown exhorts return to regulation, few can identify the Prime Minister’s ideology. His success and survival has been built on astounding flip flops.
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The Laughing Cavalier
October 30th, 2008 1:23pm Report this commentWe're doomed.
Michael St George
October 31st, 2008 2:18pm Report this commentA brilliant piece, comprehensively cataloguing Brown’s litany of deviousness, mendaciousness, obfuscation, and unrestrained statism, backed with sheer economic illiteracy of breathtaking proportions, over many years. As I have posted before, this man is an unreconstructed Marxist viper, fully signed up to the Gramscian-Marcusian project, and will wreck this country even as he gloats over the developing wreckage.
It must be political aeons since such an easy target was available. That the alleged Opposition are only now even starting to attempt a critique of this deeply flawed authoritarian socialist and the pernicious philosophy he espouses, and are struggling to articulate one, simply beggars belief.
During the banking crisis and subsequent forced bank nationalisations, Brown was allowed to pose unchallenged as the saviour of the world in undertaking an extension of state control unprecedented since the post-1945 election, and beyond anything Labour would have dared to include in a manifesto. The situation cried out for a forensic demolition of Brown and Darling’s past policies, a vigorous repudiation of their future remedies, and a strident defence of capitalism and a more effectively regulated free market. Yet Call Me Dave Camera-On and Boy George appeared to resemble nothing so much as a rabbit trapped in the headlights with nothing to say and not a clue what to do next.
Camera-On’s polls lead has duly been slashed. Brown has been allowed to re-habilitate himself. It gives me no pleasure at all to say it, but this will go down as the month in which the Conservatives lost the next election.
Michael St George
October 31st, 2008 2:32pm Report this commentA brilliant piece, comprehensively cataloguing Brown’s litany of deviousness, mendaciousness, obfuscation, and unrestrained statism, backed with sheer economic illiteracy of breathtaking proportions, over many years. As I have posted before, this man is an unreconstructed Marxist viper, fully signed up to the Gramscian-Marcusian project, and will wreck this country even as he gloats over the developing wreckage.
It must be political aeons since such an easy target was available. That the alleged Opposition are only now even starting to attempt a critique of this deeply flawed authoritarian socialist and the pernicious philosophy he espouses, and are struggling to articulate one, simply beggars belief.
During the banking crisis and subsequent forced bank nationalisations, Brown was allowed to pose unchallenged as the saviour of the world in undertaking an extension of state control unprecedented since the post-1945 election, and beyond anything Labour would have dared to include in a manifesto. The situation cried out for a forensic demolition of Brown and Darling’s past policies, a vigorous repudiation of their future remedies, and a strident defence of capitalism and a more effectively regulated free market. Yet Call Me Dave Camera-On and Boy George appeared to resemble nothing so much as a rabbit trapped in the headlights with nothing to say and not a clue what to do next.
Camera-On’s polls lead has duly been slashed. Brown has been allowed to re-habilitate himself. It gives me no pleasure at all to say it, but this will go down as the month in which the Conservatives lost the next election.
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