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
Brown’s genius, after his 1988 Commons success, was to ostensibly abandon caring for his old world — Scotland’s uneconomic coal mines and decrepit linoleum factories — and invent a new ideology to secure Labour’s election victory. Holidaying every summer in Cape Cod, he found the political answer from Democrats working with Bill Clinton. ‘We want to offer a hand up, not a handout,’ was Bill Clinton’s memorable soundbite appropriated by Brown to combine socialism with the political necessity of appealing to the middle classes. Regardless of whether Brown actually understood Clinton’s economics, New Labour’s success depended on a perpetual economic boom offering a bit of everything to everyone behind a screen of obfuscation and concealment.
Changing Labour’s gods, Brown calculated, could only be done piecemeal. So, while he criticised the class whose support he was seeking — the capitalists who in 1992 he condemned as ‘doing well out of the recession’ — he disingenuously taxed and borrowed to finance a boom to help his real constituents: the underclasses, state employees, the unemployed and immigrants. To reassure Labour’s own critics of his Thatcherite policies, he punctually reasserted his socialist faith on education, the NHS and the state. His shocking distortions about Laura Spence’s rejected application to Oxford in 2000 ranks among his more benign attempts to reconcile his genuine socialism and his opportunism to keep Labour electable. Now, seeking to save Labour from oblivion in 2010, he will be tempted to return to 1988 and rehash his abuse of ‘free market dogma’. To rely on a socialist to restore healthy capitalism would be foolhardy, but Brown will seek reassuring sentiments to confuse his critics and avoid an obvious trap.
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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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