Brown has come full circle since 1988
29 October 2008
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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
In the coming instalment of the Miraculous Reinvention, Brown will offer new buzz words. We have had ‘prudent’, ‘decisive’, ‘bold’, ‘fairness’ and ‘values’. The money must be on Brown digging out Harold Wilson’s mantra of a ‘new agenda for investment by innovation and modernisation’. In 1992, Brown wrote the Labour manifesto, ‘It’s Time To Get Britain Working Again’. Within that failed prospectus was Brown’s scathing reprimand for the ‘Tory’s trust in simplistic market answers’. A lot of fingernails will be chewed as Brown reworks the vocabulary to represent himself as the socialist who can simultaneously save and control capitalism, just as he tried after 1988. A nation imperilled by Brown’s credit boom will soon be hammered by Brown’s socialist cure.
Gordon Brown: Prime Minister by Tom Bower is published by HarperPerennial (£8.99).
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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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