Home > The Magazine > The Week

Saturday 22 November 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Politics

What’s so special about 2020? Brownism is all about postponement

Fraser Nelson

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

Gordon Brown lacks urgency and only picks fights that he knows he can win.

For these reasons, the Prime Minister may postpone a battle on civil liberties. He seems keen to postpone a battle on anything: from the general election to the European Union referendum. Postponing battles is fast becoming the essence of Brownism. That is why Jacqui Smith, his Home Secretary, says she does not know what the correct limit on detention without charge should be — she wants to launch consultation, thereby striking a stylistic change from Mr Blair’s approach. This absence of urgency is evident in much that Mr Brown says and does. Brownism is to be found in things that are not yet happening more readily than things that actually are.

The Labour MPs who are impatiently asking to see the ‘vision’ which Mr Brown has promised to lay out must now consider an unpalatable truth. It is already lying before them. It is in this mosaic of micro-initiatives, a promise not so much of ‘jam tomorrow’ but of ‘jam by 2020’. It is a vision that has as its founding principle avoiding conflict where victory is not guaranteed. The MPs who had grown used to the Blair-style boldness must reconcile themselves to a more humdrum future. This may very well be as good as it gets.

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

More articles from: Fraser Nelson | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (1)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Scary Biscuis

November 10th, 2007 12:45pm

In the shadowy but nontheless real, Labour leadership election last year John Reid said that if Gordon Brown had policy suprises then he should let people know what they are. The argument being that people could then judge his policies and 'vision' on its merits. Back then, the fear was that people wouldn't like his dashing new policies. Yes, the Bank independence was a nice surprise but others in the same style may not be so ammenable. Now, the slowly dawning terror is that the real reason that Brown kept his ideas so secret wasn't because he was afraid of them being copied but simply because he didn't have any.

A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.