2:40pm: So far, Brown is trying to lay out a third way between equality of outcome and opportunity pitching New Labour as the party of aspiration and community.
Brown’s delivery is relaxed and confident and he is managing, just, not to talk in his trademark machine gun blasts.
2:45pm Brown talks about a 10 year plan for education and how every student leaving school at 18 will now have a qualification. Low-income pupils will be financed from 16 through to the end of their university degree. This, says Brown, will be a symbol of a society not divided by class but united by aspiration. Aspiration and talent are clearly the words of the day; carefully chosen, one imagines, to appeal to Middle Britain.
2:50pm Weakest part of the speech so far as Brown tries to implicitly attack Tory plans to reward marriage in the tax system. He quotes a Bible verse but it doesn’t come out quite right.
2:55pm Brown has clearly been told to make this personal. He keeps referring to his role as a parent. Pledge to restore the link between earnings and pensions gets the biggest applause so far.
3:00pm He might not be Chancellor anymore but he still loves rattling off these cherry picked economic statistics. He now wants full employment within a generation, but that seems to be an aspiration not a pledge.
Britain to be a world leader in nuclear, that’s a strong endorsement of nuclear power. I thought the government consultation was still going on!
3:05pm Brown is setting the Tories up over housing, calling on councils of all stripes to accept the need for more housing.
On gun crime, a string of crowd pleasing initiatives and a very tough message on drugs: they will never be decriminalised.
3:10pm I’ve been saying for ages that Brown won’t go this autumn. But the speech certainly sounds like he is planning to go. Here comes another populist line about taking the licenses away from places that sell drink to the under-aged.
The rights and responsibilities agenda gets an outing. His passage on immigration is breath-taking and is rounded with a nasty, cheap, populist line about kicking out immigrants who sell drugs to our children. It is cheap demagoguery and not worthy of his office. But the audience clap anyway.
3:15pm Brown will write Britain’s red lines into the EU treaty. The Blair tribute comes in the section on the Middle East and Northern Ireland. But I think the applause for Kinnock was louder.
3:20pm He rushes through Iraq and Afghanistan. Then on to his plans for a global right to schooling and a paragraph of sub-Kennedyesque rhetoric (which sounded like it came from the pen of Bob Shrum) about vaccinating people in every country. His emphasis on common humanity here just highlights the cynicism of his comment on immigrants.
3:25pm He talks of a personal NHS and plans for a regular check up for every adult. Again this all sounds like the kind of proposals that have been thought up to form the basis of a crunchy election manifesto. Rounded off with another very personal section about his own experiences with the NHS.
3:30 Ends with a strong passage about how he’ll always fight for the British people.
My immediate reaction is that it was a strong speech and one that sets him up very nicely if he does want to go this autumn; he really is a gourmand in his appetite for political territory. Notably, no direct attacks on either the Tories or the Lib Dems. The bar has been set high for Cameron, but if there is one thing that even his shrillest critics admit that he can do it is deliver a speech.
Comments