There’s a seductive narrative emerging that places all the blame for Labour’s problems on Gordon Brown’s personal and presentational failings. It has obvious appeal to those Labour MPs who believe that if Brown would go all would be well and to our personality-driven media. But as Matt writes in The Sunday Telegraph, “It is certainly an epic delusion to imagine that the removal of Mr Brown and his instant replacement by A N Other would do the trick.”
The truth is that Labour has been directionless for quite a while now. Tony Blair had towards the end of his premiership a clear idea of where he wanted to take the country next, but his party wouldn’t let him go there. For example, on education what the 2005 white paper proposed was truly radical but by the time it had passed into law it had been diluted almost beyond recognition to appease its Labour critics.
Nothing, though, has emerged to replace the Blair agenda. Brown has been Prime Minister for almost a year now and I cannot, off the top of my head, think of one major policy reform that he has undertaken. It seems that there are no ideas in the locker either. The Sunday Times quotes one senior Labour figure thus “The political cabinet was awful. The tank is empty.”
To be sure, Brown’s flaws are compounding Labour’s problems and the voters do, as Fraser notes in his News of the World column, have a passionate desire to give him a kicking. But Labour can not recover until it has an agenda, a vision to offer voters. Until it does, changing leader will, at best, be about minimising its loses.
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