How do I feel about Gordon Brown's resignation as Prime Minister and party leader? Ambiguous, I think. When he and Blair took over the Labour Party, I already distrusted Blair, but hoped that Gordon's background in proper Scottish socialism would keep the party honest.
On that, I was totally wrong. As Chancellor, Brown seemed to see it as his duty to make the Labour Party safe for bankers, speculators and associated charlatans. Pension contribution holidays continued, regulation was almost abolished, tax rates on banks, hedge funds and speculators were slashed (hedge fund traders pay tax of 18%: their cleaners pay 20%). The eocnomy was run on the fantasy maths of the city while manufacturing was allowed to die. Brown supported every rightwing dream of the authoritarian Fabian faction - illegal wars, ID cards, nuclear weapons, the lot. He saved the economy after the crash, without a doubt, but he saved capitalism rather than saving us, because he long ago lost his ideological and moral compass.
And yet, and yet. There's a personal tragedy here. I don't care about the gibe that he was never elected as PM: nor was John Major or Margaret Thatcher. Nobody is, technically: he's elected as an MP and the biggest party chooses. The tragedy is the way in which an intelligent, passionate and committed man sold his soul for power, then found himself unable to wield that power effectively. The struggle to succeed broke him, distorted him, hollowed him out. Sometimes, we're told, he's a loving, jolly man in private. Perhaps, and perhaps he'd have won and governed well.
Let's not forget, too, that he suffered the misery of a dead child, yet had to continue in office and political life as though it had no effect. A few years ago, a Swedish prime minister took time off for depression. How sad that our own political system is so staggeringly immature that a period of mourning and recovery would have been depicted as weakness. Sad, too, that his near-blindness and partial deafness were points of mockery.
I'm sorry for him on a personal level, and I'm sad that a man with such potential wasted it all. The cliché is that all political careers end in failure. For poor Gordon, his started in the same way. He's both brilliant at small politics (you don't get to be PM without eating a lot of rubber chicken and burying plenty of daggers in friends' backs) and useless at big politics: tone deaf when it comes to public opinion (e.g. the 10p tax, and ID cards) and incapable of communicating effectively ('bigot-gate').
Will Britain and the world be better off without him? I wish it were so, but I see no heavyweight intellectual in the Labour Party - the Cabinet is a collection of bitter losers and degenerate children of Blair, obsessed with presentation and power, yet lacking principle. John McDonnell for PM!
Steve Bell's election morning cartoon
1 comment:
I think Brown suffered at the hands of the media. The sad truth is that whatever someones merits or otherwise as an administrator/public servant what really counts is how media friendly an individual is. Brown would always be a failiure in this respect next to Blair and it's interesting that analogies were made during the election to Michael Foot who also suffered from an inability to be adored by the press pack.
Tghe irony is that whilst Tony was jetting round the globe Gordon was actually running the domestic side of things as soon as he was pushed in front of the cameras it all went horribly wrong. I agree with you about his policies but, how many people took this into account when voting rather than follow a gut feeling implanted by the media.
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