Gordon Brown is not that bad Part 3There are many things to blame Gordon Brown for. I need to take a few paragraphs to list them.
He sold off gold at too cheap a price. He failed to see the perfectly predictable end of an unsustainable housing boom and to lay precautions against it. He failed to fix and safeguard the national insurance fund (instead, he plundered it), to neuter and then roll back the private finance initiative, or to create a sustainable pensions system.
He actually deepened the culture of mortgaging government business and public goods to the medium term to get short-term fixes. He undermined his own government, and encouraged a very heavy form of statism and class consciousness in education, whilst encouraging inefficient public-private monopolies elsewhere.
Yet he did some good. His Millennium bonds initiative, and bilateral write off of debt helped eliminate a modern scourge, even if it was quickly replaced by others which began in Africa. I know that 'Brown's' initiative was in fact just one in which he participated, along with a commodity boom, fiscal self-help and access to global financial markets, but he deserves credit even for that.
He kept Britain out of the euro, though if the UK had joined and blown it up, the outcome may have been better for everyone. He killed off supercasinos.
I'm prompted to write because Brown is now being blamed for just about everything. Political reporting in this country is craven at the best of times. To read the political press, however, is to leave oneself feeling as though you'd just waded through piles of premillenialist rage and fear.
Brown is, apparently, guilty of leading Labour to it's death throes. He alone is responsible for the collapse of public confidence from the heights of the 2005 election, in which Tony Blair won a stunning 22% of the electorate to his cause. Brown is responsible for the rise of the Scottish National Party, the 'embarrassment' of John McCain by supporting Obama (as though either cared or noticed) and Britain's impotence in the face of a resurgent Russia.
What rubbish.
I was in the Labour party for twenty years. I could name quite a few people of the sort which made me want to disassociate myself from it.
People like Mary Honeyball 'MEP' don't like Catholics being ministers and want to use Labour for an anti-catholic platform. She's representative, and millions of voters would know it even if she laboured in even greater obscurity, because they've met her like. This is at the same time as Honeyball sits in a 'Parliament' which costs well over a billion a year having been appointed to it from a list of party hacks.
People like councillor Luke Akehurst, who is perfectly representative, want to allow the police to have the power to throw me in prison for over 42 days without charge.
Incidentally, I am prepared to believe Akehurst is being honest in the matter, but I find the proposals obnoxious and all too reminiscent of South Africa's desperate campaigns against 'little pink liberalists'. Why not allow people to be charged and questioned afterward?
People like Oliver Kamm, who is I suspect perfectly sincere in his self-description as 'of the left' (and I can see that there is an Islamic threat to the west too) seem to want a war without end in the name of democracy, as though liberty were something associated with the fourth crusade. On point of fact, I don't think Kamm is a Labour member but he endorsed Blair often and enthusiastically before migrating to the Times to write pieces about how the likes of his family members should get more public subsidy, and reviews of things he had read disguised as opinions.
People like Harriet Harman want to create a 'right' to abort entities which a dog in the street could recognise as a child after 12 weeks, to demonise and smear anyone who disagrees as unbalanced, and to impose the practice on Northern Ireland contemptuously as well as across England.
Meanwhile, lightweight glove puppets like David Milliband appoint fantasy cabinets made up of advertising executives they have met whilst truckling to a big-oil militarist agenda when it comes to Russia, and leak diplomatic conversations. An incompetent former 'radical' hack who helped ruin councils and who even the Financial Times describes as a privileged former Trotskyite can't get a grip on the principles of finance, and Margaret Hodge, Joan Ruddock and Jack Straw--despite Islington child abuse scandals, the nonsense of CND, and the Thorpe affair--are still prominent Labour figures.
At the more junior level, ministers continue to use the state to hound fathers of children whose marriages have broken up, some near lunacy; to cultivate jobs for themselves with private 'consultants' in the future, and to press ahead with ID card schemes. 'Environmentalists' prove their Gaian faith by forcing recyling--which turns out to be a way of dumping rubbish in third world landfills--on everyone. And everyone sucks up to a bunch of tyrants, gangsters and murderous criminals masquerading as 'Palestinians'.
Yes, I know that the man at the top takes the blame. He is accountable. But Gordon Brown is not responsible for all this. Others are. It is they who will bury the husk of the Labour Party. Look around. Joe Gormley and his like are gone, and since his passing god hasn't smiled on Labour votes, even if the electoral apathy of four million tories and the Liberal Democrats' concentration of pluralities put Tony Blair in on an historically small vote. Why would any union member worth his salt in a position of leadership not reach out to anyone other than the government to help his members?
I wanted to say all that before the abomination of the Human Embryology and Fertilisation bill comes into prominence and everyone pigeonholes discontent as 'catholic', though sacrificing things like the catholic orphanage services to political correctness is another hobby horse of those currently blaming Brown for what they have done.
I am not voting from here on in. This state is rotten and what passes for the government is going to have to answer for its supporters, and not its oddly buttoned up and stubborn, but probably decent, leader when the history books are written.
Comments
That's no criticism of you, although I rarely agree with your opinion - but just that I can't see why you would have wanted to join Labour in the first place. I would certainly never vote for a party advocating your views.
I didn't need ideology in corby and nor did those around me; they needed jobs, homes, decent schools that taught proper subjects, families, and the chance to live a life marked by something other than a mix of desperation and narcissism that suited Tories who were themselves living like that in their heads. They didn't need irrational green nonsense that made middle class people and the tragically angry from mediocre universities feel engaged with a world whose inhabitants the same people distrusted.
The problem is, Labour is too full of people with no manners who think they own decency by asserting an ideologically illiterate commitment to progress that somehow seems to exclude guild socialism, libertarianism, a sense of communitarian value, common ground, courtesy, or any sort of due process and which is also fairly exclusively urban.
Avec mes sentiments distingues, etc etc
www.HarrietHarmanSucks.Com
It is certainly a non-marxist party, but has to be more than a working class party, simply because there are now no longer enough people in that category to make such a party viable. In any case. Labour has always been something of a coalition, in which methodism was more influential than catholicism, although certainly that religion has left its own stamp of boss politics and corruption on Liverpool Labour. Militant were something of a mirror image of the catholic right, and shared many values and beliefs, too.
I don't perceive Labour as being particularly 'green', but as you appear to be amongst the minority of climate change deniers, it doesn't surprise me that you aim that critique at them as well.
As for those other influences, they have always been part of the labour coalition, but in a couple of cases, notably guild socialism, not a particularly dominant force. Libertarianism and communitarianism are not particularly compatible bedfellows either, although Labour has ( and had) elements of both in its make-up.
It is certainly the case that Labour is predominantly an urban party. other than some success in rural Norfolk in the days of the agricultural workers union's heyday, Labour has never represented the values of the English countryside, which are well reflected in the Tory tradition, with liberalism as the radical alternative.