Unnatural Bedfellows

Gordon Brown consorts with power elites and client interest groups wholly inappropriate for a Leader of the Labour party.

The organized denial of any expression of choice in the selection of the Leader in every section of the Labour party's electoral college was oppressive yet illuminating. Voting had to be avoided for:
Who in the trades union sector would support the person responsible for the 10% and less taxation rate levied on some of the richest in the country? The person responsible for giving away control of monetary policy and boasting of it? The person responsible for taxing working people to the point that they have living standards no better than those supported, work -free, from the confiscations of almost half of working people's earnings? The person who constructs morally hazardous rat runs baited with means-tested benefits that distort the lives and hopes of millions? And the person who boasts that membership of the European Union will be stripped of beneficial effect for working people in the UK.

Who, in the constituency party sector, would vote for the person whose infiltration of disciplined Brown faction apparatchiks into every constituency, supported if necessary by influxes of 'affiliated' Union and Co-operative cadres, ensures that parliamentary seats are available for his henchmen, and that all candidates for the Westminster parliament conform to Brown faction parameters? The person responsible for removing all access to choice of issues to be considered at Labour conferences? The person who initiates non-Party 'citizens juries ' in the place of local Party meetings, discussion, and transmission of views and recommendations?

Who, in the parliamentary Labour party, would vote for a person sitting for a Scottish seat, when Scotland has its own parliament and Government, and represent ing no-one in England? For the person who bears personal and petty overpowering grudges against colleagues who disagree? The person recognized as 'uncollegiate' by a fellow senior minister? The person outed as a 'Stalinist control freak' by a senior permanent administrator? The person who has wrecked policy formulation over and over again by setting up private advisory groups and engaging in last minute inputs as other major ministries tried to steer a sensible course for the governance of the country? The person without parliamentary courtesy or even personal grace.

First suborned under Blair by the chance of holding of office after so many years, now gelded under Brown to democratic impotence, the Labour party will not serve any further political purpose and the voters it once provided from commitment to beliefs and hopes in a fair and safe and co-operative world are now merely bought and paid for.

So who are those who profit from Brown and his regime and sustain his claims to high office ? The very rich enjoying the most benign of tax regimes; the beneficiaries of an almost unregulated financial arena; the great landowners reaping EU subsidies; the profiteers from PFI 'initiatives'; the apparatchiks and placemen benefitting from tax-funded payouts and from democratically- unregulated authority, and their counterparts in the UK allocations within the European Union bureaucracies; the recipients of tax-funded state welfare - profiting from redistribution amongst the relatively poor.

And the self-righteous, the opinionated do-gooders, the class warriors from other decades, the loathers of our various decent cultures asserting values that are equally unacceptable to all of them , the universities run now by business managers with an agenda, the researchers encouraged and funded to research into abomination, off the wall and off their moral heads, the young old, claiming to be retired and entitled; the nomenklatura ensconced in appointed bodies throughout the country draining power and resources from locally elected governance; the international warmongers profiting in Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of Africa, and gazing hungrily at Iran.

Unnatural bedfellows of any real Labour leader.