Commanding the House of Commons is not at all the same thing as commanding a political party. Mr Blair could command the Commons and did so on occasions when his party tried to deny him his majority - on education his political will was sustained by Conservative support; on his leaving, the House recognized his Commons, not his party political, skills in rising to applaud him.
The regime Leader now has no such Parliamentary mastery. If he cannot rely on his party whips to drive his Members into the government lobbies his policies and his personality leave no room for finding support elsewhere in the House. And on the demand for a referendum on the new Constitution for the European Union in the face of his determination to cow us all into accepting his micro-managing, party control freakery, this incapacity to even understand the organic, multi-levelled nature of our democracy, let alone operate within it successfully, has been his failure and will be his humiliation.
Mr Blair's Commons majority of over 60 is ample to govern on party political matters agreed within the party and set out in the Manifesto on which Labour was elected 2 years ago; but accession to the European Union Reform Treaty is not such an issue, even ignoring the broken referendum Manifesto pledge.
Ironically it is an issue on which a party leader with a decent majority might well seek a dissolution, to fight an election on the altering of the United Kingdom's system of government for good. And the Head of State might reasonably agree, given that this is neither a party matter, so that commanding the House becomes of a different democratic order, nor a petty policy matter where, as in the education fracas, it is the prime minister's House skills that may be tested.
The accession to the Reform Treaty is identified correctly in Conservative party policies, as set out at their Conference, as being above party. No party, more than the Conservatives, must have wished more not to have to face and perhaps revive the searing hurt the dispute over the United Kingdom's relations with the European Union has caused for so long. But they did not flinch or fail the electorate; they commit to a binding popular referendum on acceptance or rejection of the new Treaty, a revisiting of the 1972 Act to place the electorate's hand directly on any further choices.
Brown failed to ask for a wholly proper dissolution because he knows that the subsequent election would have become in great part the popular referendum he is intent on denying, and the binding expression of the popular will on the European Union that he is intent on thwarting. He may yet learn that in some supra- party political matters even his supine parliamentary Labour party will step up to the plate, and then we'll have our chance to vote on what we think of this and the Leader's other failings.
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4 comments:
Applauding Blair was a disgrace.
I'm a Trollope, S, I can't help admiring sheer political skill and rhetorical command.
Look again at Blair's extraordinary speech to the Party as he bade them goodbye. I bet they wish they had him back, as so many foretold.
Sackerson is right - by applauding Blair our 'representatives' showed themselves to be willing accomplices to his paramount war crimes and treason. Anybody who can applaud a traitor - and I call him that because he conspired with a foreign government to lie to us in order to plan and wage aggressive war - is not fit to sit in the House of Commons.
I once went out with a Catalan girl whose father pined for Franco. Blair may well be a fancy raconteur, but let him preach in a prison chapel.
And would you agree AP that the current Leader (and his administration) is in it with Blair up to his oxters?
Brown is much worse because he denied the kind of economic planning that goes with war, and provided private profit opportunities for the equipping of our soldiers. Markets are not appropriate as a means of determing expenditures in equipping troops in harm's way.
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