The New Labour Project hasn't got much time left (well, left isn't quite the word, it hasn't got much time, right?).
It is a characteristic of United Kingdom governance that the office of prime minister has enormous powers concentrated in it, those of the king ceded over the centuries, first to Parliament, then to the the governing executive, and now to the prime minister alone. The Project maximised this, and the possibilities of the fluidity of our constitution to concentrate power into the fewest hands possible - there is an agenda to deliver.
That agenda is to embed the United Kingdom into the European Union, to dominate the power structures of the European Union, and to take back the position of the United Kingdom power elites that was lost in the immediate post War years - remember 'Britain taking her rightful place at the heart of Europe'? To do this has brought the regionalisation of England along unnatural administrative divisions, the near secession of Scotland, the steady re-absorption of Northern Ireland by the Irish Republic, extensive damage to local democracy, and even more damage to national democracy and its institutions, not least the rule of law.
Considerable damage has been done too, to the European Union, caused by the United Kingdom-inspired push for an unnaturally fast rate of extension to the East resulting in serious problems of institutional and economic development. The Six, or even the Twelve, would have benefitted from a slower rate of geopolitical growth, but the Project's agenda wants a weaker European Union with lesser identity and greatly reduced and contained power. Turkey was the last straw and has been placed firmly to one side by France, Germany and Italy. Apart from the determined putting of this agenda in its place in Europe, it is ironically the characteristics of the undemocratic, internal structures of the Labour party, which first gave an opening for this power grab, that are now causing, too, its collapse.
The Leader of the parliamentary Labour party is ex officio prime minister when Labour has a parliamentary majority. But the present Leader of the PLP and of the Labour party in toto, is too alien both to our current institutional arrangements and in personality and abilities to be able to command the office as now empowered. The entire Project is collapsing with the premature/overdue loss of Gordon Brown's credibility and authority.
Yet there is no way he can be removed from his position without a general election becoming irresistible. One Leader removed by coup and his majority taken has been explained as agreed succession (itself undemocratic, but we've been there) and has been swallowed; it is too close now to the average 4-years' life time of an administration to try for a second. But the speed at which major measures - the ratification of the Lisbon treaty without asking the people, the installation of a state wide data base on every person in the country, the alteration to polling methods, the undoing of devolution particularly to Scotland, the repeated blows from a failed financial and economic policy practiced for over a decade, the stranding of defence and foreign policy in unpopular wars and isolated, underfunded armies - need to be forced home, condoned even consented to, that speed is determined by the little time left. And the shortness of time in turn renders the agenda indigestible.
So how long can this Labour Leader be held together so as to push through the codification of a decade of reshaping our world for goals we neither want nor ever sought?
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4 comments:
He will last right up until the next election, if that is ever held. As you say there is an agenda to deliver. His puppeteers will not tolerate a foul up now, it is too close.
It's certainly going to be close run, Y. Presumably a lot of the progressive governance shindig was about reinforcing the will, and rallying the rank and file.
But the EU isn't best pleased, apart from Sarkozy's false cosying-up as he tries to unload the cost of decommissioning out of date nuclear plant onto the UK. And Scotland's defection gets closer by the day. Brown's too badly brought up to be courteous and conciliatory, he is by nature bullying and coercive. The polls are showing Labour dead in the water in Scotland. They need to have a separate political stance to one wholly deferent to Westminster. So do the Conservatives, for that matter.
You're right that 'he will last until the next election'. When he goes is the next election, or the next crisis of such magnitude that elections are set aside. All very touch and go really; but the personal fragility of this distasteful man is the focal point of very determined power plays.
Never mind all this. What would his mother say to him about his fingernails (we know what his father would do - beat him).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/26/nbrown626.xml
Not a pretty sight.
You will not succeed in your efforts to arouse sympathy for him, Elby. He is determined in his wickedness.
There seems to be this lovely Scottish phrase 'Hell mend him', which I would so much like to use but it has been drummed into me by Mr HG never to use other cultures' terms of abuse as they are more finely tuned than any foreigner's ear. That's what I think secretly though, whenever he's in the news for yet another disastrous piece of ill-mannered aggression. or really creepy, inappropriate behaviour.
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