The Labour Party and Brown's Restraint

It is rather hard on the Labour party to end up as Gordon Brown's cage, but where else is he to be kept? The golden bridges usually built to rid ourselves of our enemies cannot be constructed for him - public knowledge of what he is, is now so widespread there is nowhere to bridge to. No one would offer any encouragement to the Labour party to tempt him out of their world and release him any further onto ours.

When they thought to give the man his head and let him be prime minister they hoped it would be for the fag end of Blair's third Parliament and then he would move on to international pastures, leaving them free of his malign presence at last. The more honourable, or perhaps just sensible and realistic among them, thought he should be dealt with by Labour; a solution found within the Party to their home grown monster that had been bred by their own Party system and their failure to cleanse it of its despicable authoritarian underbellied corruption. But self-interest, or selfishness, or simple underestimation of the damage Brown had done stopped them from splitting the Party and giving real meaning to "Anyone but Gordon". Indeed, their policy should have been "Anything but Gordon", including taking the chance on moving forward with building a democratic party they had evidence was widely supported by the electorate as a whole, and going to the country rather than giving way to Gordon and his cabal of bullies.

The need to develop international institutions to assist the provision of international responses, when international responses are occurring anyway, has been demonstrated repeatedly since the end of the Second War. Necessarily, these institutions need to be upgraded as finance and economics become ever more interactive across national borders. As do the powers granted to them by nation states, and as do their institutional structures. These are real developments of real importance, not parking provision for political embarrassments. The World Bank stamped on the idea of Brown in office there years ago. While the IMF knows it must change, embracing today's economic realities, giving more power to China and loosening the control of the United States (developments fraught with difficulty and the need for the subtlest of negotiations and interactions) it is no place for a novice. Certainly there is nothing there for anyone from a country that was told in the last few days that its budget is made up of fantasy figures. Or for a country that cannot even begin to qualify for a Flexible Credit Line arrangement demanding “ . . . (iv) a reserve position that is relatively comfortable . . . ; (v) sound public finances, including a sustainable public debt position; . . . (vii) the absence of bank solvency problems that pose an immediate threat of a systemic banking crisis; (viii) effective financial sector supervision.” It is questionable whether criteria (iv) and (v) are met. Criteria (vii) and (viii) are obviously not met.', as Willem Buiter notes. The European Union? Labour's Shame is known there too. There is no international role.

The Labour party must accept its long term care responsibility, it cannot escape it now, however much it must regret not making the cage smaller and more secure when it could still hope to engage the wider centre left movement. There is nowhere to send him except into the kind of rump party oblivion he and the Party he destroyed deserve. The building of a centre left coalition is all the harder now for failing to deal, when the opportunity was there, with a Labour party that grew a Brown as a Leader.