All Brown Has Are Force and Lies

When Blair was driven out of office by the Brownite faction in the Labour party two things did not happen: there was no election within the Party to choose its new Leader, and there was no general election in the country to confirm the electorate's acceptance of the power shift and abandonment of the 2005 electoral Manifesto.

To achieve the premiership Brown had to do three things. First ram through his narrative that it had always been 'agreed' that Blair would 'step down' while Labour was in power so that Brown could take over, as a settlement of who should have the leadership in succession to John Smith. Apart from being a democratic outrage that two people could pre-empt choices properly for the whole Party and could openly express confidence that they would and could do so, it is known that Brown was trailing last in the Party's potential-Leader stakes. The narrative was as untrue as it was democratically offensive. But at the time it seemed a sop to ease his fury at being thwarted by his own unpopularity rather than a lie big enough to help carry him over major democratic objections

Secondly, force the Party to accept his Leadership without a Party election, which he was uncertain of winning. This was achieved by preventing the mechanisms of the Party election system from functioning. No-one was to be permitted enough nominations within the Parliamentary Labour Party for the election to take place, and enough were to nominate Brown to make any further involvement of the wider Party spurious. Looking now at these last weeks' display of cupidity and wrongdoing it is not hard to imagine Brown's bully boys moving through the PLP ranks collecting the required signatures and warning to with hold any signatures for another candidate.

Thirdly, Brown had to undermine a central manifesto undertaking that Blair would serve a full term; this was intertwined with another central plank of the Labour manifesto that there would be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. 'Full term' could mean either the maximum five years that the Parliament runs, or that the Parliament would be dissolved and a general election held immediately after Brown took over; it could not reasonably be taken to mean the assumption of Blair's majority with, at the same time, Brown's boasted political programme of 'change', of a complete break with the Blair years. Blair's majority in 2005 was much reduced from 2002, and rested on the clear commitment to the referendum on any European Union constitutional measure that replaced the voted-down European Constitutional Treaty. It is untrue that there was a clear understanding in 2005 that those who voted for Blair would get Brown. How could there be? No such arrangement was democratically deliverable, though to some tribalist Labour party loyalists sunk in their narrow, real politik viewpoint that could be brushed aside.

The Head of State is familiar with real politik; pragmatism is the monarch's middle name. Leaving office, the advice to send for Brown, as able to command a Labour majority in the Commons would have been properly given by Blair and others, and acted on. But the failure to have any open commitment to continuing the implementation of the 2005 Labour manifesto, indeed a declared and boasted commitment to total change that literally nobody had voted on, must have been accompanied by discussion of a general election as soon as possible. As soon as Parliament reassembled after the summer recess. An Autumn election in 2007.

Failure to keep faith with our oh so flexible constitution, failure to honour clear and reasonable premisses, even (though this cannot be known so certainly) specific undertakings, led to failure to seek the Autumn 2007 dissolution. And from those failures of faith and honour have derived all the other failures that engulf us now.

Our country does not have a government, it has a ruling junta just as we are living the worst economic and financial crisis ever. It has a bitterly resented and wholly discredited Prime Minister who can do nothing by democratic consent.