The long drought of potential Labour party leaders, the unanswerable question 'Who would replace Brown?' has ended and been answered. With not one but three candidates:
Charles Clarke, Harriet Harman, and Alan Johnson. Reserve: Alan Milburn.
This is a very good shortlist: blairite; woman candidate; cente-left, moderate union, Real Labour candidate. And a reserve sufficiently inappropriate to concentrate minds. Brown's last redoubt has been overwhelmed - there are perfectly credible replacement leaders, his 'there is no alternative' position has collapsed well within time to replace him and call the confirmatory general election that he failed to call when he bullied and lied his way to the premiership. Jack Straw, the fake alternative, is dead in the water, his Iraq war status and destroyed political reputation tarnishing the idea of him even as a caretaker leader in the event of Brown's collapse from enforced external circumstances (such as ill health) rather than political defeat.
The exposure of Brown's blight mechanisms for securing his and his cronies' positions has finally ruined them. The dreadful smear plans, so thoughtlessly extended outside wholly Labour politics; the 'hairdrier' treatment for Hazel Blears that forced an apology from her to a man who is a living exemplar of refused apologies, and has driven not just Labour women but all women to consider coldly Brown's bully boy coterie and tactics; the threats to pensions, savings, working conditions, wage levels, job security, and debt-driven cuts has made Real Labour really important to its natural, mass supporters rather than its Fabian, patronising, playboy social engineers. The Labour movement isn't about bourgeois feel-good, about imposed social equity or cultural choices.
Most of all the understanding that Brown has delivered nothing but increased inequality, unemployment, gigantic tax levels, and the end of hope, that he and his cabal can deliver nothing else, regardless of elections held or denied, that they have blighted even the next generation, has ended any notion that he cannot be replaced.
Brown must be replaced. Replaced now, before even the June elections, and any of the shortlist, but preferably Alan Johnson as the most representative of the mainstream Movement, must go to the country and accept their verdict. A verdict that will be greatly ameliorated by the removal of arrogance, incompetence, bullying, and corruption.
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5 comments:
And then they'll finally "get their message across"?
Sorry, love, that is not a good list. Of those candidates, only Johnson has anything resembling credibility. The others are worse than Brown.
Anyway, nothing less than deBaathification will do.
You understand better than do I, S, that it isn't a message we are receiving but a reality that is destroying our well being for two generations. For some of us it is in the form of quite minor changes in what we might have consumed, the standard of living we might have enjoyed, without any real pain. But for many more their living standards have fallen markedly, right now. And there is no prospect of improvement. This is a permanent loss of life-style, and of life chances for their families.
It didn't have to be like this. There really could have been provision for a reasonable social wage in the form of a decent social environment, but it needed determined political selflessness and a high level of technical expertise for its delivery and administration. A sort of Reddaway world of public administration and a Macmillanesque sense of decency.
Imagine if the Treasury had NOT been in the hands of Gordon Brown and Ed Balls. Or was not now in the hands of its current incompetents.
I fear your anger has led you into delusion.
He's not going.
We will have to tear him from power in June of next year. As long as we don't take to the barricades in the meantime, because if we do, he will have an excuse to invoke some of his carefully-prepared legislation and defer the election even further.
Meanwhile, note the orchestrated "it's nearly over" stories in the press about the recession. Shortly Broon will claim credit for this. He will have saved the world. His fightback will begin.
And there are those who will fall for it.
We may be doomed.
There are two fronts: within the Labour party, and in the country as a whole. Brown's New Labour cabal no longer controls the Party even at PLP level, and certainly is beginning to lose control both of the Movement and peripheral supporters. Repeated leaks into the media that he has even begun to fail in commanding the Cabinet are encouraging.
In the country Scotland is lost to Labour, any kind of Labour, because there is a party like middle of the road, social reformist Labour on offer and in power there. And most of what is of interest to less well-off voters is devolved to the Scottish Government.
Brown's 'only me' pursuit and securing of power has led to a situation of no available support politically, and a Party desert.
When he was found out, the sheer breadth and depth of his failure measured in financial and economic collapse - and the collapse is complete, the banks are claws up on the floor, there is no serious manufacturing sector, infrastructure has no resources to improve or even renew itself, we are stumbling through the motions of living in a functioning economy - was set out in a display of his almost complete isolation. Hence the desperate parade of global 'friends', solutions to be found outside of the United Kingdom in 'really important circles'. Except that the reality of his hold on office lies in his Party and then in England. His Party that he has brutalised into mass desertion and sullen dislike, and England which is not his country. His country voted him out.
As the petty tyrants of the GDR, and other countries of 'realised socialism' in eastern Europe found when they thought to cling on by force, there are no longer international friends who would overlook a denial of democratic choice. In less than a month we vote. And if the Labour party does not send the pistol and whisky delegation and require Brown's departure, together with his unsavoury gauleiters, then, as the Conservatives have asked, we should turn that vote into a plebiscite for a general election.
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