The gentle push that Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon gave, in a single, mild-mannered letter, asking if the members of the Parliamentary Labour Party would like to have a secret ballot on Brown's leadership, has had a notable response. Major newspapers had running accounts and blogs as the story unfolded throughout the day; comment pieces poured out; the news for most of today has been dominated by what? - a letter from two former Labour ministers (and yes, I do intend the adjective to precede Labour not ministers. That debate has barely begun in the UK though it's well under way in the rest of Europe).
It is wrong to think that Patricia Hewitt and Mr Hoon do not enjoy considerable entree with the great and the good. Not so much Islington dinner parties as Cambridge high tables and Masters' get togethers. And this was no botched coup, no display of ignorance on how to topple a leader. Where they are the in-crowd, toppling is a favourite and much enjoyed sport. "You have the support of the College" from a smiling Master means support from an establishment of international and inter-temporal reach. Consider your 'Yes, Minister'.
Brown does not belong in such a world, where else does his visceral loathing of what he calls toffs and tories come from? Margaret Thatcher may have been denied honour by Oxford, but they did her the honour of organising to deny, which is just as good, if not better.
Brown has been severely damaged by just a toe-in-the-water exercise. A statement has been made that he has been abandoned to the Labour 'core'. Brown faces an electorate inviperito, and we know now, without the slightest support from the ruling classes of the centre left.
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5 comments:
He thinks its made him stronger, which it has. Just not anywhere but within his party.
Hats, I thought this post on Guido rang a bell...
15 DAVE MAN OF IRON(cast iron that is) says:
January 8, 2010 at 12:51 am
Guido this was posted at 12.05 post 343 on labours chances …….. post
BY Manchester Old Labour :he got this information from a senior labour back bencher
The brownites got wind of the plot and that several cabinet (the six named) were planning to speak out this weekend .
In a “false flag”opperation designed to spike the Real Rebellion,
the brownites co-opted Hoon and Hewitt to announce a FAKE rebellion
which had no real support and was designed to fizzel out quickly and Leave Brown Looking Stronger
This took the real oppersition to Brown by suprise and has now left them in a bit of a Quandary on what to do !
Sounds Bang On to me !
and has all the hallmarks of Mandelson on it !
Isn't it funny how directly one hears of a rumour from the lulab cesspits, one immediately assumes that conniving skulduggery is afoot, and one has to look behind the 'evidence' to find the real nasties at work.
Actually I'm quite proud of the term cesspits here, as they work by anaerobics breaking down the filith...
There are, though, such very high levels of concern about the British economy; not just its immediate status but about its long term management under Brown - failures in economic forecasting, failures in regulation, failures in policy choice, failures in communication and trust and respect between various parts of the economic and financial administration.
Brown is a notoriously disruptive man, to put it at its best. Ill-informed meddling in reasonably smooth and efficient long term administrative structures did not start in America.
This is not just a cabinet-level, or even PLP stirring of trouble, there isn't a wholly political conspiracy or skulduggery afoot, I think Scrobs, though it is a Labour cesspit in which Brown thrives that has permitted Brown to do all this damage for so long.
Brown will always be king in the cesspit; but the mere suggestion of a secret ballot on his real levels of support among the only group immediately empowered to remove him has done its job - we all know now that he may stay where he is if he does as he is told and stops the nonsense economic stance. He's stronger 'within his party' as you say Mr Q, but his party has been sharply and narrowly redefined to the rump. And a properly social democratic Labour with eonomic and social competence is going to be presented for the election. Brown is still there because the effort to put together a decent social democratic manifesto and present it widely has been so hampered by Brown's silly behaviour the extra couple of months is sorely needed.
Oh but there's a long time to go yet. If, as the papers suggest, Balls has been sidelined, he will be incapable of not stirring it over the coming months.
With any luck, they will tear themselves to pieces. hersi
The break up of the social democrats from the authoritarian, ex-communists and socialists, on the centre-left is going on all over Europe. The communists and socialists were rejected as an ideology and as functioning political parties when the peoples under their control tore them down from power. But then they attached themselves onto the centre left like limpets, gave themselves 'reformed' respectability, and set about installing their vile regimes all over again. That's what Brown's regime is in England and Wales, it seems to me Elby, - authoritarian socialism dressed as social democracy.
The Labour party is sullied by its socialist and communist members and fellow traveller recidivists. If they stand for social democracy rather than Christian democracy, they'd be better not to permit a democratic centralist Party and an imposed, unelected socialist leader - particularly one of such monumental and spectacular incompetence.
The Labour party needs to change its aims and its means if it is to attract the social democratic vote, and it needs to define itself as more in the interests of its country's working people and less in the interests of any notional international workers' movement or any other international interest group. As all the other social democratic movements in Europe are learning.
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