The Election Called Too Late

'If I were you I wouldn't start from here', never had a truer moment than now.  The election should have been called in 2007; had it been the economic debacle would have been avoided, for in the very process of losing the 2007 election Brown's economic illiteracy would have been  pointed up in discussion of his economic proposals and an enforced earlier defence of what he had perpetrated already. 

There was a double failure of democracy in 2007 - within Brown's Party and within the country.  And the double violation of democratic validation has led us to where the need for a democratic mandate is forced upon Brown only after his uncomprehending politics and economics and his personal bombast, coupled with even more serious personality and character failures (cowardice, fawning on the powerful, failures of understanding, self-seeking 'career' advancement, vulnerabilities various and often personal) have reduced our economic present and our future well-being for a generation at least to a depressing, uniform, battleship grey.

The turning point was Blair's confirmation of Brown  as Chancellor of the Exchequer  after the 2005 election.  Overcoming even the revulsion of Labour supporters at his Iraq warmongering, Blair still could not repulse Brown's continued claims to office. Claims enforced by what, one shudders to think.

The gathering storm was so clearly visible that there were retail runs not just on the banks in the offing, but anyone with the means and opportunity, right down to private individuals of modest wealth, was shifting what they could to safety outside the UK.   Greece is now sending delegates to the US and to China to beg for funds, just as Brown went to the US and Mandelson to China, Russia and the Middle East  for the same purpose in the last couple of years.  But patience is running out for us as much as it is for Greece.  Report after report from international monitors decries the failure of Brown's regime to cut its fiscal coat to its fiscal cloth; denounces squeeze-lite as too little, too late, too slow - an impertinent assumption that we can ignore economic reality and pretend that all is well with just a small adjustment, a brief pulling-in of the fiscal horns -  and after the general election of course.

' Immediately after the election' Brown kept saying to our creditors; only he wouldn't call the election, wouldn't face the electorate until forced by a choice between a formal coup (following the informal coup bullied through in 2007) and the immediate economic devastation that would have followed such a suspension of parliamentary democracy. Now there is just one last month of lies and misrepresentation and begging 'don't pull the rug out from under now', in the hope that he can fraudulently rig the reckoning.   But patience has run out.  If Brown's client state and client media is successful in threatening a return of Brown to power there will be a last rush for the exit before the beginning of May.