Coup d'etat

The illegitimacy of Gordon Brown's claim to office has become scandalous. What the Labour party chooses to do according to its ill-drafted, loose-thinking Rule Book is the business of its members, but when such an electorate, governed by such a constitution and committed, many of them, to a dead ideolgy, assert that authority to wield the powers of the Crown is theirs to confer, they are wrong and malign.

They further the scandal by deliberate misrepresentation of the country's Constitution.

At the last general election we had the simple task of looking at the manifestos of the parties offering themselves for office, as well as choosing the individul member of parliament we wanted for our own constituency. Usually the two coincide, sometimes they do not, always we have to choose for the better not the best; yet how the system works is clear and established.

Organic constitutions are just that - they live and alter in response to circumstance but according to their principles. This mediates the nature of the important notion of precedence as a determinant of practice for it reinforces some acts, discourages others as it changes, in itself, over time.

The succession of John Major, who became leader of the Conservatives by widespread Party vote, as a constitutionally valid precedent is grotesque; even at the time many felt a general election was constitutionally required, and this when Major was taking over with the blessing of Margaret Thatcher - her heir, her nominee. James Callaghan's, and every previous, succession to the office of prime minister, was under selection by parliamentary party and private consultation with interest groups alone, resolving factional difference; when faction could not be resolved, precedent actually provides for the outgoing Prime Minister to recommend to dissolve the House and ask the country.

We do not have fixed term parliaments in this country; a glance at the length of parliaments since the watershed of the second War shows that almost half have been much less than 5 years; look further back and some exceed 5 years. There is no restriction on calling us all to the vote to reinforce political advantage, or factional advantage.

Despite the granting or rejecting of a prime minister's recommendation for a dissolution being one of the ' reserved powers' of the monarch no such recommendation has been ignored for over a century; that's true precedent.

Election on manifesto commitment is one of the advantages of first past the post electoral systems. Labour voters won the last general election on a specific commitment to serve the full term of the next Parliament by the leader of the party they were choosing. Never was the generality of the electorate told 'vote Blair get Brown'. The claims that this was indeed understood are rooted in the horrible truth that, to keep the trotskyoid activists and burnt-out socialists (with which the Labour party is still infested despite the Kinnockian boast that he cleansed the stables) on board after the Blairite 'betrayal', the cadres got their instructions and were promised their reward.

Such an enormous alteration in a party manifesto under our electoral system must evoke a general election endorsement. The current attempts to pretend to a policy continuity between Blair's adminstration and a Brown administration are laughable. The outlines of what is intended are seen in various policy discussions that betray a different vision of how we should govern ourselves or, in the Brownite plan, how we should be governed.

Should Gordon Brown and the faction that he leads succeed in seizing power through the majority that the electorate gave to Blair and his policies ( whatever some may think of those) we will never get the chance to vote them out. There will be concentration of power in the hands of the executive, to the detriment of judicial and legislative defences. And the electoral system itself will be altered.

We have no formalized code or constitutional court to defend us because our unrestricted freedoms are not rights, they are what we have until taken from us by executive act or (should we be so lucky after Brown) legislative choice.

Others have pointed, analysed, discussed, warned of all this, of course, and with detail and evidence galore. The long march through the institutions of our country has already had 10 years and might soon be irreversible

Brown's accession would be a coup d'etat.