UK Politics
Brown must dare to reveal to voters his real core beliefs
Published 22 May 2008
At the time of writing, Gordon Brown is still best placed to lead the Labour Party to victory at the next election. But only just.
The Labour leader's probationary year runs out next month and he is dangerously close to failing the test. Brown was not challenged for the leadership in 2007 because there was no candidate of stature prepared to stand against him. While this remains the case, he is safe in his position as Prime Minister (at least until the country goes to the polls). Yet those who argued for Tony Blair's resignation and the smooth transition to a Brown premiership must now ask themselves how the situation can have been allowed to deteriorate so badly.
By the summer of 2006 it was clear that Blair had become an electoral liability and had to go. No one imagined then that Brown would so soon prove even more unpopular with the public.
A year ago, the New Statesman urged Brown to call an early election to cement his mandate as Prime Minister. He chose not to, but with insufficient conviction, and, partly as a result, has seen his authority drain away. This is no longer simply a party matter that can be solved by upbraiding malcontents and calling for unity. The far more worrying problem for Brown now is that he has lost authority with voters around the country. Many clearly feel that his assumption of power unopposed within his party and without the subsequent sanction of a general election leaves a democratic deficit.
His government has become catastrophically unpopular: an ICM poll in the Guardian on Tuesday showed Labour trailing by 14 per cent. The background polling information is even more chilling for Labour: 71 per cent of people think the government has run out of ideas, 68 per cent think the party doesn't deserve to win the next election and 67 per cent believe Labour is more divided than the Tories.
As the New Statesman went to press, the result of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election was unknown. But it is serious enough for the party that the possibility ever arose of Labour losing Gwyneth Dunwoody's seat to the Tories.
Equally serious is the prognosis for the next general election. Until this year, the received political wisdom was that it would be impossible for the Tories to win, because the required swing of roughly 7 per cent was simply too large. That is no longer the case. Such a defeat for Labour, snatched from the jaws of victory, now seems possible. It would be devastating. The party would be lucky to be out of power for only one term.
Labour has one strong suit. The Conservative Party is, as Labour has pointed out, a policy-free zone. But for this criticism to really stick, Labour has to build a convincing progressive policy platform of its own. At the moment it is not countering the tide of public hostility with a sufficiently strong agenda of policies.
Its recent legislative programme included admirable proposals (shared-equity schemes, help for first-time housebuyers, more accountability for chief constables, extension of flexible working), but the package lacked vision and inspiration.
Meanwhile, Brown's continued support for prison expansion, identity cards and the extension of detention without charge for terror suspects to 42 days reveals a deeply unattractive authoritarian streak and contributes to his poor popularity ratings (inflating David Cameron's undeservedly).
Maybe the most worrying development is that, in his mission to sound tough, the Prime Minister makes it increasingly difficult for us to know what he actually believes. It was dispiriting, for example, to hear his speech to Google's Zeitgeist conference in London on 19 May, denouncing Opec for limiting oil supplies and "holding back the development of the world economy". Once he would have said that reducing dependence on oil and investing in renewable technologies was the "zeitgeist".
Brown must urgently reassert his core beliefs. Only by daring to reveal his very real passion for equality, opportunity and justice, and by communicating this convincingly, will he stand a chance of reconnecting with the voters.
Go to work on an egg
The spirit of '68 is alive and well in Budapest, judging by the protest aimed at Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, while he gave a lecture in the city. A student, convinced that Hungary had a grievance with Microsoft, began throwing eggs at Ballmer, who took it in good part, perhaps because none reached its target.
It may be too soon to draw definitive conclusions about the efficacy of egg-throwing tactics during the 1968 demonstrations, though an analysis of the ideological cleavages between those who used raw and those who preferred hard-boiled is surely long overdue.
What we do know is that the propulsion of encased ova at those considered to be objects of ridicule or disapproval has a long, if malodorous, history, with countless incidents recorded over the centuries. More recently, it was such a missile that led to the incident after which John Prescott became known not as "Two Jags", but "Two Jabs" - a response to this noble tradition that earned him a rebuke from the former Tory minister Malcolm Rifkind.
"If egg-throwing resulted in violence every time it happened," Rifkind said, "that would be something which was totally new to British politics and hugely unfortunate."
At a time when the price of eggs has risen by 40 per cent in a year, we salute the student who aimed high, if not well, at Steve Ballmer. Forty years on from '68, the capitalist yoke may remain intact, but in this case the capitalist yolk was truly smashed.
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