Now Cabinet turns on wounded Brown
The papers this morning are full of stories about the Labour Party skulking around preparing to remove Gordon Brown after the disaster of the Glasgow East election.
The first cracks in the Cabinet's support for Gordon Brown appeared yesterday as Labour MPs urged senior ministers to tell him to quit after the party's humiliating defeat in the Glasgow East by-election.
Although cabinet ministers said there would be no immediate attempt to oust the Prime Minister, some predicted he would face a concerted move to force him to stand down in September – possibly before the Labour conference, which starts on 20 September.
What a pile of tosh. The Labour Party didn't lose Glasgow East because Gordon Brown is unpopular, they lost Glasgow East because there are many of us who aren't sure what the party stands for anymore.
Having lost the support of the working class of Glasgow East through it's almost manic determination to appease Daily Mail readers, the party now simply has to address whose values it thinks it represents.
At the moment that is unclear, which is why the Tories are storming ahead in the polls.
To add to Mr Brown's woes, the latest monthly survey by ComRes for The Independent gives the Conservatives a 22-point lead over Labour, the biggest they have ever enjoyed in a ComRes poll. It puts the Tories on 46 per cent (unchanged on last month), Labour on 24 per cent (down one percentage point), the Liberal Democrats on 18 per cent (unchanged) and other parties on 12 per cent (up one point). The figures would give David Cameron an overall majority of 236 if repeated at a general election.A change of leader won't sort out the Labour party's woe's, they need a change of direction. I have supported this party my entire life and, at the moment, I don't know what they stand for.
They are proposing asking people to clean graffiti in order to get benefits, a policy which is so right wing that I honestly think Norman Tebbitt would have winced at the thought of introducing it. And therein lies their problem. They are trying to be all things to all people.
Brown fights to be allowed to hold terrorists for 42 days without charge and attacks benefits claimants with a ferocity which even the Tories would balk at, whilst simultaneously trying to be the party of the working class.
It's a bloody mess. Brown has yet to govern from his heart and, instead, has offered his version of a Blair premiership. He needs to stop that and to govern in a way that suits his constituency.
That's Old Labour, the very thing that we have been told that Britain will not stand for. He's got two years before the next election and one thing is very clear: Brown's version of Blair's New Labour isn't working.
Gordon should go back to the kind of politics which he has believed in all of his life, he should abandon appeasement of the Daily Mail and start thinking of what the people of Glasgow East need from a Labour government.
That's his core vote. And that's who the current policy is alienating.
Without Glasgow East, there simply can't be a Labour government. That is an undeniable fact.
You can change the figurehead as many times as you want, but until you represent those people and their interests, you will lose to Cameron. The middle class know that Cameron represents them, the working class feel deserted by Labour. No, I'll go further, they feel betrayed.
And the reason they feel betrayed is because they have been.
So I don't support the calls for Brown's scalp, but I do wish Brown would start to govern as if he's the elected representative of Kirkcaldy rather than the elected member for Knightsbridge.
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Deborah Orr makes some brilliant points and is well worth reading.
New Labour has only itself to blame
The truth is that Labour's own dependence on supplementing even working people with benefits, instead of promoting their reasonable need to be able to live on their earnings, has repulsed many of their "core voters". It is the exhausting strain of working poverty that promotes benefits dependency, and the ensuing informal, sometimes criminal economy. Beyond its early and timid championship of the minimum wage, Labour has failed to promote the idea that employers should do more than treat humans as squeezable units of profit at all. That is the greatest Labour failure, and this dying Government's most putrid legacy. If there is a personal message to Brown in this result, that is it. The most awful thing is that he seems no more able to hear it than David Cameron, the man who will, sooner rather than later, succeed him.Roy Hattersley in Guardian Comments.
Don't give up - Labour can still win in 2010. Here's how
Labour has to decide whose side it is on.Click title for full article.
The fear of alienating people who are already Labour's enemies is one of the reasons why the government is so rarely on the offensive. Much that has gone wrong during the past six months is the direct result of either Tory policy or Tory ideology that Blair accepted.
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2 comments:
Sounds just like the Democrats in the U.S.
But I wonder if you're not wrong about Brown (and Blair and perhaps much of the Labour leadership). Maybe Brown is following his heart, it's just that his heart doesnt belong in Labour, that's just where his opportunities were.
As for treating people like commodities, unfortunately, that's what you get when everything is driven by money (that's our problem here in the U.S., you'll find the "cost" of things are always given as the reason why something is or isnt being done, and it's never human cost that's the issue).
But I wonder if you're not wrong about Brown (and Blair and perhaps much of the Labour leadership). Maybe Brown is following his heart, it's just that his heart doesnt belong in Labour, that's just where his opportunities were.
Dave, the saddest thing about all of this is that Brown is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as being Old Labour in his heart. Blair was always an opportunist who simply used the Labour Party to further his own career, Brown was supposed to be different.
But you are right about one thing, the current situation is exactly like the Democrats in the US. We seem frightened to offer a real alternative to the right.
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