The Agony of Gordon Brown
Today is, to be honest, a pretty slow news day in US politics. But it’s a huge news day in UK politics. Basically, Gordon Brown’s Labour Party had been unpopular. Then came the financial crisis, which has really hammered the UK, where London’s financial sector is a huge portion of the economy. Then on top of that has come some scandals about MPs abusing their expenses. And then most recently, Labour got absolutely wiped out in local elections. So now a bunch of ministers are resigning, Brown is reshuffling his cabinet and vowing to fight on, but realistically coming under increasing pressure to step down so that Labour can try to find some way to put a new face forward rather than march onward into what looks to be certain electoral apocalypse.
At any rate, spending some time reading about this is a powerful reminder of what the emerging information ecology looks like. The cable networks that we keep on in the office seem to have been covering this story not at all, even though it’s clearly more newsworthy than the latest iteration of “hey! look at what Rush did!” But that’s the way it goes on cable. Meanwhile, thanks to the internet I’m able to read about UK news from BBC, The Guardian, British blogs, etc., and get far more detailed information about what’s happening than I ever would have been before. Banal, I know, but I think worth stepping back and thinking about.
Meanwhile, back to the UK, I suppose from an outsider’s perspective I wonder if at some point there can be a tipping point for the Liberal Democrats. I imagine a lot of people who might have some love for the Lib Dems nevertheless don’t want to “waste” a vote on a third party. But if it’s absolutely clear that the Tories will win no matter what, then that incentive seems to melt away and Labour will start polling even worse.
51 Responses to “The Agony of Gordon Brown”
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June 5th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I think it’s interesting (in a blog comments sort of way) to point out that Labo(u)r is along with the Republicans a succesful third party, although while the Whig Party no longer exists in the United States, the Liberal Democrats still exist as a version of the historical Liberals. There were tipping-points in the first half of the last century when Labo(u)r and Liberals switched roles as to who was the biggest oppostion to the Conservatives. On the other hand I am sure people who actually know something about British politics will say it is ridiculous to think Labor will go back to the being the third largest party, but who knows?
June 5th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I always figured that the LibDems missed their chance in the late 90s and early 00s to become the opposition to the Labour Party. Blair’s “Third Way” could attract moderates and right-of-centers, while the Lib Dems would attract the left-of-center-and-further-left who was disillusioned with Blair, while the Conservative Party got left with the rump of the hard right. But I think the Lib Dems simply failed to seize the initiative while it was available.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
My guess is that Labour is doomed whether they keep Gordon Brown or not. They would be better going down with him and then finding a new leader rather than finding a new leader going down and then trying to find someone else. Moreover who would want to be the leader that replaced Gordon Brown only to be defeated in a short time? Labour has been in power since I believe 1994 so it seems healthy that UK conservatives get a shot. We should wish our conservatives were as good.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
“Meanwhile, back to the UK, I suppose from an outsider’s perspective I wonder if at some point there can be a tipping point for the Liberal Democrats.”
I’ll defer to anyone who shows up with an actual UK perspective, but my understanding is that the Lib Dems are not taken very seriously by the working class for a variety of reasons, mostly rooted in the history of class politics. Their image is basically similar to the “Wine Track Democrats” incarnated as a culturally liberal, economically moderate third party.
So while they tend to fare very well in upscale, culturally liberal urban areas, and their commitment to political decentralization has built them a base in Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall… they aren’t really an effective national party. They might conceivably finish 2nd in the nationwide popular vote, but will likely be crushed by Labour in the number of seats they win due to the first-past-the-post, single-member district format.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Not banal at all. Note also the way our media largely ignored the recent Indian elections. Largest democracy votes with some very interesting results and well… yawn. One reason why we Americans are so ignorant about world affairs is because our media is more interested in “human interest” stories. Or with folks from the opposite political spectrum screaming at each other over some inanity. It is noise … not news.
I personally think the Gordon Brown, while not spectacular, is a not-so-terrible PM who given the challenges is doing a pretty OK job. However, he has the charisma of a door knob. The real damage (to Labour) was done by the very pretty and charismatic Blair but poor Brown will land up with most of the blame when Labour gets thumped next year. There is a lesson in here for the Democrats.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
The interesting hypothetical is what a Brown government would have looked like with a cabinet made up of the same people Blair had in the top jobs back in his first term of office — Cook, Dewar, Dobson, Robertson, etc. Many of today’s ministerial departees enjoyed the good times under Blair in the junior ranks, but never experienced the lean years of opposition in the 80s and early 90s.
I imagine a lot of people who might have some love for the Lib Dems nevertheless don’t want to “waste” a vote on a third party.
Actually, no. The results are all over the place, beyond the expected “Labour gets hammered, Tories pick up seats and councils”. But the Tories aren’t doing quite as well as they hoped, because there are lots of fringe parties and this time round — Green, UKIP, the execrable BNP — as well as independents splitting the vote in ways that can’t be extrapolated into trends. You’d assume that the fringe and anti-establishment parties would be squeezed in a general election, but that’s still likely a year away.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
But of course don’t forget that in this case, the ‘third party’ is less likely to be the Lib Dems– instead it’s the neo-fascist BNP, UKIP and Greens in the European elections. Also remember that the three main parties (LibDem/Labour/Conservative) do not exist on a simply two dimensional plane, with Lib Dems on the left– they policies are far more nuanced (or a different way of understanding is that they haven’t yet worked out what their positions are in terms of their historical positions or their more modern policies).
June 5th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Everything about the Lib Dems and the UK demand a proportional representation system. They’re quite popular, but never do that well because of
a) wasted vote effect- people don’t vote for them
b) they rarely will beat both the Labour AND the Tory candidate in any given district
Anyhow Labour is in for a whooping; as #5 said, Brown is as charismatic as a doorknob
June 5th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
The real damage (to Labour) was done by the very pretty and charismatic Blair but poor Brown will land up with most of the blame when Labour gets thumped next year. There is a lesson in here for the Democrats.
Thatcher/Major
Reagan/Bush
Blair/Brown
Obama/45?
June 5th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I always figured that the LibDems missed their chance in the late 90s and early 00s to become the opposition to the Labour Party.
Perhaps, though I’d push that back earlier, to the declining days of Major’s time in office, when the Tories lost their absolute majority and relied upon the votes of the Ulster Unionists for matters of confidence. Paddy Ashdown (himself an Ulsterman) was in a position where he could potentially pull the plug, and chose not to. After 1997, Blair had a sufficient majority to usurp the mantle of constitutional reform in a way that defused some of their long-standing positions. Then there was the whole thing with Charles Kennedy and his problem with the bottle.
I don’t think there was ever the opportunity for the Lib Dems to become the equivalent of the NDP, though. It has always has a Janus-face, squeezing Labour at the suburban edge of its heartland, and the Tories in rural areas like SW England and the Scottish borders.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Banal my ass! I get most of my *American* news from the BBC. I’ll continue to do so as long as the mainstream media continues to “balance” coverage by elevating failed conservative hatemongers to importance.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Remember that the media ecology in Britain is different for a reason–from the beginning, radio and then TV mass media were understood as public goods with a civic responsibility, whereas we went the commercial route. I don’t think the difference in tone is an accident.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
@Cate: agreed wholeheartedly. We made excellent progress by establishing media ownership limitations, which made room for the kind of diversity of opinion that decentralization affords. Then we completely gave away the store in 1996, under a Democratic President no less. Within 5 years media had concentrated so much that antiwar voices were squeezed out of the dialog, and Clear Channel was censoring the Dixie Chicks nationwide for political revenge.
I firmly believe that restoration of the ownership limitations is the only way to save the press at this point, because it’s clear that the current media oligopoly is failing us all miserably.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
As another Yank commentator, I’d take what I say on British politics with a grain of salt. I do follow British politics as I have an interest that stems from interests in comparative politics and world affairs as well as time spent abroad in the UK. That being said, I’ve often found that even UK commentators well-versed in US politics routinely give awful analyses of US politics (read any UK commentator’s coverage of the 2008 election – while they were clearly quite interested, there was an awful lot that any well-informed American political junkie would challenge).
That long preface out of the way, there are a couple issues to note:
(1) Brown deserves criticism for profligacy and for failing to regulate the financial markets, allowing big bubbles in finance and housing. That being said, it’s hard to imagine the Tories having done anything differently and he’s been admirably redistributive. Under Labour, there have been big improvements to the NHS (even if some of the vast sums thrown at it have been sucked into increasing bureacracy and red tape that came with their insistence on “choice” and targets). Brown’s response to the financial crisis has actually been reasonably good, but he suffers not only from having absolutely zero charisma but also by coming at the “fag end” of a long period of Labour rule.
In most mature democracies, parties simply don’t endure in power for far beyond a decade. Voters get tired and look for a change, the party in power starts to drift, loses a sense of urgency, plus inevitably there are scandals and some turns in fortune that are blamed on the ruling party. Brown came to power 10 years after Blair did. He miscalculated by not holding an early election in the fall of ‘07, when, despite a late Tory surge in the polls, he would have won.
(2) The Liberal Democrats are a perennial third party. There are few truly close national elections in the UK, and in the last couple decades, the Lib Dems basically take a bunch of votes from disillusioned supporters of the losing party who can’t bear to vote for the winning party. So lots of disaffected Tories voted Lib Dem in ‘97 and ‘01 and lots of disaffected Labour voters voted Lib Dem in ‘05 (despite Labour’s win).
The closest the Lib Dems came to actually displacing Labour was in the ’80s, when the Lib Dems were known as “The Alliance.” It’s possible that had there been no Faulklands War, the ‘83 election may have resulted in an Alliance minority govt or a Labour-Alliance coalition.
Of course, the Lib Dems are themselves split between centrist, European-style liberals and social democrats. The social democrats want the Lib Dems to outflank Labour on the left and the liberals want to position themselves between Labor and the Tories.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
It’s worth pointing out that Brown is one of the world leaders really committed to fighting global poverty. Brown’s playing a tough hand, no doubt, but I think he’s doing a pretty good job, and to some extent this is Murdoch-led hysteria. I’d like to be reassured that Cameron’s up to the job, but from what I’ve seen the man strikes me as George Bush with a bad haircut.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Why would anyone with an IQ above room temperature be watching cable TV at all?
Seriously, this is 2009.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Too true about the US Cable networks!
And this thing about Keith and Rachel and everybody daily getting indignant about Rush only serves to feed the bloated monster. Stop it already!
Yes, my IQ is well above sauna temperature and cable news most of the time just cherry picks from the intertubes anyway but just once in a while it is arresting to catch the visuals live rather than in a little You-Tube window (or a grainy big one.)
My big gripe is wannabe media barons like, um, say, Joshua Micah Marshal,l who are under the delusion we would rather watch them read the news than just simply scan the text ourselves. Even most sub-sauna IQs can read fast than a talking head speak.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
but unfortunately we can’t type as quickly as we think. sorry.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Things are very bad for the government but Labour is nowhere near being supplanted–thay have far too much depth. It is quite nornmal to give the government a seriously good thrashing at this stage in the electoral cycle. If Labour were to lose the general election (probably in May ‘10) then they could find themselves in the same place as the Tories in ‘97. Lib Dems want electoral reform because they know that is their only route to power short of Labour breaking up–we are not there yet, though!
You didn’t mention that the severity of the governent’s and Labour’s problems stem from Brown’s leadership flaws.
June 5th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Interestingly, electoral reform might not actually help the Lib Dems at all – they usually do worse in the European Parliament elections, which are based on proportional representation (where tiny parties get a fair amount of support), than they do in the first-past-the-post UK elections. Though they would probably do pretty well under an instant runoff system, since they are often seen as the second-best option by both Labour and Tory voters.
June 5th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
There is a certainly cultural element to this. You go to Surrey or Kensington, and ask the average bloke on the street, alright, if you can’t vote Tory, would you take Labour? The answer is usually a pretty solid “hells no.” You ask the same question, but change Labour to Lib Dem, and the attitude immediately shifts.
For all intents and purposes, Labour is already a fringe party in the south of England. They essentially don’t exist in the Home Counties and trail the Lib Dems. In this local election, I remember that southern counties had distributions (between Labour-Lib Dem-Tory) of something like 2-26-50, or something like that.
Part of it isn’t even the policies of Labour; it is just that among southerners, there is a visceral, unchangeable “yuck” factor when it comes to Labour; the closest analogy is the reaction of New Yorkers and San Franciscans to the Republican party; whatever their policy might be, the physical, visceral reaction is still “yuck.” And Labour has only got itself to blame for it; it’s got a lot of pretty off-putting and unlikable people, Prescott included. Middle England essentially sees hard Labourites as Neanderthals, much like urbane Americans see hard-line Republicans. That fact that Labour is perennially associated with the grimy North, much like the Republicans with the Appalachian backwoods, does not help.
Once the “yuck” factor is there, nothing can change the preference. Voters in the south would sooner vote for UKIP than for Labour.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I spend a fair amount of time listening to BBC 4. Two things I’ve been wondering about. First, where is similar outrage in the UK (or US!) to banking bailouts? Second, why aren’t the Tories more seriously affected by these scandals when some of the most prominent examples of allowance abuse is by Tory MPs?
June 5th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
Second, why aren’t the Tories more seriously affected by these scandals when some of the most prominent examples of allowance abuse is by Tory MPs?
That Tories are a bit dim and somewhat lax when it comes to money is sort of expected among the British public, i.e., the “toff”, sort of Jeeves, Ho! impression.
But also, there is a certain, qualitative difference between using public money to fix your moat, or do your gardening, and using public money for porn video rental or for jacuzzis or, to put fake Tudor beams on your house. The former is merely corrupt; the latter is not only corrupt, it is low-taste and trashy. Americans might find the difference trivial, if not frivolous, but for the middle-class British person, the difference is like night and day. It is bad enough to have corrupt parliamentarians; it is even worse to have corrupt, trashy parliamentarians. The British are a hierarchical-minded people.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
and ask the average bloke on the street, alright, if you can’t vote Tory, would you take Labour? The answer is usually a pretty solid “hells no.”
“Hells no”?
Miley Foppington may dress like an inbred third son of the gentry, but he has clearly only ever been to Kensington to bray at the dinosaurs.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
“Why would anyone with an IQ above room temperature be watching cable TV at all?”
Because electoral general election politics in both the US and UK are dominated the telly.
If you are interested in the domestic electoral politics of your nation, you have no choice but to watch cable TV.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
And to parse Miley’s lofty-nosed nonsense in #23: the moats and duck islands and gardeners may indeed be expected of Sir Bufton Tufton, knight of the shire, but chiselling Tories who claim the secretary’s allowance to their wives and a researcher’s allowance for their children have come off no better. Furthermore, the biggest issue in the expenses scandal hasn’t been about the tastefulness of expensed items — in spite of the Torygraph trying to make it so — but abuse of the second-home allowance to take advantage of the idiotic property bubble.
As Daniel Davies noted, every City banker is popping vintage Krug over the fact that a million-pound bonus is fantasy money, but a few thousand on expenses is a visceral outrage. And there’s something ironic about it being the Telegraph (former proprietory Prisoner Number 18330-424) who broke the story by signing a six-figure cheque to the original leaker.
June 5th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Miley Foppington may dress like an inbred third son of the gentry, but he has clearly only ever been to Kensington to bray at the dinosaurs.
I don’t live in Britain. I live in America. I see no necessity of my phrasing everything in folksy British lingo. They are obscure, they are interesting, but they aren’t necessary for me to communicate ideas. Give up that snark.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Furthermore, the biggest issue in the expenses scandal hasn’t been about the tastefulness of expensed items — in spite of the Torygraph trying to make it so — but abuse of the second-home allowance to take advantage of the idiotic property bubble.
Frankly, the Telegraph has descended into a populist rag over this whole affair. It cannot be called the Torygraph anymore; the Torygraph is supposed to be establishmentarian, not going hysterical over some petty foolishness and calling for the pitchforks.
And I’ll repeat, and challenge anyone to defy my description, that the image of Gordon Brown, in Great Britain, is probably worse than that of George Bush in the U.S. In fact, come to think of it, the hatred for Brown is probably stronger, if only by half a boat length. But it’s looking like by the time the election hits, that is, if he survives, it’s gonna be more like four boat lengths.
Toward both politicians the hatred is purely visceral, physical, and partially irrational. Except for Brown, it is even more visceral, physical, and irrational than Americans at large ever could manage toward George Bush. It’s not totally his fault, but the whole premise of Labour Party, based on a sort of weird, bizarre class-based politics, fits ill with the British psyche. This is the end of the road for Labour, and whatever my own thoughts, the end of this class-based approach to politics cannot be held to be detrimental to Britain.
June 5th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
While the BBC is better than the US’s commercial “newsradio” stations, I think its political and business coverage are pretty crappy. Their “personalities” often seem quite dumb to me.
They do have decent straight reporting on global crises, though.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
I see no necessity of my phrasing everything in folksy British lingo.
And yet you are but a human-shaped cluster of affectations, who makes claims about “the British psyche” that were hoary when Wodehouse parodied them. As such, your predictions are worth less than a sheet of single-ply industrial bog-roll.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Matt, don’t you guys have access to FiOS TV or something similar? I think in some ways its vital to have in your business. I installed FiOS in October and now I have eight devoted news channels, four of them international, and three C-Spans.
It has been an eye-opening educational experience, the equal of the my recent discovery of the true power of the internet. If you use the remote aggressively, it is almost like cruising the internet without the pop-ups, and of course, without the brutal physical labor necessary to operated a mouse and keyboard.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Re: If you are interested in the domestic electoral politics of your nation, you have no choice but to watch cable TV.
I pay very close attention to politics, and I NEVER watch cable TV (other than on election night, to get the returns). The Internet is fast replacing TV as the venue for political junkies.
June 5th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Max424: What foreign news channels do you like? I’m looking at FIOS. Thanks.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:38 am
What I interpret the lack of UK coverage among the American cable news channels to mean is that cable news is putting a high priority on to what they think people want, not what’s necessarily important. People will want to hear whatever bullshit comes out of Rush’s mouth, the assumption goes, but they won’t want to hear about controversy and party struggles in Britain even though that’s far more important and serious.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:41 am
@33 SN
FiOs has four devoted news channels, CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, and FOX News.
Three foreign news channels, CNN International, CNBC World, and BBC World News. Three devoted financial networks, Bloomberg, CNBC, and FOX Business. Bloomberg I find watchable because it has a lot of international stuff, mainly interviews of foreign “players.”
Also, three military channels, the Pentagon channel, the Military channel, and the Military History channel, so you check the three pack and if you get lucky, you might catch a program that gives you a real “feel” for the military’s perspective on things.
And three C-SPans. I like having three because almost anytime, day or night, you can catch someone -usually a Cabinet member- testifying at a Congressional hearing. I find watching some hearings informative and on not so rare occasions, enlightening.
June 6th, 2009 at 3:32 am
That is so 1998.
June 6th, 2009 at 4:38 am
And yet you are but a human-shaped cluster of affectations, who makes claims about “the British psyche” that were hoary when Wodehouse parodied them. As such, your predictions are worth less than a sheet of single-ply industrial bog-roll.
Look, I don’t know if it is a congenital trait of British Labourites to be bitter and (in Damian McBride’s case) utterly unscrupulous, but you don’t have to like me much to realise that the British people detest Labour, and that’s the end of it.
They put up with New Labour primarily because it is not at all leftist, but simply right-authoritarian in every sense of the word. Now they have anyone who’s slightly to the left of Blair, they won’t put up with it. For god’s sakes, this is a nation that has been bitten hard by post-war Keynesian-inspired, socialist economics that has lost them the Empire; to expect them to vote for the Left is to expect them to jump off a cliff, the second time.
They won’t do it, and I can’t blame them. At the end of the day, Labour is extinct, and both you and I know it. No point in verbal jousting in trying to elude the point. The end is nigh, and there is no point pretending otherwise.
June 6th, 2009 at 4:42 am
And those who think that the Lib Dems will tack (economically) left are deluding themselves. Their youth wing is now called Liberal Youth; there are no votes, economically, left of Blair, to be found anywhere in the south of England.
No party that cannot at least convince Middle England of its basic legitimacy will hold power for long, and Labour has reached that point of illegitimacy. Lib Dems, being not affiliated to union influence, will be bound to be more economically liberal.
June 6th, 2009 at 8:35 am
I always figured that the LibDems missed their chance in the late 90s and early 00s to become the opposition to the Labour Party. Blair’s “Third Way” could attract moderates and right-of-centers, while the Lib Dems would attract the left-of-center-and-further-left who was disillusioned with Blair, while the Conservative Party got left with the rump of the hard right. But I think the Lib Dems simply failed to seize the initiative while it was available.
This analysis is actually completely backwards; the Lib Dems (and before that, Liberals) were historically the centrist party in UK politics, between the socialist Labour and the Conservatives. Labour, tentatively under Kinnock then aggressively under Blair, moved to the centre, and then a bit past it, with policies associated with the Lib Dems and Conservatives. This was successful, at least temporarily, because the Conservatives had rendered themselves unelectable with a rightward swing of their own and vicious infighting (sound familiar to US audiences?) while the Lib Dems were, at the time, not enough of a national force to stop Labour claiming their territory.
It’s fair to say that the Lib Dems are now the leftmost of the three main parties, but hostility to socialism and militant trade unionism is still deep in the party’s DNA, so a wholesale shift of working class support from Labour to Lib Dems remains unlikely. Sadly the neofascist British National Party may be better placed to appeal to parts of that constituency.
June 6th, 2009 at 10:20 am
Can anyone point me to a quick guide to the recent elections in the UK and what they were all about? I thought the elections were for the European Parliament but that doesn’t jibe with the results as they have been reported.
June 6th, 2009 at 10:41 am
There were 2 sets of elections on thursday, one for the european elections and one for a number of local councils.
The results for the local elections were announced on friday and the results for the European elections will be announced on sunday(so all EU countries results are announced on the same day)
June 6th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Though I feel the acid uprising in the throat even as I type this, I am stunned to note that Sir Myles Baroque SG (R-Dubai) actually made an insightful point.
I think this gets at a part of this scandal’s significance.
June 6th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
At the end of the day, Labour is extinct, and both you and I know it.
A) Money. B) Your Big Mouth. Apply A) to B), and you’ll show a degree of seriousness about your prediction that isn’t displayed by your talk of “Middle England”.
this is a nation that has been bitten hard by post-war Keynesian-inspired, socialist economics that has lost them the Empire;
Pip pip, Ginger! Clearly this explanation accounts for the role of the property boom and the banksters — the fundamentals of the Daily Mail economy — in the last two recessions. Or perhaps not.
The Labour government is knackered, diluted of talent, and dealing with the post-Blair hangover. Some time in opposition will, frankly, be good for the party, and the thing that makes Cameron electable (when his predecessors were not) is the perception that he will not enter Number 10 with the arrogance and class-war mentality of Thatcher. The fundamentals of the NHS are not going to change; the minimum wage is not going away; gay civil partners will not be stripped of their rights. And the Tories will campaign hard on a pledge to reverse the right-authoritarian tendencies that Blair imposed upon Labour.
June 6th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Some time in opposition will, frankly, be good for the party, and the thing that makes Cameron electable (when his predecessors were not) is the perception that he will not enter Number 10 with the arrogance and class-war mentality of Thatcher.
John Prescott clearly hasn’t got the note. As haven’t scores of northern Labour MP’s. Look, here is the deal: the government of the country wasted more than three post-war decades squabbling about class war, when it should have been building and re-building the country. Everyone remembers, of course, that asinine, and eminently quotable utterance about taxing the rich until the pips squeak; pure class hatred.
Thankfully, that ugly aspect of the British polity has been washed out since the days of Thatcher; gradually it will disappear somewhat.
No one is going to scrap NHS, or the minimum wage, or whatever. That’s not the issue.
Pip pip, Ginger! Clearly this explanation accounts for the role of the property boom and the banksters — the fundamentals of the Daily Mail economy — in the last two recessions. Or perhaps not.
It is alright to talk about recessions only when you ignore all the boom Britain has experienced since the 90’s, crawling out of, as it were, its banana-republic nadir exemplified by the IMF loan of the Callaghan government. Ask the average Briton; you want to bet that he would way rather take the boom, with the recessions and all, over the Callaghan economy and the Winter of Discontent? You wanna bet?
Are you being serious, for God’s sakes? Complaining about Thatcherism is all fine and dandy, and making noises about houses and the City is old practice, but what’s your implication? Return to the Sick Man of Europe status of Britain’s late industrial economy? What’s your alternative?
None.
The financial storm will pass, but the shitty industrial economy won’t come back, and in any case no one would want it to come back.
And the Tories will campaign hard on a pledge to reverse the right-authoritarian tendencies that Blair imposed upon Labour.
What you don’t seem to grasp is that the right-authoritarianism isn’t, you know, New Labour so much as it is Daily Heil, and it is a direct result of Labour trying to grab the Mail-reading demographic. From Blair onwards, every single government will have to deal with, and placate, the Mail-reading, commuter-belt, Home Counties demographic. David Cameron isn’t an authoritarian himself, but he will have to satisfy the bloodlust of those with that tendency, and those amount to great (electoral) numbers. Right now, the political tendency of David Cameron is actually to the left of the Home Counties; we’ll see how that will fare during government.
It is relatively easy to talk about biometric ID cards; everyone thinks they are rubbish. But ASBOs? Foreigners? Feral youth? “Chavs”? Do you seriously think they are just pure New Labour fabrications, and not part and parcel of the English political instinct? Do you seriously believe that the Mail will reverse its authoritarian hysteria simply because Cameron campaigns, and plans to govern, on it?
It’s easy enough to talk about the class wars of Thatcher. But where did she learn the tricks? Labour. Ernest Bevin. Scargill. Gaitskill. And where did Labour learn the tricks? From the class-loathing toward the lower orders, of the British middle classes. The instinct has always been there.
And I just feel compelled ridicule your economic pronouncements again? So, again, what are you saying? You would rather take the banana-republic economy of Callaghan than the boom-bust economy of Blair and Thatcher, which, I note, at least have booms? Clearly you aren’t saying that. You are just verbal jousting.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
[...] #2: Matt Y Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Things I can’t stop laughing [...]
June 6th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Because of the parliamentary system, people can freely vote for the LibDems *in districts where they have a chance* without worrying about whether it will hurt the Tories. A Tory-LibDem coalition government is quite imaginable. Furthermore, British media reads the polls and *tells* people which districts are “LibDem-Labour marginals”, “LibDem-Tory marginals”, “Labour-Tory marginals”, “three-way marginals”, or likely blowouts for one party or another. So it’s a lot easier to vote strategically than it is in the US.
In fact, the LibDems’ problems are two. First, a lot of the working class vote consistently for Labour even though New Labour screws them over: people who oppose *nearly everything Tony Blair has done* still vote Labour. Second, the first-past-the-post system dilutes LibDem support severely, since it’s fairly evenly distributed across England.
June 6th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
However, the LibDems would probably make better coalitions. I have no doubt that under proportional representation, Green Party, SNP and Plaid Cmyru representatives would be more likely to go into coalition with the LibDems than with Labour or the Conservatives. The Europarl elections are also weirdly distorted by the issue of “Euroskepticism”, which benefits the UKIP and the Tories disproportionately, but has very little effect in Westminster elections (which kind of makes sense).
(Of course, there’s also the mess known as Northern Ireland. The principled non-sectarian position of the LibDems rather hurts them in coalition-making there.)
June 7th, 2009 at 1:56 am
It’s always fun to be lectured about the Winter of Discontent by someone who was aged -12 at the time, and makes ad populum appeals based upon, well, I have no idea where Miley gets his Clapham-omnibus material.
The basic fallacy in your comparison is to treat Callaghan in isolation, as if he were Carter, when like Alec Douglas-Home, John Major and now Gordon Brown, he presided over the scrag-end of a political era. There have been three sea-change elections since the 1945 Labour landslide: 1964, 1979 and 1997; Heath’s surprise victory in 1970 and the re-election of Wilson after the two elections of 1974 hardly represent a substantial change of direction.
Now, if your argument is that all governments are hostages to the selfish, paranoid inhabitants of Daily Mail Island, who’ll hoard the profits from a property boom or throw their money at Icelandic savings accounts, then look for someone else to blame for the bust, I’ll grant it to a point, though the bark of that self-caricature of Middle England is worse than its bite.
But if you’re really just hoo-hahing about how “Labour is extinct, and both you and I know it”, well, you really ought to stop telling me what I know, because it makes you look like a tit, and you are again invited to put your money where your big mouth is.
In the meantime, be sure to remember this point in your life, when you’re convinced that you know everything about everything; if you’re lucky, that will go away in six or seven years. Give it a decade, and you’ll be sanguine about losing your bet.
June 7th, 2009 at 2:41 am
The basic fallacy in your comparison is to treat Callaghan in isolation, as if he were Carter, when like Alec Douglas-Home, John Major and now Gordon Brown, he presided over the scrag-end of a political era. There have been three sea-change elections since the 1945 Labour landslide: 1964, 1979 and 1997; Heath’s surprise victory in 1970 and the re-election of Wilson after the two elections of 1974 hardly represent a substantial change of direction.
Now, if your argument is that all governments are hostages to the selfish, paranoid inhabitants of Daily Mail Island, who’ll hoard the profits from a property boom or throw their money at Icelandic savings accounts, then look for someone else to blame for the bust, I’ll grant it to a point, though the bark of that self-caricature of Middle England is worse than its bite.
No one would assert that the whole mess of the 70’s was something exclusive to Labour; the whole thing was a post-war consensus between the Tory wets (who predominanted) and the Labour democratic-socialists. Except that specific consesus was wrong, counterproductive, and ruinous for Britain, and both parties deserve equal blame.
Had Macmillan been successfully turfed out by the cabinet crisis of 1958, I suspect Britain would never have reached the breaking point of the IMF and Winter of Discontent in the 70’s. As it were, that did not come to pass, and Britain kept going downhill. Socialism wasn’t just a Labour construct; it was a Tory-Labour consensus until Thatcher came along with her view of Hayek.
But frankly, I would rather having the Mail and its demographic screaming their heads off about some fixation than have the Times complacently anointing the bizarre, self-destructive, and ultimately humiliating post-war social consensus. At least with the Mail ideology you won’t ever get something as tail-end (your word) and manifestly ugly as the Winter of Discontent. While the Mail, and Blairism, are just unpleasant, any return to the post-war view is profoundly destructive and could again make the country ungovernable.
It might now take some incredulity for the average Briton to recall this, but for most of the post-war period, Britain was far poorer than France and Italy. France and Italy! That’s how bad things got. It wasn’t like 1993 that Britain re-exceeded Italy. I don’t think anyone in the country is looking to the those days.
It doesn’t take a very clever person to see where the future of Britain lies; a strong, globe-leading capital sector that sucks money from abroad, by extension, Britain-headquartered multinationals who invest capital and grab profits from abroad, like BP, HSBC, Standard Chartered et al, and the like.
And frankly, the whole expenses scandal is silly. Attlee’s 1945 of Labour MP’s were probably incredibly clean and conscientioius, but look what a job they did gutting, via a closed-economy socialism, all the economic advantages and concessions forebears hae built up, Cecil Rhodes-style, via the empire formal and informal (Argentina was a captive market, for example).
Whereas it was a corrupt group of MP’s who chose Canada over some sugar islands in the Carribbean, urged by open bribery. Granted, the luck was unforeseen, but still, it is illustrative that conscientious scruples could backfire spectacularly. Whether MP’s are pigs have very little to do with how well the economy is being run, and frankly I am more willing to have a bunch of clever, corrupt pigs who know how to make Britain rich and prosperous than hae a bunch of uptight fools who only know how to make Britain poorer.
June 7th, 2009 at 2:42 am
The basic fallacy in your comparison is to treat Callaghan in isolation, as if he were Carter, when like Alec Douglas-Home, John Major and now Gordon Brown, he presided over the scrag-end of a political era. There have been three sea-change elections since the 1945 Labour landslide: 1964, 1979 and 1997; Heath’s surprise victory in 1970 and the re-election of Wilson after the two elections of 1974 hardly represent a substantial change of direction.
Now, if your argument is that all governments are hostages to the selfish, paranoid inhabitants of Daily Mail Island, who’ll hoard the profits from a property boom or throw their money at Icelandic savings accounts, then look for someone else to blame for the bust, I’ll grant it to a point, though the bark of that self-caricature of Middle England is worse than its bite.
No one would assert that the whole mess of the 70’s was something exclusive to Labour; the whole thing was a post-war consensus between the Tory wets (who predominanted) and the Labour democratic-socialists. Except that specific consesus was wrong, counterproductive, and ruinous for Britain, and both parties deserve equal blame.
Had Macmillan been successfully turfed out by the cabinet crisis of 1958, I suspect Britain would never have reached the breaking point of the IMF and Winter of Discontent in the 70’s. As it were, that did not come to pass, and Britain kept going downhill. Socialism wasn’t just a Labour construct; it was a Tory-Labour consensus until Thatcher came along with her view of Hayek.
But frankly, I would rather having the Mail and its demographic screaming their heads off about some fixation than have the Times complacently anointing the bizarre, self-destructive, and ultimately humiliating post-war social consensus. At least with the Mail ideology you won’t ever get something as tail-end (your word) and manifestly ugly as the Winter of Discontent. While the Mail, and Blairism, are just unpleasant, any return to the post-war view is profoundly destructive and could again make the country ungovernable.
It might now take some incredulity for the average Briton to recall this, but for most of the post-war period, Britain was far poorer than France and Italy. France and Italy! That’s how bad things got. It wasn’t like 1993 that Britain re-exceeded Italy. I don’t think anyone in the country is looking to the those days.
It doesn’t take a very clever person to see where the future of Britain lies; a strong, globe-leading capital sector that sucks money from abroad, by extension, Britain-headquartered multinationals who invest capital and grab profits from abroad, like BP, HSBC, Standard Chartered et al, and the like.
And frankly, the whole expenses scandal is silly. Attlee’s 1945 of Labour MP’s were probably incredibly clean and conscientioius, but look what a job they did gutting, via a closed-economy socialism, all the economic advantages and concessions forebears hae built up, Cecil Rhodes-style, via the empire formal and informal (Argentina was a captive market, for example).
Whereas it was a corrupt group of MP’s who chose Canada over some sugar islands in the Carribbean, urged by open bribery. Granted, the luck was unforeseen, but still, it is illustrative that conscientious scruples could backfire spectacularly. Whether MP’s are pigs have very little to do with how well the economy is being run, and frankly I am more willing to have a bunch of clever, corrupt pigs who know how to make Britain rich and prosperous than hae a bunch of uptight fools who only know how to make Britain poorer.
June 7th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
The ironic thing, of course, is that Gordon Brown probably has less right-authoritarian tendencies than Blair. Except, of course, no one cares, and everyone thinks Brown is the Stalinist.
Tells you all you need to know about the political situation in Britain.