Margaret Thatcher was honoured with the invention of an eponymous political
creed in the 1980s: Thatcherism. Gordon Brown, however, stands accused of
promoting a less flattering brand: “stuckism”.
Tracey Emin, the artist, once kicked her boyfriend out, adding insult to
injury by accusing him of being artistically “stuck, stuck, stuck”. He
gleefully embraced the insult as the label of his movement. As a proud
progressive, Brown is unlikely to follow suit.
Michael Gove, the perky Conservative schools spokesman, had a ready audience
beyond his party last week when he took up the theme in a speech to the Bow
Group. No longer is Brown just “the roadblock to reform”, he charged, but a
“thwarted idealist” who has waited too long for office.
In his best Oxford Union manner, Gove pretended to mourn his fellow Scot: “The
prime minister is trapped, by circumstances he inherited, choices he has
made, trapped in a position which made a sort of sense for a specific time
but which now, sadly for him, leaves him unable to respond effectively to a
world which has changed.”
“Spot on,” said the Blairites. Well they would, wouldn’t they? They regard
Brown as a poor Lyndon Johnson substitute for their own glamorous John
Kennedy, a Roger Moore to Tony Blair’s Sean Connery.
When the Tories argue that the prime minister “has an itch to central-ise
which speaks of nothing so much as an attachment to power itself”, the
Blairites grimace, remembering their bloody defeats in Whitehall at the
hands of Brown, the chancellor.
It’s not just the Blairites who say that Brown is like a man who saved up for
10 years for a sports car and then pranged it while everyone watched on its
first outing. The left also accuses the prime minister of stuckism.
Compass, a pressure group which has hitherto been a good friend to Brown,
published a critical manifesto last week demanding a decisive break with new
Labour’s centrist politics. Pay up for more child poverty programmes, end
markets in education and health, go for a core Labour vote strategy, they
argued in their best tax-and-spend mode. Well, it’s a point of view. The
venerable Fabian Society later joined in with a whinge against “the magpie
theft” of Tory policies. Brown “needs a positive argument to win”, they
moaned.
Yet Brown really has been trying to paint a visionary canvas of sorts. A
recent speech on security and liberty thoughtfully discussed the evils of
arbitrary state power, even if the numerous erudite citations sounded a bit
Top of the Philosophes. However, the prime minister’s defence of ID cards
and promise to extend powers to hold terrorist suspects without charge for
more than 28 days will not win back disillusioned Labour defectors to the
Liberal Democrats.
An intellectual Labour MP says that Brown has failed to describe “the purpose
of Great Britain Limited” because of his uncertain grasp of identity
politics. Thus the prime minister will not tell us how much is enough when
it comes to immigration numbers or defend a Britain that welcomes “the
huddled masses”.
In fact, he will not talk about immigration at all, when the rest of the
country can talk about nothing else.
By extolling British values and hoping that Scottish nationalism will go away,
“we look as if we are permanently antiEnglish”, adds my informant: “He
doesn’t understand that devolution was not an end point but a process. We
should reply by celebrating the four nations of the United Kingdom. Only by
expressing the differences can we understand what we have in common.”
Brown has a copy of Linda Colley’s Britons by his bedside. The book identifies
the historical success of Britain with empire and Protestantism; it is hard
to know which is more moribund now in this country.
The Blairites accuse the prime minister of being policy-lite. “He doesn’t feel
ownership of our immigration policy - that’s why we are in trouble here,”
says one. They believe he is neither defending the past 10 years nor
delineating the next: “We are in no man’s land; talk of personalising public
services is evading the issue. Where’s the vision thing?”
The Tories, too, boast that the government has lost “the battle of ideas”.
Maybe - although I think it is premature, if not a little presumptuous, to
boast that the Conservatives have attained intellectual supremacy so soon
after their bitter internal wrangles last summer. Grammar schools, any-one?
However, their leader David Cameron is certainly proving more effective than
Brown in empathising with voters’ concerns - which is not quite the same
thing.
Cameron is successfully adopting the hit-and-run tactics of new Labour in its
years in opposition. Then Blair, as shadow home secretary, termed the tragic
murder of young Jamie Bulger as “a hammer blow against the sleeping
conscience of society” and warned of “moral chaos”; now Cameron has warned
of “Britain’s broken society” in the wake of Rhys Evans’s murder in
Liverpool.
With greater confidence now that he has seen off the threat of an election,
Cameron is no longer afraid to address immigration either, formerly taboo.
His reward was applause from Trevor Phillips, chief of the Equality and
Human Rights Commission and a Labour intimate: “For the first time in my
adult life I hear a party leader clearly attempting to deracialise the issue
of immigration and to treat it like any other question of political and
economic management.”
Cleverly the Conservative leader turned his fire back on an uncaring state
that allows at least 4m native Britons to rot on welfare while more than one
in two new jobs go to foreigners. Cameron’s remedies may be fuzzy but at
least the diagnosis chimes with the voters.
Gove delves too far back into the past with his analogy that Brown is a
broken-backed Balfour, Rosebery, Lloyd George or Lyndon Johnson - all of
whom got the prize too late. But there is a more modern and disconcerting
parallel in Al Gore, the former US vice-president, and his boss Bill Clinton.
Nobody would accuse Gore, now a Nobel prize winner for promoting awareness of
climate change, of being a lightweight. On the contrary, there is a
heaviness about him that dismays ordinary Americans.
Gore used to bang on about the internet and his role in inventing it. Clinton
would sell the Americans a grand vision, too, but then he would pop down
from the clouds to address the worries of parents with homespun
illustrations about how “the decent society” could be protected. A V-chip in
the television, explained Clinton, would stop your kids seeing a load of
disgusting stuff in the living room.
In a 10-second television news clip from a classrooom last week, Brown
pontificated in high falutin’ words about how education is “the great
liberator of all mankind”. It sounded as if he, like Gore, was accepting a
world leadership award. There was little concrete here about discipline in
classrooms, disruptive kids or how to stop the little horrors watching too
much trash.
Watching Brown, you ask: what has that man got to say about my children and
their school? Brown answers with the grandiose pledge of “a society in which
no child falls behind”. Oh really? From the most socialist to the most
socially mobile society, someone has to come last. To use a word beloved of
Charlie Whelan, his former spin doctor, “bollocks”.
Even Thatcher, no touchy-feely prime minister, could talk about balancing the
family budget and picking up litter. Cameron today talks about quality of
life. Sometimes it gets a bit gooey what with “the sunlit uplands” but more
often than not nowadays it works.
Brown did it for a few short months - he stopped supercasinos and held back
the tide of 24-hour drinking on taking office - the V chip issues of Britain
today. Those acts ticked the boxes. But they are not enough.
Has he anything left to give? Vision comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes
it is a matter of small is beautiful.
