Gordon Brown has secured a place in the record books. An opinion poll last
week put Labour’s rating beneath the low point achieved by Michael Foot in
the early 1980s.
Brown is now regarded as the “best” choice as prime minister (among the three
party leaders) by only 17% of voters. However, Brown’s signal place in
history is the speed of his collapse. He has plumbed these depths even
before celebrating his first anniversary in Downing Street. In just a few
weeks Labour moved from being within touching distance of the Conservatives
to a poll deficit of 24 points.
The timing is interesting. Brown’s poll rating did not disintegrate when he
failed to call the election last October or when Northern Rock failed or
when the government lost the tax records of 25m citizens. It tumbled because
he abolished the 10p tax band and evidently the expensive compensation
package has not brought recovery.
The government bungles in areas where it once excelled. Brown was the master
of the stealth tax. The tax burden rose steadily but in ways we did not
perceive. Now the government takes extra revenue from us with all the
subtlety of a mugger with a baseball bat. I heard a caller to a phone-in
programme describe how abolishing the 10p rate had doubled the tax on his
small occupational pension.
From late autumn another 2p duty on motor fuel is scheduled. Starting next
year, many motorists will face enormous increases in vehicle excise duty
(VED). The government has plotted a series of headline-grabbing tax rises
from here to the next election.
Whereas once new Labour could seize the news agenda with a fresh initiative,
its efforts now are clumsy at best and often counterproductive. When Brown
reannounced last week that he favours nuclear power plants, he appeared out
of touch. Even if they are built over coming decades, it is irrelevant to
households who face large electricity bills today.
Nobody believes that discussing extra production with Britain’s diminishing
oil industry can affect world prices. Anyone who has written to Downing
Street might be impressed to receive a telephone call from the prime
minister, but publicising this quirky practice reduces it to gimmickry.
It is amusing to recall that Brown opened his prime ministership by declaring
an end to spin. He did so because he wanted to appear the opposite of Tony
Blair. John Major similarly aimed to distance himself from Margaret
Thatcher, his predecessor at No 10. Dumping the past is always an easy first
trick. Voters were tired of ideology in 1990 and of spin in 2007. It is not
enough, though, to be different from the old regime. In Brown’s case it was
ludicrous anyway, since he was more addicted to spin even than Blair.
Just as wistfulness about Thatcher has stalked the country ever since, people
miss Blair’s charm and his speedy decision-making. He was unpopular at the
end, but his poll ratings never sank close to those of Brown today. Iraq was
a political catastrophe but, nonetheless, in the following election Blair
held the Tories to fewer than 200 parliamentary seats. Remembering, too,
that Major won reelection after the debacle of the poll tax, it seems that
the electorate is more forgiving of disaster than of prolonged ineptitude.
This government fails to think through its initiatives and so, not
surprisingly, cannot sustain them. It cannot yet quite bring itself to say
so, but both the fuel tax rise and the new VED rates are for the chop.
Administrations in trouble select the most unfavourable ground to defend.
Thatcher staked everything on the poll tax and lost. Brown is circling his
wagons around increasing the period for which terror suspects can be held
without charge. He has lost the support of the director of public
prosecutions and of Lords Falconer and Goldsmith, the former lord chancellor
and attorney-general respectively.
Opposition from such Blairites may make Brown more adamant. Perhaps the whole
thing is about winning on an issue where the Commons defeated his
predecessor. Doubtless a parliamentary fudge will emerge, but to construe it
as a triumph will be beyond even Brown’s power of spin.
He now appears unable to hold the line on any issue. Naturally every lobby
group is queueing to force his hand. As lorry drivers blocked our roads last
week, the worst images of old Labour chaos returned. To supplement that
unwelcome nostalgia, the unions are intent on retaking control of the party.
It was one of Blair’s insights that Labour had to cease depending on the
brothers for money. After the cash for peerages scandal, however, private
funding dried up. As always, union support comes at a price and the barons
wish to be paid off with more left-wing policies and higher pay.
It is paradoxical that Blair seemed to know his way and that Brown does not.
Blair is a political opportunist, born with a silver spoon to a Tory family,
a pragmatist who could have found a home in either party. Yet he discovered
firm political positions, including modernising Labour, supporting America
and reforming schools. Brown surely came into politics to make life better
for the poor, the people to whom his clergyman father ministered. How, then,
could he commit the 10p blunder and why does he grub for middle-class votes
by reducing inheritance tax?
The fuss over house prices illustrates the absurdity of Brown’s political
positions. He made the Bank of England independent better to control
inflation. Yet he presided over, and connived at, a huge rise in real estate
values, even though that made homes for the poor and first-time buyers
unaffordable.
Nothing has done more to increase social inequality. Even so, now he seeks to
prop up the housing market. So does he think inflation good or bad? Is it
more important to sustain the bubble for the middle classes than to allow a
welcome correction back towards saner prices?
Brown is stranded halfway between old and new Labour. Old Labour instincts
made him oppose Blair’s introduction of private capital into state
schooling. When we look back, Labour’s worst failure will be Brown’s. He
instigated massive increases in spending on public services but blocked the
reforms that Blair wanted. That exacerbated two of this country’s biggest
problems: massive debt and an undereducated workforce.
Even so, Brown is joint architect of new Labour. That is why he now dithers
between holding onto the middle classes and offering a social agenda more
progressive than the Conservatives. The lack of clarity is evident to the
most obtuse voter. Labour MPs must wonder whether things could get any worse
if Brown did in fact adopt the unions’ policies. That would have the merit
of consistency.
My abiding memory of the Conservatives’ last two years in office is of drift.
We had embarked on a voyage in 1979, but now someone had switched off the
motors. We rocked in the swirl, took in water and offered an easy target.
Yet in one respect we were in better shape then than Brown’s government is
today. We still had heavy guns. Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine and
Michael Howard were large calibre. Today nobody in the cabinet measures up
to Brown and that diminishes him.
Clearly one option for Labour is a cabinet reshuffle that restores the men of
substance to high office: David Blunkett, John Reid and Charles Clarke.
There is mutual dislike between them and the prime minister, but loathing
within a cabinet would scarcely be a novelty, not even a barrier to success.
The other option is to replace Brown. It worked for the Tories with Major.
When a plane is in a nose-dive, wrestling for the controls is rational.
True, there is no Labour tradition of unseating a prime minister, but the
past is a poor guide to the future. When one member of the cabinet after
another told Thatcher that her time was up, even the Iron Lady had to go.
Brown would be history by teatime if every senior minister threatened to
resign. That is all it takes.
