Will the summer triumph herald an autumn election? |
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Danny McIntosh |
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It could not have been a much better summer for Gordon Brown, having finally succeeded to the top job he has coveted for 14 years. So effectively and thoroughly has he reshuffled the cabinet and assumed total control over the government that already Blair’s name is seldom mentioned. Indeed many commentators have been left wondering how such a transparently shallow and manipulative leader could have held such sway for so long. Brown has not only ridden the storms of the summer - the failed airport car-bomb, the floods, the foot and mouth - but he has ensured that he was filmed by suitably unctuous BBC political staff doing so. Vital peak time news broadcasts depicted Gordon decisively taking the helm in crisis meetings, intervening to ensure increased numbers of water bowsers were dispatched to submerged areas of Gloucestershire … and, after heroically dashing back from just 4 hours of holiday in
He has dumped a clutch of failed Blairite ministers and promoted a new cohort of loyalists who have set out to create an impression of “new brooms” sweeping through ministries and departments to revisit some of the more controversial Blairite policies. The “new broom” approach has included the novel appointment of top surgeon Sir Ara Darzi as a junior health minister with an apparent brief to draw up a new strategy for the NHS - but more likely a mission to create a short-term distraction and debate on what appears to be bold and technocratic change, while local health chiefs force through cash-saving cuts and closures. Brown has also taken his own stand on some policy issues. He has ditched the ludicrous policy of promoting supercasinos and bowed to the conservative lobby in re-opening the legal classification of cannabis. He has made it clear he wants to increase to 90 days the length of time “terror” suspects can be held without charge or trial. But he has also announced what appear to be spending commitments estimated to total £39 billion, with an extra £7 billion for defence, £15 billion more for railways, £8 billion more for housing and £4 billion extra for Sure Start pre-school centres. And Brown has also managed to pull off a visit to one of Tony Blair’s more infamous friends, George W Bush in which Brown managed both visually and in his statements to convey a cooler and more distant relationship with the increasingly unpopular lame-duck President. All of this - plus the vital and hugely popular factor that he is not Tony Blair - has helped boost Brown’s poll ratings, while the honeymoon period of Tory leader David Cameron has come to an abrupt end, and Tory poll ratings have slumped. Cameron faces a challenge from the Tory right to his woollier liberal policies, while his attempt to position himself in the eyes of middle
With the neo-con right regrouping behind the spooky figure of John Redwood to demand the Conservative party commit itself to slash taxes and embrace policies even more neoliberal than Brown, and many more traditional Tory voters wondering which of Cameron’s policies they can support, the crisis in the main opposition party seems set to grow. But there is a further unexpected bonus for Brown: the trade union leaders, cowed for so long under Blair, but with a constant murmur of empty threats of revolt, have swung with a new and quite inexplicable enthusiasm behind Brown. Perhaps the most remarkable turnaround is UNISON, which six months ago was recoiling in shock as Brown stepped in personally to impose a cap on the pay settlement for health workers and others in the public sector, and vowing to ballot for industrial action in the NHS for the first time in 20 years. UNISON has also been among the unions which have been most opposed to the Blair-Brown policy of increased private sector provision of health care and other public services and the ruinously expensive Private Finance Initiative as a means to fund new hospitals, schools and public infrastructure. These policies have been marginally tweaked since Brown’s take-over, but remain substantially intact. And cutbacks in district hospital services threaten not only to antagonise local communities, but to axe the jobs of thousands more UNISON members. None of this has stopped UNISON’s supple-spined leaders rolling over to have their tummies tickled by Brown - who they nominated for the leadership post. Indeed the union’s Head of Health Karen
A national demonstration against cuts and privatisation in the NHS which the union had been pressed to organise, and reluctantly called for October 13, has been postponed to November 3 - and rebranded as a “celebration” of the fact that most of the NHS has not yet been privatised by Brown and Blair. And after the most cosmetic of concessions the public sector pay fight has been effectively abandoned: instead the union is mounting an increasingly vicious and paranoid attack on its own left wing members and any involvement even with the Labour left. The conclusion is unmistakeable: unless there is a dramatic change in circumstances, leaders of UNISON and many other unions will be eagerly digging once again deep into their Political Fund coffers to finance any future electoral campaign Gordon Brown may choose to mount. Couple all of this with a new line-up of ludicrously wealthy millionaires and billionaires reportedly jostling for the chance to donate seven figure sums to a Party that has become the political equivalent of Chelsea Football Club, and we have a political and financial basis that seems certain to lure Brown towards securing his own mandate for a further five-year spell of “modernisation”. The only fly in the ointment appears to be the Labour Party’s organisational state - after the departure of so many disillusioned activists under Blair – and the prospect of growing economic problems if Brown waits until next Spring. Overall commentators are divided on whether or not Brown will exploit the total weakness and disarray of his opponents and go for it - or revert to the expected previous plan of an election in 2009. Either way, these are likely to be testing times for the left, and the need to strengthen organisation and support in the trade unions has never been greater. |
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