Going, going...
WORKERS, OCTOBER 2008 ISSUE
If you want to understand Gordon Brown read the Tom Bower biography. Bower identifies the cowardice, indecisiveness, absenteeism, lack of leadership, innumerable wrong decisions seen well before he became Prime Minister, now epitomised in his collapsed public standing and confidence.
The division between Blair and Brown, barring ego and self-importance, was never on policy. Destruction of Britain’s manufacturing industry, privatisation, dependency on the markets, dependency on the USA, cringing adoration of wealth and City crooks, PFI, public services by tick box, targets that drive workers mad, the bloodcurdling smooching up to Thatcher, billions wasted on consultants, spin and war. Where could you get a cigarette paper between them?
Speech of a lifetime or a 15-second sound bite? Does it matter? Brown will be gone next week, the week after, at Christmas, in February – doesn’t matter when, just that he is going. And after him comes another and another – New Labour, New Tory, New Tory Labour, New Labour Tory, New Lib Democrat Labour – meaningless labels as the same old hand of Capital still rests on the rudder.
Brown will enter history along with all those other failures of social democracy – Ramsay MacDonald through to Callaghan through to Kinnock. The social democrats instead of running capitalism efficiently, have actually created something worse than Thatcher, so why do they exist? Time to go, Brown, and all the rest of them.