The Brown effect - Labour 15 points adrift

According to the latest ComRes poll (due to be published tomorrow in the Independent) the main parties are as follows:

Conservatives 43% (+2)
Labour 28% (-4)
LibDem 16% (-1)

I have got this information from Political Betting and Iain Dale's Diary.

I am inclined to agree with Iain when he says that this is likely a reaction against Gordon Brown. I was struck at the weekend when I discussed the current state of the economy with a number of relatives, many of whom do not follow politics very closely just how badly Brown is perceived. Especially after this last week where he has had to come up with another bail-out package just 2 months after the last one and all the spin and nonsense that has gone with it has triggered this anger.

His performance on the Today programme on Friday morning was little short of pathetic. I heard him over and over again claim that it is a global problem i.e. "nothing to do with me guv" and almost in the same breath he pulled out his old "10 years of continuous growth" claim. How the hell he thinks that he can take the credit for the good times and yet shirk all responsibility for the problems is beyond me. He was given several chances to respond to Evan Davis' question about whether he regrets having claimed to have abolished "boom and bust" and to acknowledge that on his watch we had now had both. He refused to answer the question over and over again and instead just repeated his "global crisis" mantra ad nauseum.

Another trick he is now trying to pull is when he is asked about whether the UK will be coming out of recession by the middle of this year (as Darling claimed only a couple of months ago) he says it depends on whether we can get the global cooperation necessary. This is a complete confidence trick. It allows him to be the sole arbiter of whether the international cooperation was good enough and then to use this as a way of wriggling out of his responsibilities yet again. It reminds me of the sort of claims you often get from faith healing practitioners who insist that you "have to be in the right frame of mind" to get the benefits and of course they then use this excuse when their mumbo jumbo fails. This is exactly the same sort of trick and it needs to be exposed for what it is.

I strongly suspect that the electorate are wiser than Brown gives them credit for and they are starting to tumble his game.

If he showed more humility, accepted some responsibility for what has happened and openly identified where things have gone wrong the country would have more respect for him and although he will still likely lose the next election, at least he would have tried to do the right thing and make amends.

As it is he is starting to look like a hopeless political case.