This is their last chance to get rid of Brown
Twitter and the blogs are ablaze with discussion about the letter that Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt have sent to Labour MPs urging a secret ballot leadership contest. Guido has the full letter here.
I watched the coverage on The Daily Politics earlier as the story unfolded with Nick Robinson saying what he thought was going on even though he had been in the dark as everyone else. James Lansdale who reported from Central Lobby during the programme suggested that Labour MPs were telling him, in private, on lobby terms that they did not want this.
Fraser Nelson is suggesting that the lack of cabinet ministers coming forward (now that the story is over 2 hours old) is noteworthy and he also points out that Alistair Darling is close to Geoff Hoon. Apparently Peter Mandelson is due to appear on the media later on and I await what he has to say with interest. Could this be the moment that he strikes?
What I would say though is that this is absolutely, positively the Labour Party's last chance to get rid of Brown.
If they flunk this one then they fully deserve their fate.
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3 comments:
Their fate is settled - they're going to lose big time.
We of all people should not be pushing the message that all the problems this country faces now are due to Brown. One can see why the Conservatives would push that message, and as a last desparate push some in Labour might if might would get rid of Brown.
But what we actually have here is worldwide problems made worse by decades of government which has led us the wrong way and left us harder able to deal with this government.
Look across the world and what do we see? Those governments worst hit by the recession are those who have most closely followed what the Tories put forward as the route to prosperity. Ours has done badly because Blair led it down the path of following what were previously Tory policies. Our country, supposedly governed by its left-wing party, is consistently to the right of our big European neighbours, France and Germany, governed by their right-wing parties. And it's a mess, a sodding unequal mess in which the rich get ever richer and the poor get ever poorer, thanks to that.
I've read a few of the Tory newspapers recently, comment articles on the state of the nation, and in every case I've been left screaming "YOU ****ING IDIOTS!! CAN'T YOU SEE IT'S THE POLICIES OF ***YOUR*** PARTY THAT HAVE LED US HERE? CAN'T YOU SEE THAT WHAT YOU ARE MOANING ABOUT HERE IS THE INEVITABLE LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES OF THATCHERISM?".
I don't think reading the Tory press helps my blood pressure. Just yesterday there was some stupid article about the high costs of housing benefit, and I think back to the time when the Tories introduced the "right to buy" for council housing and I was in correspondence with the then housing minister, Ian Gow, on this topic. I told him while it was great for existing tenants, what would the next generation do, how would people be housed in the next generation 25 years down the line. His answer was that I shouldn't worry, the houses would still be there. Well, so they are, but owned by private owners and let out not at cost price (as the were), but at three times that, profit to the private landlords who bought them up and let them out to people who would have got council housing if it hadn't been sold off. Yet we have Tories and Tory newspapers going on about the rise in homelessness adn council house waiting lisst since 1997 as if it just started then, as if this hadn't just continued going from 1997 as it was in the years before.
So much else of what the Tories are saying is this sort of thing. Even all this local government targeting and the like they now denounce as "doctrinaire socialism" was brought in by THEM. They are ***ing ***ing hypocrites.
Just why can't our party be saying this loudly and clearly (if a little less politely)? Why are we letting them get away with the line it's just Brown's personal failing when he was just the poor sod, another old lefty bamboozled by the Tory press into thinking they'd like him if only he adopted Tory policies, who was at the top when the shit that was thrown from 1979 onwards really hit the fan?
What a marvellous Tory trick this is - convince Labour to adopt Tory policies, then when those policies get this country into a mess say "Oh it's all the fault of those wicked socialists, vote for us".
The last chance to get rid of Brown is long gone. This is a non-starter clearly.
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