Rugeley,

There are a couple aspects of your article that are faintly disturbing. First is the imagery of "King Brown," possibly an allusion to the monarchistic ambitions of Bush, but wholly inappropriate for Britain. He is still subject to the crown itself and very much answerable to the British people, even if they appear to be largely asleep.

The second was that you gave only two reasons for a disastrous Labour environment: the war in Iraq and rising interest rates. What about the cost of fuel? Overcrowding and the incipient changes in the housing market? Mounting personal debt and the modification of laws to allow bailiffs access to remove your goods without consent. The penetration of PFIs into previously governmental roles? The rise of the right wing after twenty years of relatively peaceful slumber? There is a corporatist run on the UK, and Brown is connected to all the right people. The trick is, as they say, to follow the money.

Right now Blair is completely irrelevant, and reduced to doing the circuit to indicate that he has regrets regarding the mandating of "tea drinking" in Britain and that he completely supports the things that he did that he thought were right, damn the evidence.

Thirdly, you seem to be promoting a view that Britain is still coming to terms as a post-imperial power. I don't know where you went to school, but in a fairly ordinary comprehensive, we learned that the collapse of the British Empire came about in the 1950s, the best part of half a century ago. Althugh it's debatable as to whether we should have negotiated with Argentina over the Falklands (the Junta's nationalistic cause celébrè, if memory serves), every military engagement since that time was undertaken with UN support, except Iraq.

This section is utterly wrong: "Ever since he moved into 10 Downing Street, his next-door neighbor Chancellor Gordon Brown has been trying to evict him and take his place." Thre was an agreement made between Blair and Brown regarding who got to sit in the big chair, and they've been cordial up to the point where he announced that he would step down. Compare and contrast the internal dissent in the Liberal Democrats after the ousting of Charles Kennedy, or the messy regeneration of the Conservative party into a nicer, greener and ultimately more left version of New Labour.

"The one pledge that Brown could deliver that would make the transition worthy of the name is to withdraw from Iraq immediately." An announcement was already made regarding the withdrawal of troops from Iraq in 2008; he's indicated that he'll probably do something with that previously made announcement with classic Labour spin to keep the idea fresh.

"A left candidate, John McDonnell, did come forward but conceded defeat after he failed to get the backing of a sufficient number of MPs to enter the election." You failed to mention that Brown got 308 nominations from Labour MPs, which means no election and a lockstep new Labour which is incapable of backtracking to its liberal socialist roots.

James Diss
05/23/2007 @ 11:14am