Brighton Beach Postcard

Brighton.

Short of sashaying over the waves, or flying Harry Potter's Nimbus 2000 (perhaps on loan from his good friend J.K. Rowling) into the Labour Party conference here yesterday, there wasn't much Gordon Brown could do to keep the British press from writing his political obituary. With an election due sometime before May, Labour is currently third in the opinion polls, trailing not just David Cameron's Conservatives but also the Liberal Democrats. Outside the Brighton Centre, a noisy handful of demonstrators shouting "Don't they know there's a bloody war on!" shuffled along the seafront, sharing sidewalk space with a more numerous assemblage from the postal workers' union, protesting government plans to sell off part of the Royal Mail. (The delay in postal deliveries from strike action in London meant that your correspondent's press credentials, mailed in mid August, still haven't arrived.)

On Monday Labour delegates cheered Peter Mandelson, who twice resigned from the cabinet in disgrace only to be drafted back last year by an increasingly desperate Brown, when he told them "If I can come back ... we can come back." And they loved it when Mandelson, architect of the postal sell-off and master of all political dark arts, told them "this election was still up for grabs." Brown's job was to make them believe it.

With the sound system pounding out "What a Beautiful Day"--"I'm the king of all time, And nothing is impossible, In my all powerful mind..."--over a powerpoint montage of British achievement under new Labour ("Iconic Modern Architecture" "18 Oscar Winners in the past 4 years") Sarah Brown, repeating her performance from last year, introduced "my husband. My hero!" And then, as The Levellers gave way to Curtis Mayfield, , and the Prime Minister received the obligatory standing ovation, the inevitable question formed in my mind: who chooses the soundtrack for these things?

After 12 years in power--12 years during which the opportunity for debate and dissent inside the party have progressively diminished--skepticism is no more common among Labour party loyalists than it would be among pilgrims to Lourdes. And Brown's speech had a long shopping list of good ideas: a new National Care Service offering free in-home care for the elderly; a promise that cancer patients will have diagnostic results within one week after visiting the doctor; an expansion of free childcare; using post offices for community banking; offering voters the right to recall MPs; regulating (but not capping) bankers' bonuses and forcing banks to repay taxpayers; a promise not to cut spending on schools or the health service. Delegates, especially prospective Labour candidates, were also cheered by Brown's u-turn on national identity cards--if not abandoned, at least put off for another 5 years--and by his decision to give local authorities the power to ban 24 hour drinking (though here, too, Brown was bandaging a self-inflicted wound).

But Brown's death-bed conversion to populism also had a dark side: a proposal to force unwed teenage mothers on welfare to live in group hostels; neighborhood "action squads" cracking down on anti-social behavior; even more obstacles in the path of economic migrants. (In the case of his attorney general, Baroness Scotland, who was fined £5000 for hiring a Tongan woman who overstayed her student visa as her housekeeper, Brown has remained supportive. Baroness Scotland keeps her job. The housekeeper, however, was arrested, and now faces deportation.)

The one measure that really might have kept the Tories out of power, a shift to some form of proportional representation, was deferred until after the next election. By then of course it will probably be too late.

Waiting in the hallway before Brown's speech I fell into a conversation with Carole Maleham, a driver from Rotherham who is also an activist in Unison, the public service workers' union. A widow, Carole told me that one of the first things New Labour did was to abolish the widow's benefit, replacing it with a means-tested (and, in her case at least, reduced) bereavement benefit. More recently the Labour-controlled council in her town responded to the recession by eliminating Meals on Wheels and ending the council's laundry service. Yet she was in no doubt that things would be even worse under the Tories.

Brown's main problem is not the recession (which he handled well enough to almost make one forget how much his and Mandelson's "relaxed" approach to regulating British bankers was to blame in the first place). His lack of charisma, though incurable, need not be terminal either. No, Brown's downfall will come because after 12 years of being taken for granted by New Labour, all that traditional Labour voters have left is the certainty that things would be even worse under the Tories. I suspect they are right. But I don't think there are enough of them to save Gordon Brown.

Comments (15)

1. Brown is going down to defeat next year ... and for reasons not all that different from Obama's heading for one-termer status, failure to deliver on promises, failure to end wars, failure to regulate financial scams.

   Posted by sloper at 09/30/2009 @ 11:11am

2. Time delay factor overseas...

   Dubya destroyed the Republican Party over here....Tony Blair destroyed Labour over there.

   Posted by Mask at 09/30/2009 @ 11:49am

3. gordon brown gets his from the elephant in the room.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYA0DsPcbaU

   Posted by frosty zoom at 09/30/2009 @ 12:02pm

4. Brown is going down to defeat next year ... and for reasons not all that different from Obama's heading for one-termer status, failure to deliver on promises, failure to end wars, failure to regulate financial scams.

   Posted by sloper at 09/30/2009 @ 11:11am

   Don't be so quick about the 2012 elections. It takes an administration of epic feebleness to ensure a change of party after less than eight years in office!

   Posted by Mistral at 09/30/2009 @ 12:47pm

5. Posted by Mistral at 09/30/2009 @ 12:47pm

   Bush-41 was "an administration of epic feebleness"???

   Posted by Mask at 09/30/2009 @ 1:04pm

6. Aside from Carter in the 20th century, you'd have to look back to the 19th to find a period where one party hung on to the Oval Office for less than eight years. And when Grover Cleveland was booted out after four years, he came back later and served another four.

   There were even periods of more than eight year control: Reagan & Bush, Roosevelt & Truman, Harding & Coolidge & Hoover, McKinley & Roosevelt & Taft...

   Posted by HonestLiberal at 10/01/2009 @ 11:04am

7. Posted by HonestLiberal at 10/01/2009 @ 11:04am

   The most recent examples require some extraordinary events to refute the historical precedence...

   1. Carter...required a major recession and foreign policy crises that seemed unresolvable.

   2. Bush-41....required a minor recession and a "pox on both Parties" populist (who sounded quite conservative really) siphoning off votes.

   Apart from a double-dip recession hitting in 2011-2012 AND another "hostage crises"....or a left-wing "Perot" who can do 5X better than Nader in 2000.....the precedent is on Obama's side.

   Posted by Mask at 10/01/2009 @ 12:22pm

8. Posted by HonestLiberal at 10/01/2009 @ 11:04am

   But it takes some serious puissance to get elected to two terms and then continue the party for another term. Reagan-Bush did it. Jackson-Van Buren did it. But other than that a party had to be on the winning end of a war: Roosevelt-Truman, the Republicans after the Civil War.

   Posted by Mistral at 10/01/2009 @ 1:54pm

9. Posted by Mistral at 10/01/2009 @ 1:54pm

   Harding-Coolidge-Hoover?

   Posted by Mask at 10/01/2009 @ 2:05pm

10. 'But other than that a party had to be on the winning end of a war: Roosevelt-Truman, the Republicans after the Civil War.' -- Mistral

    Well, when you think about it, we're almost due for another big war. It was only 74 years from the end of the Civil War to WWII...

    Posted by HonestLiberal at 10/01/2009 @ 3:12pm

11. Posted by HonestLiberal at 10/01/2009 @ 3:12pm

    Why do "numerical cycles" cause wars?

    Posted by Mask at 10/01/2009 @ 3:27pm

12. Posted by HonestLiberal at 10/01/2009 @ 3:12pm

    I guess it'll depend on luck then: who's the man on horseback when another Pearl Harbor or Fort Sumter hits, or on the other hand who gets stuck with the blame when the stock market crashes.

    Posted by Mistral at 10/01/2009 @ 3:29pm

13. 'I guess it'll depend on luck then' -- Mistral

    Think what would have happened if we had a parliamentary system and Bush could have called an election when the DowJones was at 13,000!

    Posted by HonestLiberal at 10/01/2009 @ 3:33pm

14. Decaying, rotting, fading into the oblivious past world kingdoms; GB is going down for the third time without any willing rescuers.

    Posted by BigPasture at 10/02/2009 @ 12:19am

15. Decaying, rotting, fading into the oblivious past world kingdoms; GB is going down for the third time without any willing rescuers.

    Posted by BigPasture at 10/02/2009 @ 12:19am

    They've been saying essentially the same thing about the UK since the battle of Castillon. What makes you think you're any more accurate than the Kaiser, Tojo, Napoleon,...?

    Posted by Mistral at 10/02/2009 @ 08:13am