Thursday, September 18, 2008
Gordon Brown is Still There
I had forgotten about Gordon Brown. He still appears - doubtless due to some clerical error - to be Prime Minister. He is now more unpopular than anybody ever. I would like to think this is because he is a really bad PM. But it's probably less rational than that. In my case, I used to feel a wave of intense depression whenever he appeared on TV. Now I'm just embarrassed, as if the room is full of incredulous foreigners asking 'Why?'
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Sorry, Bryan, it's because in your very heart and soul you know that he would be PM if there was an election right now. And more that that, will win next time. It is that shivery feeling in your bones.
ReplyDeletePoor old Gordon has become one of those dents your car receives in a car park, every day you notice it, seconds later the irritation is forgotten. Gordon is obviously not a wisdom dent nor an incisor, more of a rotten molar.
ReplyDeleteIn America it was the 1929 Wall Street crash and the Great Depression which were blamed for everything. In Germany it was the Jews. In England it is Gordon Brown and a deep-seated prejudice against scapegoats.
ReplyDeleteBut those who reduce the entire complexity of the phenomena of finance to certain personal equations will have to concede that between the forces of finance and history there is also the force which is called the lynch-mob, precisely because for the witless the only enjoyable form of entertainment is a public execution...
D.
I remember you thought the PM was ''sinister'', like evil, but now he's simply disastrous.
ReplyDeleteRather like a tramp with a dog, it's depressing enough to be British at the moment and we all need someone to look down on. Gordon Brown will do. Things can't be that bad if I can still look down on the loser's loser of the loser's party is the feeling, I guess.
ReplyDeleteIt might be that in future all prime ministers will be known as Gordon Brown regardless of who they were before they assumed the purple.
Alternatively, we could invite a foreigner to take over and jolly us up a bit. We've done it more than once before with royalty so why not with prime ministers? Step forward, Barack Gordon-Brown, Angela Merkel Gordon-Brown, etc.
Good idea, Mark, though I would prefer Jose Mourinho-Brown
ReplyDeleteI think Brown's unpopularity is chiefly 90% the media's fault and 10% Gordons.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason he is being written off and vilified with such primeval hatred is because he is more honest than his predecessor and because he is Scottish. The English media cannot stand to see a scot in charge. They want the Scots to be part of the union but to stay subserviant.
As Peter Oborne noted three months ago:
"Furthermore, he is a far better prime minister than the man who went before him, Tony Blair...Cabinet government has, in part, returned since Gordon Brown took high office, as the Prime Minister promised it would.
To give one example, the Foreign Office - treated with contempt by Tony Blair - is functioning more like a great department of state under the leadership of David Miliband.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith - plucked from the obscurity of the Whips Office and a bold appointment - has gained in stature.
Gordon Brown has not been given nearly enough credit for these profound cultural changes.
I believe that the reason for this oversight is, in part, sinister.
Many of the media commentators who denounce the Prime Minister in their newspaper articles and columns used to be fervent supporters of the Blair regime.
They relished their special access and influence.
Effectively clients of Tony Blair, they turned a blind eye to the blatant corruption of British government under their hero.
These creatures resent Gordon Brown's more straightforward way of doing business.
So they yearn for a return to the old regime and continue to take regular briefings from allies of the former Prime Minister, passing on a diet of poison to their readers."
Isn't the real problem with Gordon Brown that he is a history graduate who has spent 10 years playing at economics without understanding it? Naive people see economics as pulling levers and turning knobs in response to supposedly objective measurements. Gordon certainly did, and fetishised his simplistic, golden rules, and selective inflation targets. He then believed his own figures and proceeded to borrow and spend lots of money he didn't really have. A particularly worrying trait was the way he changed, or side-stepped, the rules he was in danger of breaking rather than addressing the problem, and it felt as though he was trying to fool himself as well as us. In his mind no alarm sounded when the gap between rich and poor widened and ordinary people began earning more from their houses than productive activities, because the measurements told him that the economy was 'performing' well. Many people studying the global economy knew that this was an illusion but Gordon was just not sophisticated enough to see it.
ReplyDeleteLike the PM, I, too, am profoundly ignorant, but the difference is that I know it. In GB I recognise the sort of person who has always irritated me hugely: the fantasist that talks so confidently and is so convinced of his own abilities that it sometimes fools me into thinking he must know something I don't. Later I realise that my initial impression was the correct one.
a friend just sent me this url. you can send gordon a private message that they;'ll deliver to downing street!
ReplyDeletesend gordon a message
now where do i start.........!