Brown And Out

The British Labour Party glorifies existential decay. They stand for nothing – in power purely to be in power, desperately deceitful because they no longer have remedies for the big challenges, and drifting dishonourably into an ideological vacuum. Their decline in government, just like the country they profess to be governing, seems ineluctable. So too does their legacy – a decade of betrayal, brainwashing, and backsliding. A fundamental disconnect has grown between the governed and the governing – the duopoly of a financial crisis sewn together with a deplorable expenses scandal have aggravated this disengagement – and society has reversed to a familiar age of reactionist despondency. Injustice, and the deep roots protecting both bankers and politicians alike, has been solidified by a government who have trashed rights, and couldn’t care less about responsibilities. The meltdown that battered market forces – and turned casino capitalism into concussed capitalism, hurrah – could have provided the landmark turning point, but all it honestly revealed was a flat leadership utterly alien to any progressive cause. It’s almost over.

The major barricade is the great leader himself. It’s easy – too easy – to blame the big boss man, or unelected prime minister in this case, when times are tough, but the fundamental disconnect has been augmented in the draconian halls of power. Politics is always a mix of imitable personalities and policy substance – my country goes further by challenging these two essentials with an adversarial sophistication that no other liberal democracy has been able to match. But adversarial sophistication has been paralysed by an expenses virus that has infected parliament, and its ramifications play out naturally on the doorstep. The other two ingredients – personality and policy – have been in steep decline long before any constitutional crisis of legitimacy.

Gordon Brown has collapsed from one towering climbdown after another. His crumpled face, discombobulated by doubt and ravaged by tired defeatism so as to succeed in resembling a zombie exterior, tells a deeper story about the party who were never given the chance to elect him in the first place. The Prime Minister has an imposing intellect as well as a vulnerable intensity. His daughter, Jennifer Jane, was born prematurely and died within days of birth, and the enthusiasm he showed for sport nearly condemned him to blindness following a rugby accident in his teenage years. It’s a vulnerable intensity that his dark personality always obeys him to hide. Yet all of these sensitivities prevalent throughout his flawed character, and the sympathies that should naturally flow from certain members of an empathising electorate, are bruised by an organic addiction to dirty tricks.

The Prime Minister has always been sold on dark arts. It’s a drug he has frequently used in his long distinction in power. It also cuts right to the black heart of his psychology – a man with a mind bordered between madness and jealousy. He’s a politician who can’t stand competition. This explains the frenzied rivalry with his successful predecessor, the shame in ignoring the democratic process within his own party, and his utter cowardice to hold an election now. Brown’s passivity as a communicator can be espoused to this infantile hatred. His leadership is not uniquely responsible for reducing everything to nothing – the causes for this once great socialist party’s capitulation can be summarised in a long mountainous list – but the proliferation of self-pity seems to offer a reasonable explanation.

Gordon Brown prolongs suspicion, and there’s a lot to be suspicious about. He marches along the lonely corridors with physical disconcertion, then he raises a dreadful smile. It’s as though a button – ordering him to perform that grinning sensation – has been inserted through the back of his head. Brown is a robot, his politics have become deprivated by a heavy surrender to spin, and no one will listen anymore. The accession to Downing Street had been prognosticated for some time – yet the prime minister believed the realisation to be destiny into a realm that belonged exclusively to him by right of conquest. And it’s been declivity ever since. The dirty tricks, indeed, became filthy tricks on one infamous occasion. A Nixonian diagnosis would invite unnecessary exaggeration. That doesn’t change a slimy thing though. Brown’s chief political aide, a grubby fat blob known as Damian McBride, used official government computers, and public money too, to spread sleazy sex smear scandals about top guns in the Opposition – a series of horrendous rumours, everything from embarrassing infirmities to floozies and a dildo, followed. McBride was dismissed instantly, yet his boss struggled to find the five letters that constitute an apology. The monster raving loony is gone, and his slobbish attitudes will never return thankfully, but it still isn’t of any surprise to hear about furniture being smashed, printers being trashed, and unfit spasms degrading everyone around the master – a master whose deforming health replicates the estranged façade of a weak and dying emperor.

It’s a tremendous shame. His reaction to the financial crisis was the stuff of radical leadership, and its eminence is distinct in every country that has adopted this exclusive doctrine since. Brown, an astute student of history, realised, unlike his opposition counterpart back at home, what can turn recessions into depressions – and the effect that has on every continent when global finance is under siege. The Prime Minister risked spiralling the budget deficit in an eruption of bigger debts. A cocky opposition, who have since grown cockier, pathetically pleaded against it as did a multitude of fiscal conservative economists. Brown ignored all these warnings. He brought the world to London, paraded with his greatest ally about fiscal boosts and stimulating the state against the wrath of mephitic bankers and their stultified enterprise – a poison and stultification that hypnotised his government for far too long. And, finally, his endeavours were crowned, not only by an influential liberal nobel prize winner, but also by an influential organisation who proclaimed him world statesman of the year. There is a revealing disparity between home and abroad – the world stage gives him emancipation and euphoria.

And now look at the domestic scenario. The Labour Party, in national elections to the European Parliament, received its smallest share of the vote since before the war. These devastating results, which also saw the rise of two fascist thugs to this parliament, are comparable to early tribulations when the party was more of a movement than a political force – a new party squeezed by the dual dominance of Liberals and Tories. This may soon become the case in contemporary times. Labour’s candidates in local elections have trailed in third and fourth place, obvious working-class constituencies have turned their backs on any substantive message, and these core supporters are choosing either to stay at home, or dabble with a coterie of dangerous fringe parties. This is not defeat – it’s humiliation. And the general election could confirm annihilation.

Britain’s Conservatives have gone through a strange evolution in the last few years – it would be nice if they could dissapear indefinitely. David Cameron, their leader, and a fraudulent phoney in my view, was elected to challenge the government, promising change, and waving a pledge card that he would transform his party. It worked well for some time. He encouraged compassion through hug-a-hoodie sentimentality. Cameron was the first Tory to acknowledge green problems. Biking and a reformist mentality shifted his party from the margins of ultraconservatism to a logical place in the centre. This was enough to talk about social mobility, and promise freedom for the free market at the same time. The credit crunch has exposed a reversion from this progress.

Their popularity is clearly derived from extreme public hostility to the government. Cameron seems harmless, notwithstanding his smarmy artificiality, but his party isn’t. Judgment is something the leadership has left wanting – opposing a fiscal stimulus puts them at odds with every major ally throughout the world. Cameron’s European policy, tribalism towards the edge and appeasement of racist homophobes, jeopardises the prospect of influence within the councils of cooperation, and risks further undermining the purposeful partnership with our greatest ally across the pond. His reaction to the ballooning deficit speaks volumes on his ideology, but fails to detect common sense. The country’s credit has just imploded – tax rises and spending cuts are inevitable. We’re not babies to be told anything different. And that’s the way to do it – not a savage slash and burn policy that will stifle recovery, invite a sequel recession, kill the rationality of tamed unions, and desecrate a generation of children and elders in poverty traps and failing public services. The government deserves to lose, but this obnoxious opposition will never deserve to reap its rewards. Cameron’s Conservatives have never been so intimidating.

The Labour Party used to be a great force for good. Everything that’s fair and progressive about Britain, in both its society and culture, has come from their pioneering socialism – nationalised healthcare, a welfare state, voting rights for women, the Sex Discrimination Act, wealth redistribution, the minimum wage, battling imperialism and fighting exploitation worldwide, collectively choosing us and always as superior to me and now. The Labour Party shouldn’t die. It deserves to be saved, and can live on. It is a movement, as it has called itself on great occasions when the national voice was in peril and the defining moment came calling, fighting against the exploitation of capitalism, providing hope to the gaping inequality illness that infects destroyed communities like a wild plague, and using the power of the state to give a positive contribution, and powerfully change someone’s life. Brown has correctly admitted changing one life means you’ve changed the world.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are conjointly culpable for defecting socialism and conforming to neoliberalism – a disrupted chorus with conservative rhythm. Blair, who has buried himself in the mud of religious monomania since leaving office, shifted the party into the centre – it was a plea to grab the votes, and donations, of the middle tier. Blair did this – despite leaving the super-rich in charge with unfettered self-regard, obesely greedy foibles, and hateful predilection – and his commitment and conviction is something that, even his foes on both sides are forced to, rather grudgingly, admit, has separated him from a group of impeccable statesmen. Blair made mistakes, naturally, but he took on big issues, faced the wrath of a hostile and cynical electorate on three difficult occasions, and won the vital arguments every time.

His successor has subjugated the efficacy of principles. This is Labour right now. The “great movement” has been reduced to a power lust. It is the sweetening scent of power, and that’s all. No prime minister leaves the stomping ground with sanity totally undiminished, but the current incumbent has gone delirious with his unelected power. He allowed the super-rich to rule without a conscience. The bankers brought the country to its knees, yet this was only possible through political coercion. Brown is indeed the gloomy villain. The election campaign has already begun. So much for the choice: picking an automaton who can’t smile, or replacing him with a hologram of the former prime minister. I advocate abstention. The Labour movement must not die, because its heart and soul has always fought, and risked political death, to defend courageous values. It is this position of principle – and embattled idealism – that makes its greatest champions, unlike the great leader, prefer to lose an election rather than surrender its unique beliefs.

This is what the government dare not do. They are devoid of sorrow, bereft of radical ideas, and melting into electoral oblivion. The Labour Party has become an enemy of everything it once believed in. It’s reduced their government, and the hardworking activists who impossibly brave the streets, and valiantly knock on doors knowing full well that a noose is tightening around their necks, to nothing. Every progressive lefty who supports freedom, equality, and justice needs to excuviate this collective nullity – or sentence the movement, and the poorest in society, to a motionless fate. Enough is enough.

Robert King is a Contributing Editor to WDC.