Gordon Brown and the sound of chickens coming home to roost

Today's weekly column picks up on David Cameron's latest attempt to address the English Question, but focusing less on his pledge to create an "English Grand Committee" and more on the background to how Labour got itself such a mess on the issue.

Of all the politicians in the UK, Gordon Brown bears more responsibility than any for the ongoing "English backlash," given his repeated refusal to reform the grossly iniquitous Barnett Formula despite a critical Treasury Select Committee report on the issue as long ago as 1999.

In my column, I argue that Labour had a great opportunity to tackle Scotland's disproportionate share of public spending under the formula in 1999/2000 when the party was riding high politically and public expenditure as a whole was rising so sharply that the adjustment could effectively have been concealed.

That opportunity has now been lost. The politics of the situation have changed utterly, with the SNP now very much in the ascendant, while public spending is no longer rising anything like as fast.

"New Labour’s refusal to reform the Barnett Formula when it was in a position to do so is a metaphor for its entire performance in government. It had two majorities of 160 plus. It was faced by an opposition which wasn’t capable of running a whelk stall. It had a chance to do difficult but necessary things for the long-term benefit of the country. And it didn’t do them."

The piece can be read in full on my companion blog HERE.

What England means to me

A few weeks ago, Toque invited me to join a new Facebook group called What England Means to Me, and to contribute to a new website of the same name. It's being billed as a "Domesday Book of the mind for England at the beginning of the 21st century" aimed at defining the oft-debated yet elusive notion of Englishness. My contribution will appear on the site shortly, but I thought I would also reproduce it here. It's not the usual kind of stuff you will find on this blog, but it does sum up, as best I can, how I feel about my beloved country.

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England is the land of my birth, and the land where I hope to end my days. The land of my fathers and mothers, and the land where I too will raise my children. The land from which I have sometimes travelled far, yet always longed to return to whenever I have left its shores. The land where I have enjoyed all my happiest moments, from the childhood summers in Sussex by the sea, to the Lakeland mountain walking holidays of the middle years. The land of music as varied yet as quintessentially English as Elgar and Vaughan Williams, Genesis and The Smiths. A land of beer drinkers and pub culture, of bar-room camaraderie and foaming pints beside roaring log fires. A land of temperate sunshine and richly varying seasons whose weather is reflected in its politics, free from harsh extremes. A land rich in history, symbolised by the continuity of a royal line stretching back fifteen centuries, and by the more ordinary human stories which bear out the truth of TS Eliot’s beautiful verse: “A people without history is not redeemed from time...History is now and England.” A land which people have fought and died to save, and a land which, in my grandparents’ generation, stood alone against the most atrocious tyranny the world has ever seen. A land where the words of its greatest leader Winston Churchill forever bear witness to its indomitable spirit: “We will defend our island, whatever the cost may be...we will never surrender.”

I hope to dwell in this land all my days and enjoy its safe pasture, and to bring up my children to love it as I have done.

November 2007

More good advice for Brown

Yesterday I suggested that if Gordon Brown wanted to be taken seriously as a champion of liberty he would have to reconsider the ID card scheme. I was pleased to see today that the Fabian Society takes a similar view.

Blair must go

Peter Oborne explained in his recent book that one of the defining characteristics of the "political class" was the belief that their continuance in office is more important than any quaint notions of accountability for organisational failure. We saw it with Tony Blair when he refused to resign in the wake of the Butler Inquiry despite its devastating finding that intelligence on Iraqi WMD was distorted, and now we're seeing it with his namesake Sir Ian Blair over the equally damning de Menezes verdict.

David Davis, Nick Clegg and Iain Dale are right. He should go. Am I the only person who finds it both surprising and depressing that it is a Labour Government that should be seeking to defend him?

Not the election day

As other bloggers have already pointed out, today would have been General Election day had Gordon Brown announced a poll immediately after the end of the Conservative conference as was speculated at the time.

Interestingly one of the key calculations in Gordon's dilemmma over whether to hold the first November election in living memory would have been the state of the weather, with conventional wisdom suggesting that the month's customarily gloomy days and dark evenings would have hit Labour's turnout disproportionately more than the Tories'.

Well, I can't speak for the rest of the country, but up here in Derbyshire today it's been positively summery, so if the weather really was a factor in the Prime Minister's decision, he probably needn't have worried.

But autumn sunshine or autumn rains, would Brown have won? No, I don't think so. I think the main movements in terms of seats would have been from Labour to SNP in Scotland and from Lib Dem to Tory in the South, with a small number of marginals changing hands directly from Labour to Tory.

The upshot of all that would have made Labour the biggest single party in a hung Parliament, which would really have been the worst of all outcomes for all three party leaders.

Gordon Brown, having thrown away a majority of 66 in a reckless gamble, would probably have had to resign. Sir Menzies Campbell would have tried to put together some sort of Lib-Lab coalition, but Nick Clegg and David Laws would have stopped him, and he would probably have had to go too.

As for David Cameron, he might have struggled to persuade his party to give him a second chance in a situation where many Tory MPs would have expected him to win outright.

The end result would almost certainly have been some sort of caretaker administration, and a second election next spring, quite possibly with three different party leaders. In a word: chaos.

Brown is his own Chancellor

Who runs the Treasury? asks Ben Brogan a propos of Downing Street's leaking of today's partial U-turn on capital gains tax.

"No one seriously expected the new Prime Minister to surrender all interest in his old department, but recent weeks suggest Mr Brown still has an office there," he says.

I'm not sure Ben or anyone else should be terribly surprised by this. History shows there are two sorts of Chancellors - those who have their own independent powerbase, like Denis Healey, Ken Clarke and Brown himself, and those who owe their power entirely to the Prime Minister, such as Anthony Barber, Norman Lamont, and Mr Darling.

From this list it will be seen that the more successful Chancellors tend to be the former variety, which bodes ill for Mr Darling's tenure. I continue to take the view that Jack Straw would have been a more sensible appointment.