Gordon Brown - two predictions
Since the election have been nineteen polls asking how people would vote with Gordon Brown as Labour party leader. Populus seem to have pretty much made it one of their regular tracker questions. Every month when one is published I try to add a caveat of some sort to them saying not to worry too much about them, but how useful are they as a guide to how Gordon Brown will perform?
It is easy to see why the papers commission this question. British politics is in a strange interregnum. We all know Tony Blair is going very soon, we know that whatever policies are announced now are liable to be changed once Gordon Brown enters Number 10, whether people would vote for Tony Blair or not is pretty much irrelevant. Naturally the papers are keen to look past this to proper politics, once the new Prime Minister is in situ so are trying to do so by asking how people would vote with Brown in place.
The results have been very consistent. Labour would do badly. Since David Cameron became Conservative leader in December no hypothetical poll of how people would vote with Brown as Labour leader has shown a Labour lead. In the vast majority of cases, it has shown the Conservatives performing better against Brown than they are at present. But does this actually mean anything?
The first question is whether this is actually anything to do with Gordon Brown. Normal voting intention questions don’t mention party leaders, just the party names. Obviously if a question mentioned just Gordon Brown it would be skewed to Labour, so the hypothetical questions also mention David Cameron and Sir Menzies Campbell. The difference in the results could, therefore, not be a result of Gordon Brown at all - it could be a positive result of mentioning David Cameron’s name (or a negative one of mentioning Menzies Campbell’s).
Back in July Populus sought to solve this question. Using a split sample they asked three questions - one was a normal voting intention question. The second was a voting intention question with the names of the present party leaders. The third was a hypothetical voting intention question with Gordon Brown as Labour leader. The results were that mentioning the names of David Cameron and Tony Blair also increased the Conservative lead, from 2 points in the unprompted question to 7 points in the prompted one. Changing the Labour leader from Blair to Brown further increased the Conservative lead - up to 9 points.
What this suggests is a large part of the apparant change is just the effect of mentioning David Cameron’s name in the question (or a negative result of mentioning Tony Blair’s name) but some of it is also people being less willing to vote for Brown’s Labour party than Blair’s labour party. Certainly it doesn’t suggest that Brown would increase Labour’s support relative to the Conservatives.
The second question is whether it means anything. People are not very good at predicting their future behaviour, and obviously they cannot take into account “events” that haven’t happened yet, future policies and publicity. At the moment they are judging Gordon Brown on his record as Chancellor. As yet people have no way of knowing what policies Brown will announce when he becomes premier, of how they will react to him as Prime Minister. At least, they don’t in some ways.
My personal prediction is that, when Gordon Brown actually becomes Prime Minister Labour will experience a strong boost in the polls. Obviously it depends where they are starting from, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they regained a healthy lead. There will obvious be a flurry of press coverage, TV profiles, interviews and so on. Brown will undoubtedly start his premiership by rolling out new policies and new agendas designed to boost his support. However people think they’ll react, in reality I suspect many people will want to give Gordon Brown a chance. Whatever the polls say now, I am confident that reality will be different and Brown will take Labour up in the polls, not down….in the short term.
In the longer term, once the bells and whistles of Gordon Brown’s accession have faded away, I’m afraid that the present polls probably do give a good indication of the sort of effect he will have on Labour’s fortunes. Here is why.
The polls are pretty consistent on questions of why people seem to dislike Gordon Brown. They consistently show that people rate Brown as having run the economy well, of being strong, reliable, experienced, competent and efficient. On every rational measure people rate Gordon Brown very highly, yet if you ask whether people would rather have a Brown or Cameron led government, Cameron leads. Brown’s weak point is that people think he is not charistmatic, caring or likeable. However highly they rate his performance as a politician, they don’t like him as a man.
That is why I think the present polls do say something about Brown’s future success. If they showed people didn’t like Brown because they doubted his competence or experience, or disagreed with his policies or principles, then it would be perfectly possible that Brown in office would change peoples’ opinions, impress them with his competence or change their minds with new policies and ideas. Brown’s negatives though are far more nebulous - they just don’t like him. This will be very hard to change.
Gordon Brown has been on the public stage for well over a decade. People have a very firm image of him in their minds of a dour, brooding Scotsman, and it would be incredibly difficult to shift. Perceptions of Tony Blair have changed in the last ten years, but the core impression that he is at heart a decent, fairly normal, sort of family chap is unmoved. Polls show that people think he is an untrustworthy liar, he is firmly associated with a now deeply unpopular war and seen as a poodle to an even more unpopular President. Yet polls show that people still consider him likeable. Impressions of Blair as a person haven’t shifted. The public formed an impression of William Hague as a bit of an oddball very early in his leadership and he never shifted it. Michael Howard was never able to escape the public image that Ann Widdecombe had summed up as Howard “having something of the night” about him. I have great doubts that any rebranding exercise could do anything to change perceptions of Brown’s character.
If you wish Gordon Brown success, as I am sure the majority of Labour supporters reading this do, then I am sure you are saying to yourself that this doesn’t matter. People are not so shallow as to vote on such trivialities as who is the nicest chap. Alas, while I’m sure democracy would be far healthier if everyone cast their vote based on a lengthy consideration of the rival manifestos, they do not. Most people vote on broad perceptions of the parties, including the leaders, and the fact is that people do not make purely rational decisions. This applies to all of us, however smart or immersed in politics we are. You cannot turn off your subconscious.
Why do companies spend so much time and money on the packaging of their goods? Because it makes people buy them. It isn’t just a case of good packaging making them look more appealing on the shelf though, good packaging changes opinions of the goods inside them. In taste tests of identical products in different packaging people will pick one over the other and believe it is on grounds of taste, there are companies devoted to it. Put margarine in foil, people think it tastes better. Put more yellow on a can of 7UP, people report that it tastes more lemony, people think that ice-cream tastes better if they’ve bought in a round box. If you ask people why they prefer that particular margarine, soft drink, ice-cream, etc they won’t say - it was in foil or a yellow can or a nice round box. They are under the impression that it is actually better.
At this point many of you reading this - possibly nearly all of you - will be thinking something along of lines of “Politics is different. You can’t just apply the logic of flogging ice lollies to selecting the head of government. People take it more seriously.”
The reason you think people look at politics differently is because you do, right now you are reading a blog about political opinion polling. It’s a long post so you’ve probably spent quite a while doing it. To you politics is far more important than fizzy drinks and margarine. You aren’t typical. Most people aren’t particularly interested in politics. Most people cannot identify politicans beyond the party leaders (Brown himself is one of the few exceptions). To most people politics isn’t that important. More importantly, we are talking about subconscious reactions. You cannot turn them on and off depending upon how important the issue is. People don’t think “I am only buying carrots so I shall allow my subconscious thoughts free rein” and later, “Now am I voting, so must become a dessicated calculating machine, banishing all but rational thought”. You couldn’t if you wanted to anyway.
You will probably have done the Implicit Association Test at Harvard University’s website in the past. It flashes rapid pictures and words on the screen, black faces and white faces, negative words and positive words, and sees if people are microscopically slower at associating positive words with black faces than they are with white faces. It measures your unconscious prejudice over age, gender, race and so on. If you haven’t yet tried it and you’ve got a spare 15 minutes or so do so, the chances are that you’ll find that you have some minor degree of subconscious prejudice on age, race, etc. The thing is, even if you do your level best and really concentrate on not being biased at all in the test, it is very hard to fool it. The point is, you can’t turn off your prejudices at whim. If you are prejudiced towards white people, or young people… or English people, or pleasant, likeable people (or indeed, against grouchy, insular, Scottish people) you aren’t going to turn it off.
Choosing someone to run a major international company is presumably a vitally important issue. The CEO of major companies like BP, General Motors or Microsoft arguably has more power than the heads of government of some countries. When appointing CEOs company boards presumably make decisions on things like competence and ability and not trivialities like, say, how tall they are. A third of the CEOs of the top 500 American companies are over 6′2″ tall. Under 4% of American men as a whole are over 6′2″. Presumably no company boards chose their CEO on the basis of height, but clearly there was some subconscious bias at work here.
I’ve referred to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink here before (in fact, if you’ve read it you may have spotted that some of the packaging examples and the comment about the height of CEOs are drawn from it). In his book Gladwell talks about the “Warren Harding Error”. Warren Harding is normally rated as one of the very worst American Presidents. He had an undistinguished record in Ohio politics. As a Senator he didn’t turn up for the majority of votes. He was an ill-educated, was having a long term affair with a friend’s wife and illegally drank alcohol. Despite his manifest shortcomings, Gladwell argues, he got elected because he looked like a President, a tall, handsome, patrician figure with a strong, rumbling speaking voice. Subconsciously people assumed that because Harding looked like a great President, he would be a great President. They were wrong.
People’s opinions of other people are influenced by unconscious prejudices. So are people’s votes. People consistently voice their approval of Brown’s performance in his job and say how strong, effective and competent he is. These things are clearly not the problem. The reason he polls worse than Blair, must be because he is seen as having an unattractive personality, people just don’t like him, and that will be difficult to change.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he won’t win. James Callaghan was always regarded as far more likeable than Margaret Thatcher yet she won in 1979 and twice thereafter. I do think it will be a real obstacle though. My prediction is that there will indeed be a Brown boost when he becomes leader, but that it won’t last. The public already have firm perceptions of Brown, and they won’t be easy to shift, especially when he is up against an opponent in the form of David Cameron who seems to have the exact opposite effect upon the public.
Filed under: Communicate, Economy, Labour
I don’t disagree with anything you write here, Anthony, except in this respect (and I’m writing as not-a-fan-of-Brown): much of Gordon Brown’s public persona has been shaped by the role he has played in government. Are not the characteristics you expect of finance ministers (or financial professionals generally things like “dull”, “dour”, “firm”; likeability is not an easily achieved trait in such a position, especially if that is an appearance needed to be transmitted to a public formerly sceptical of your party’s economic management?
I’m not arguing that these traits don’t coincide with Brown’s but equally they over-emphasise those “respected but not likeable” characteristics and understate others. In contrast, there have been dramatic, short-lived changes in his perception during the “humanising” experiences he has had; notably the happiness and tragedy over his children.
Of course, surges in public sympathy in such circumstances are expected and understandable regardless or who the person in question is; but perhaps they were more dramatic because they were so untypical of the public persona - a more likeable politician would have had less of a “bounce” from them because they started from a higher base in that regard.
The office of Prime Minister is a different kettle of fish: Brown will have the freedom to define himself how he likes - his difficulty is that he may already have been typecast.
Brown will be free to define himself, but he will also have to take responsibility for areas of the political agenda other than the economy and that could prove very difficult.
He won’t get away making 90 minute speeches on Iraq outlining the governments record beating achievements to the applause and cheers of labour backbenchers.
He could of course go for a quick election (as Hazel Blears seems to be suggestng) to gain from the initial bounce, but the fact that the Labour party is close to bankrupt might put a dampener on that.
Peter.
I agree pretty much with all of your post Anthony. Notwithstanding Thatcher - who actually should have won more comfortably in 79 - we seem to like nice middle class boys and girls. Cameron is that.
However for all his high profile many of the current polls are measuring the Tory team captain with Labour’s second in command, a man who mainly speaks on relatively”dry” subjects. Leader v leader may be different
It’s hard to remember that when Brown emerged (during John Smith’s illness in 1988) he was the articulate personable, competant voice of new younger Labour spokes people
As a dyed in the wool tory I can’t wait for Gordon Brown to become leader of the labour party.
There are a number of reasons for this optimism, one is who will be the next resident at Number 11, Ed Balls? Not exactly the most popular member with *any* wing of the labour party but moreover Brown as PM will re-ignite the type of internal conflict not seen since the days of Kinnock taking on Eric Heffer and Derek Hatton. Further evidence of what is almost certain to follow can be seen by Peter Mandleson’s 2p on PM in that ‘he hopes GB would speak to him if GB was elected’ clearly Peter Mandleson clearly hasn’t forgotten or forgiven Gordon Brown.
Then there is the economy which even on the macro economic basis has problems in that, unemployment is rising, inflation is rising even though the method for calculating the same was ‘adjusted’ to lower the headline rate of inflation, growth is patchy (across the economic spectrum and geographically) and there is a real chance that even with changing the basis for the ‘golden rule’ that GB may not be able to show compliance with this.
Add in micro economic factors such as the recent rise in fuel duty, the reduction in wholesale/ futures gas prices not coming down and the predicted rise in council tax and many will, by the time of the next election probably disagree with the statement that ‘they’ve never had it so good’.
Add in, dissent in the public services (which tend to be dominated by labour voters) the melt down in the Home Office (there’s always a PR disaster just around the corner at the HO and its always a question of when not if) the restructuring of the NHS, the war (yes amongst labout voters I think this still resonates) and labour’s plastic poll tax (ID cards) Labour will be up against it with their core voters.
As such I think the real issue will be not whether there are marginal shifts in the decisions of the floating voter (although these changes are vital in key marginal constituencies) rather will the core Labour vote turn out?
My gut feeling is that it won’t and that there will be some high profile casualties as a result, (the most likely high profile casualty being Charles Clarke in Norwich South).
So, in short I don’t really think it matters how popular Gordon Brown is, the tide of politics is against him and, as politics is largely cyclical, the time is right for a new, green, Conservative dawn.
Just as a historical note,
When I was doing my degree ( Politics and Sociology) at what was then Glasgow Tech and is now Glasgow Caledonian University, Gordon Brown was my Politics tutor for a year.
Articulate and Personable, ain’t what I would have said.
Peter.
I agree broadly with what has been said in this post too! It is perhaps worth pointing out that Brown was brought into the limelight in the 2005 Election because he was perceived as being more popular than Blair - who appeared to be costing Labour heavily in terms of votes, particularly to the Liberal Democrats! I remember well on Election night as the results rolled in Andrew Marr - then BBC political editor - suggesting that had Brown been leader Labour would have won a further 3 figure majority of 120 plus.
Admittedly , that was in the context of Howard as Tory leader - not Cameron.
That was a great read, thanks. It made alot of sense.
I agree with your prediction, Peter. However, whatever happens with Brown if he does become Labour leader, he certainly won’t win my vote.
I’ll be voting for the first time at the next election and I will definitely vote Conservative. This is simply because my family have been beef and dairy farmers for over 100 years and have always voted Conservative because they are the party that represents the interests of business families like mine the best.
Sorry Anthony On your main point I disagree entirely . I think the theortical poll questions comparing Brown and Cameron have no importance whatsoever . What is of importance on what GB does when he becomes PM and what new policies and direction he takes Nulab .
Oops cut myself off and posted too early . It may well be that he does not change the government direction to improve it’s standing in the polls but as always it will be the government who will win or lose the next election and Cameron’s appeal or non appeal is of no great significance in this .
Phil,
While I respect your right to vote for who you want, I can’t follow your logic.
Most of the EU rules that have harmed UK dairy farming were negotiated under thatcher, and the people who are really responsible for decimating Britains dairy Industry are the likes of Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, all of whom have had far more help from the Tories and their free market liberalisation than farmers.
To be honest I’d say if you are in farming you would be better off voting LibDem if you are in England and SNP in Scotland. At least with Independence we would be able to try to get different termss from the EU.
Peter.
I agree with a lot of this, but the point is that the Labour Party will be all-too-aware of it. The spin doctors of the party will be devoting all their attention between 2007 and 2009 to ensuring that Gordon is seen as a smiling, gentle, family man who you could have a drink with. We shall have to see if it works.
On Peter’s point about a snap election, I am absolutely astonished that this is being mooted by anyone. During the TB resignation kerfuffle earlier this year, he said he would resign earlier “in order to give [his] successor ample time to bed in”. If GB declines this bedding-in opportunity, what on earth will the whole palaver have been for?!
Toby, the “snap election” stuff is a nonsense - they’ve selected three - count them - candidates so far. In the next six months they’ll be fighting elections; they’re not going to select 300-odd parliamentary candidates in six months.
It’s going to be 2009 (provided that the polls are ok) and 2010 if not.
A very interesting read Anthony and of course you may well be right but one bit of history gives me considerable cause to doubt your thesis:Ted Heath’s comfortable victory over Wilson in 1970.
Wilson was seemingly a far stronger figure than Cameron can ever hope to be,Heath a much colder, less liked individual than Brown and the experience/achievement perceptions were reversed.Everyone including pollsters and political scientists at the time gave Heath no chance but British voters perversely found reasons to defy all predictions.
My guess–and let’s face it that’s all it is this far out—- is that Brown could yet contrive to remain unliked as an individual but trounce Cameron with ease when it comes to the election (and that will be in 2009 or 2010, depending on polls.)However I was wrong in 1970 like everyone else too….
Of course the reason why GB is grumpy, could be due to the fact he has had to play second fiddle to TB!
1970 is always used as an example of the triumph of a un-personable party leader over a personable one. I’m not sure that it is relevant today. The Tory party won in 1970 due to a much better campaign, Jeffrey Johnson-Smith and Chris Chataway’s very effective PB’s. Some un-welcome news on the economic front re the balance of payments, the balance of payments surplus, was touted as a major economic triumph for Roy Jenkins. Labour complacancy after a poll, a Sunday Times poll (carried out I think by ST employees, not by a reputable polling org.) giving Labour a 12% lead. We should also remember that the Tory Party still had 2 million members in 1970. I passed the Tory Party HQ in Croydon on a superb summers day during that campaign. There sitting in the garden were rows of Tory Ladies being addressed by the candidate, who was waving a pointer at a map, it was reminiscent of Montgomery addressing his staff officers before a major battle, I can’t imagine anything like that at the next GE.
Strength in depth was always gave the Tories an advantage, that advantage is much weakened today.
I am fully against the European Union and British membership of it but the Conservatives have always been the best governing party since my family began farming. In fact we never suffered with the dairy farming at all but we were very consciencious and sad about what was happening in other farms.
Labour has upped business tax on us and we are paying much extra just in tax every year. The Conservative’s pro-business stanch will always be there and David Cameron missing the conference of business leaders was indeed a big mistake but he’s got another 3 years to convince people and I am sure he easily will.
Peter Cairns - I’d be really interested to learn more of your personal experience of Brown from your University days. What little I have gleaned from those with first hand knowledge of the guy suggests that he is rather more personable than the public image suggests. I think yours is the first contra-indication I have read. Unfortunately, you were rather brief.
Can you tell us more?
PtP - I’ve never met Brown, but I’ve heard reports both ways. I’ve read some accounts that seem to square the contradiction - that he is brusque, rude and barely communicative to the majority, but good company to the select few who he rates.
Whatever is the case, it doesn’t necessarily matter. What counts is how he comes across in the media, which isn’t necessarily the same thing at all. I always cite Michael Howard as the best example - personally I’ve always found him to be a charming, pleasant and kind man. In contrast when he is on the television he does indeed come across as creepy and somewhat sinister.
An aspect of the Brown popularity rating which Anthony didn’t cover is the growing anti-Scottish bias in England. It has appeared partly as a result of the West Lothian question, and partly because of the preponderance of MP’s from Scottish constituencies in the Labour party and in the cabinet. The fact that other Scottish MP’s are in prominent positions as Lib-dem leader or Speaker, doesn’t help either.
How much does that affect the image of the Brown brand? The issue is so new that there is no polling history.
Anthony, your post is full of contradictions. On the one hand you say that when Brown becomes Prime Minister Labour will experience a strong boost in the polls, and that at the start his premiership he will roll out new policies and new agendas.
You say that there will be a flurry of press coverage, TV profiles, interviews and that you suspect many people will want to give Brown a chance. You then go on to say that on every rational measure people rate Gordon Brown very highly, yet would rather have a Cameron led government.
Brown’s weak point,you say, is that people think he is not charistmatic, caring or likeable. However highly they rate his performance as a politician, they don’t like him as a man.
Surely all the media attention and the the policy initiatives that he makes as PM, will be designed to show the electorate, Brown as PM, a different man from Brown as Chancellor. And provided all goes to plan, that should go some way to sustain the boost, that you yourself predict.
Ben - I expect the flurry of publicity around his accession will give him a temporary boost from all the publicity, and no doubt a lot of it will be attempts to change public perceptions of Brown as a man. However, I don’t think it is possible to change public perceptions of his character that are now so seated in the public’s mind, and which seem to have at least some grounding in reality, so once the publicity has died away I expect them to have failed.
The fact that Gordon Brown has the capacity to be brusque, rude or indeed animated is perhaps the first positive thing I’ve heard about him.
Let’s not forget ’shagger’ Clinton’s remarks ‘It’s the economy stupid’ well:
official unemployment figures are up,
the number of young people not in education employment or training is (has) topped 1 million
the headline rate of inflation is up to 2.7% (probably about 4.4% in old money)
fuel duty has just gone up by 1.25p per litre
public secotr pay is being squeezed
most of the inflation hits disproportioantely at the lowest earners (who tend to support Labour)
So I don’t really see GB having much ‘wriggle room’.
I see the next few years being akin to the last years of the Major administration (with one difference, everyone I’ve met who knew JM hsa said that he was a decent sort, I don’t think the same could be said for TB or GB).
I accept your clarification Anthony, but I remain to be convinced. I do, though, fail to understand the polls, and their discrepencies, vis a vie Brown V Cameron, and Labour V Conservative. Surely the respondents know that come the next election, it will be Brown leading the Labour party, Blair being completely out of the equation, and cameron leading theTory party. I think we can safely say that the parties are fighting for roughly 40% of the voting public, as their base vote is always around 30%. So for the polls to have any meaning with regards the leaders, they need to filter out the traditional party voters, and find what difference the leaders make to the remaining 40%. If this could be done, then the findings would have a real meaning.
Three quick points
Is GB’s equation as follows: If the after-election honeymoon is good enough - go for it, if not then play a longer game a la Major in 92.
The 1970 precedent is interesting. Although Wilson had surged ahead in the opinion polls, it was too recent and insufficiently in depth to overcome the 3-4 years of deep unpopularity that preceded it.
Nobody really liked Thatcher. People voted with cold calculation. She was seen as competant - as is GB. Admittedly she never faced anyone as likable as Cameron after Callaghan stood down
Anthony, what you say makes good sense. But I’d like to suggest another possible reason for some of the reduction in Labour voting intention seen in the Brown vs Cameron polls.
Standard voting intention questions ask about a hypothetical general election “tomorrow”. Obviously, there won’t be one then, but this question does gives an indication of whether people would idly like an immediate change of government.
When the questions name Brown and Cameron, things are different. ICM does still ask about an election “tomorrow” with Brown as Labour leader. But this hypothesis stretches reality even further, and so people may not be answering the question as it’s litereally being asked. The mention of Brown, who is assumed to take over at some point next year, may catapult respondents into the more distant future. Populus and YouGov don’t use “tomorrow” in their Brown/Cameron questions.
If respondents are thinking farther ahead, they may be less inclined to support a Labour government that’s been in office for 12 or 13 years than they are to acquiesce in its continuation right now. This effect, if it exists, would be distinct from any particular dislike of Brown.
There are some very interesting points here. One problem is that over the past ten years Britain has fundamentally changed and I do not know anyone who thinks this is for the better. The fact that the recent census shows that 1.5 million 20-30 year olds have basically disappeared (ie the cream of a society moving abroad for a better life) seems to have been ignored by most politicians and lets face it Gordon Brown is not a communicator. Nor is he a delegator. He is your archtypal dour Scotsman - although I am sure this quality appeals to a Socialist Europe.
Cameron is the only chance we have though it will take many generations to undo the damage of Brown and Blair.
Personally, I think in many ways Britain has changed for the better in the last 10 years. Not due to the political choices of this government, but in many ways we are a more welcoming, accepting and tolerant society.
Look at the (non-)reaction to the drug allegations made against Cameron. For him to be able to stand up and say “none of your business” was not something that could have happened decades ago.
I dont know if there are many people who would say that just because someone did something 7 years before he entered politics should rule him out or dissuage anyone for voting against him. We are all own human. History is littered with such examples.
Having said that Britain is isolated in the Europe - is a laughing stock because of its foreign policy - is a soft hand to anyone who wants to abuse our hospitality and sense of fair play (ie everyone!!) and, like Europe, is being ruled by champagne socialists who seem to care little that we are being taxed out of existence while they bask in protected pensions, expenses-paid lifestyles and have very little in common with what Britain really stands for. How anyone can say that Britain has changed for the better is beyond me!
Such as?
There are several major factors working against Gordon Brown. Firstly the new boundaries which will be in force remove 10 seats from Labour and give the Tories 13 more seats without a single vote switching because Labour seats tend to be small urban ones and Tory seats large rural ones. SEcondly in 1997 Labour won dozens of rural seats and in the past decade Blair has waged war on the countryside and almost destroyed the country way of life and we country people have long memories. Thirdly Blair and Brown while lecturing us all about arranging pensions omit the fact together they have stolen £100 billion from our pension funds in the past decade ruining the retirement plans of the next 2 generations of non-public sector workers. Fourthly and possibly the most fatal for Brown (if he becomes PM which I doubt) Blair has presided over the most corrupt government since Lloyd George. Under previous governments of either party Quangoes had mixed party membership but Blair’s Labour has systematically removed Tories, Liberals and Nationalists from almost all of them, resulting in them being dominated by Labour party supporters and if he thinks Lord Levy will bite his bullet on the Cash for Peerages issue, he should look at Bob Woodward and Nixon in the 1970s. Everything about current politics feels like the mid 70s. Blair’s Labour rose by spin and it will spin out of power taking Gordon Brown, John Reid or whoever picks up Blair’s poisoned chalice with it! Oppositions never win elections, governments throw them away and the sooner the better with this lot while we still have in our case a village shop/post office.
Well said! Completely agree with you.
The character of Gordon Brown? I can recite one example from an acquaintance. In the 2000 Budget, there was a notorious press release to the Budget which became known as “IR35″. This vicious proposal was deliberately aimed at putting independent IT Consultants out of business. I joined a pressure group to fight this measure - one of our members was a constituent of Gordon Brown. He went to Gordon Brown’s constituency surgery to complain about the impact of IR35 on his business - how did the “great man” react when our hapless member was ushered into his august presence? Simple - he completely ignored him. Whilst our member was trying to explain the impact of IR35, Gordon Brown sat there reading a fax and said not a word - our associate eventually left having got no reaction at all, not even hello or goodbye.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, whenever you see Gordon Brown, charge him £5 extra. In shops, garages, hotels, eating houses, etc. Even if he just buys a Mars bar, charge him £5 extra.
If he talks to you, charge him £5. If he sits next to you on an airplane, ask him for £5.
Five Pownd Brown - as we now call him - must learn a simple lesson, which is “Stop taking the mickey”.
You have the power. Use it. If Five Pownd thinks that he can just tax people on a whim, then tread on his carbon footprint. Every shopkeeper in the land can charge Five Pownd a fiver just for entering his shop. Do it. If everyone sticks together on this issue, Five Pownd will learn a valuable lesson.
One thing not touched on is the amount of trust that ‘middle england’ voters have for Gordon Brown. The way that he has implemented all the ’stealth taxes’ over the years and his apparent ready use of ’spin’ to hide these has led people to possibly see him as devious and untrustworthy.