Categories: uncategorized
Date: 25 July 2008 12:43:00
Unfortunately it looks like Gordon Brown is not going to have a happy holiday in Southwold, following last night's by-election in Glasgow East. To lose a safe seat is never a good thing but to have a majority of over 13500 turned over is a disaster.
Labour have lost safe seats in Crewe and Glasgow East, control of councils in Wales and look like having no clue as to how to stop the rot. I suppose that they'll hope that "Things can only get better" between now 2010, the last date for a general election.
Today he's making a major speech that will set forward his vision for Britain - yet another one. Behind him will be people who will see that vision but not him as its leader. Not even John Major had this many disasters to contend with and there seems to be no end in sight.
For the last 3 years we've told that Brown is an intellectual heavyweight and a conviction politician. They made it sound like a great alternative to the publicity fiend that he followed. Yet he's failed to live up to the hype. He is indesisive, proane to floating ideas and then withdrawing them as soon as things look bad, making decisions that prove to be ill thought out (obilition of the 10p tax) and very uncomfortable in front of the cameras and with other heads of state.
Labour has a choice to make - follow him and probably lose the next election or remove him now and try to turn things around with a new leader.
But who would take the job? Brown has to bear a lot of responsibility for what is happening. His 10 years of "prudence" were nothing of the sort. The cupboard is bare and the only hope is to borrow more and more. We're already saddled with a PFI debt bigger than Everest, the Northern Rock bail out and endemic tax avoidance that goes unpunished.
Would you want to take over that mess and the current economic situation?
History Today:
306 : Constatine is proclaimed Emperor in York. Later he'd be proclaimed Emperor in Rome.
1603: James I becomes the first monarch of England & Scotland.
1909: Louis Bleriot becomesthe first person to fly across the English Channel.
1917: Margaretha Zelle is sentenced to death. She was better known as Mata Hari.
1939: The Nazis begin the systematic "euthanasia" of disabled children. It was later stopped after mass protests when the German public found out - see they could have stopped the death camps, if they'd wanted too.
1943: Benito Mussolini is forced to resign.
1952: A sad day for Europhiles... The European Coal and Steel Community, which was established by the Treaty of Paris in 1951, is ratified. Later it would become the EU.
1968: Pope Paul VI condemned all forms of contraception in his encyclical "Humanae Vitae".
1978: Britain's first test tube baby is born.