Gordon Brown: ‘Life on Mars moment’

May 3, 2008 at 2:24 AM
11 comments

A quote from the local elections in the UK today: ‘Gordon Brown has had his Life on Mars moment. He went to sleep in 2008 and today he’s waking up with support back to the worst his party has seen since records began in 1973.’
   How that series has changed the way Britons refer to things.
   Labour, under Gordon Brown, may even fall below the Liberal Democrats when it comes to the popular vote, says the right-leaning Daily Telegraph.
   Britons might just simply want a new bunch of people to make fun of and criticize, and David Cameron’s lot seems ready, they have decided. The next General Election will be telling.

11 comments

Jack Yan’s rating:

★★★★

Tags:

This also appears in:

Comments

Woo and a hoo. I'm quite pleased with this, not least because I can't stand Gordon Brown. I strongly dislike having to agree with my Constituency MP, but he said on TV ages ago "When Tony is gone for a year you'll all be saying 'oh I wish we could have tony back'". He's right. I didn't like Tony Blair at all but he stood by his convictions and had the courage to make the hard choices. I may not like the choices he made, but I respect that he had the cojones to make them. Gordon Brown is not only incompetent, he's a ditherer and a coward.

I'm not a big Cameron fan either, he's a little too slick, but I do like some of the shadow cabinet, so I'll definitely be voting Tory next election. I think William Hague is a fantastic politician and would be a better PM than Dave, but unfortunately for Hague they threw him in too young and ruined his chances.

This said - I'm old school, everyone else seems to throw around their education as an insult. I think it's great - Eton then Oxford? That's good, I hope they had a very good quality education, I want my leaders to be clever and if they have breeding then that's good too.

Sorry, I'm rambling again :)

I agree. I didn’t support Blair in 1997 and was pretty vocal about it but I would rather have him than Gordon.
I also agree with you about David Cameron. Hague is a better politician—I remember him as Welsh Secretary—but he was ill-equipped to lead the Tories with ‘One free gallon of petrol to anyone who votes Conservative’!
I am proud of my schools, too—in my college, the headmaster who came on board after I left was a Low Master at Eton. Why not have educated leaders? Total agreement there, as well!

It reminds me of West Wing when Josiah is running for re-election and Toby argues with him that he should play the intelligence card because it's something that you want in a leader. I find that Gordon Brown's book on Courage is laughable - firstly he stole the idea and the title from JFK's book before he got elected, but then JFK was a war hero who saved a whole lot of lives in the Pacific. Gordon Brown just picks his nose.

It's really cool that the headmaster had taught at Eton! Marvellous. I went to a comprehensive, but I have respect for any parents who decide to educate their children at better schools, it's their future, after all. One of my biggest bug bears about this country is how much anything associated with the former upper and upper-middle classes is ridiculed, it seems to me based out of jealousy and spite mainly and it means many valuable traditions and facets of our nation are put down because we're all meant to attain not to a high standard but to the lowest common denominator.

Blair did ok compared to many PM's but signing up to the invasion of Iraq started the rot maybe. Educated leaders is a plus but I wish some of them had more common sense rather than a high IQ. Watching the way these Eton and Oxbridge graduates carry on in the house of commons is really alarming at times, they behave like bickering children but they do not have the excuse that children do. Intellectuals do have a habit of making the simple, complex. I sincerely wish we could do away with party politics and just have politics.

Should have mentioned that the conservatives have taken London back tonight.

[這個好]

Pete, I love the ‘Gordon Brown just picks his nose’! I had no idea the man wrote a book. I’d rather read John Major’s memoirs.
The head is now a city councillor, so he has done well. My parents sacrificed a lot: we weren’t rich and somehow they coughed up nearly one person’s weekly wages to buy a blazer at the private (public in British terms) school I went to.
That ridiculing probably comes from good motives about fairness but it has come to be a bane—because it has descended into being founded on envy. You are very correct, and for better or worse it is even stronger in the antipodes.
Karlos, you are probably right on where Blair’s poll numbers began sliding. War is never a popular decision but like Pete I respect that Mr Blair took a stand and stuck with it, which took guts. That earned a lot of respect from me because till then I thought Blair was a poll-watching popularist.
The Commons, and indeed the Westminster system, does have a lot to answer for in the lack of civility that regularly emanates from them. I often think the American system of the speaker going up and addressing a House whose members are not sitting at opposite sides facing down each other is superior, even if ultimately that system descends into petty partisanship, too. But as a “body language” plan I like it.
Modern politicians could indeed learn lessons reading Hansard and earlier transcripts of a time when decisions were made in the public good rather than oppositions made for newsworthiness (which is what one MP friend of mine found on entering the House) or, even worse, corporate interests that only benefit the few.
There is that concern with intellectuals but worse are the ill-educated who use intellectual-sounding pomposity to make themselves appear smarter—yet make poor decisions for the nation.
Simplicity could indeed work and I imagine if I entered a leading position in politics, e.g. as a mayor, I could drive to simplify meetings and decision-making.
As for London, I am not surprised. The tide has turned!

[this is good]

I just love the fact that politics can be challenging sometimes. It seems that the Tony Blair clone has his work cut out for himself :)

The results for the local elections were really bad for labour and really good for the conservatives. I honestly believe that labour is losing favour fast because of the evil three letter word. TAX. Labour have made a few improvements here and there but looking at the big picture, tax just keeps going higher and higher. People are struggling to pay their mortgages and council tax and with recent hikes in petrol, gas, electricity and food prices we are on the road to disaster, peoples wages do not go up with such regularity and the simple maths mean the majority have more going out than coming in = recession and backlash for labour. If we paid higher tax rates and had seen improvements in education, the national health and other public services then labour could defend their policy but we have not seen improvement. In fact, we have seen these things go in decline and many wonder where all the tax revenue is going. There has to be some serious wrong doing somewhere and labour will pay the price for taking its people for a ride.

The other side, Karlos, is that too many firms that are apparently British-based are no longer British-owned, and they can offset losses in other countries with what they would have paid in tax to HM Inland Revenue Commissioners. Therefore, with the tax take coming more and more from the citizens of the United Kingdom and not UK-based businesses, there is a constant shortfall. At least Major had the good sense to find ways to streamline the economy and reduce the actual rate of tax, and I think people are looking at his time with more respect than they did in 1997.

That's very true. Maggie Thatcher started the ball rolling with all the privatization of everything in england but I feel that is also a global issue. The major corporations seem to own most of the world now and what they have not acquired is probably not worth having. Whether you call them masons, freemasons, illuminati, politicians, bankers, industrialists, corporations or whatever, the simple truth is that governments walk hand in hand with CEO's and they have it all under control. The ruling elite have the power and they could that power to some good use but alas, it's mainly about their own bank balance.

Absolutely: you are right, Karlos. Once upon a time corporations limited their slavery to certain nations. Now they have the whole world at their beck and call, thanks to globalization and the belief in the technocracy—including the monetarist system that Margaret Thatcher advocated. She may well have had purer motives with the union issues in the UK during the 1970s, so it was possibly a natural reaction—but then those union problems were in turn caused by economic reforms of the 1960s and the duping of the British Government by certain economic theorists, stock market manipulators and corporations (corporate raiding, the British Leyland Motor Corp. formation, Slater Walker, Heath’s drive to the top). Collectively it is not incorrect to say that successive governments in much of the world have been hand in hand with the corporate élite, out for themselves and never a moment for real social responsibility for the countries they plunder.
I am for individual responsibility but I do believe in a balance in helping those who suffer; while John Major said he was a conservative with a socialist conscience, I think I am a socialist with a conservative conscience. And I certainly believe in limiting the power of the technocracy for the sake of ensuring that public services can function and that social welfare exists for those who need it.
Conservative might not solve these ills, at least not under Cameron as I (and it appears Pete) perceive him, but Labour has done little.

Gordon Brown: ‘Life on Mars moment’

Comments

Post a comment

About Me

My Links

My Groups

Neighborhood

Tags

Archives

Magazines