So, what’s the state of play in UK Politics? Despite death, danger and pestilence all around, everything’s in safe hands, the media tells us.
Good old Gordo, just look at him, chairing his twice-daily crisis committee during the latest foot and mouth crisis. Oooh, isn’t he strong jawed, isn’t he resolute and calm, isn’t he just the very picture of a father of the nation?
So unlike like that odiious simpering Blair…. Crises, what crises? Gordo will save us!
That’s the picture we’re being given anyhow:the British political media would have us believe that their own personal relief at finally being shot of the Blair/Campbell spin machine that they’ve been such slaves to all this time somehow translates into a general wiping-clean of Labour’s political slate. All is forgotten and it’s a bright new day with Uncle Gordo!
Even the Tory press loves him.
But just because there’s been a change at No.10 doesn’t mean this is a new start: it’s the same authoritarian, secretive and incompetent government it always was.
Proof of this comes from Conservative blogger Ian Dale who has kindly fisked most of Brown’s recent “New!” policy statements and his sincere promises to a disaster-hit population and found nearly every one to be a complete sham.
Meanwhile those journalists who were so cowed by Campbell that they forgot how to do their jobs are now so releived to have someone who doesn’t shout in charge that they’re sucking up Brown’s own spin even more obediently than before.
Brown’s image-making is very clever – his voice is slow, measured, almost whispering and every announcement he makes is in that ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ tone, like Daddy dishing out the discipline; but he too relies on it resonating with a particular public archetype of masculinity, just as the laddish and crush-prone Campbell sold Blair’s image of debonair international statesmanship. Campbell must’ve been chuffed to bits when Hugh Grant was cast as PM.
But like Blair’s, Brown’s public image is a facade: look behind the heroic moral posturing and his soothing paternal words and there’s nothing there but mendacity and greed for power.
Nevertheless thanks to a compliant press the spin appears to be working. After all, who is there to oppose it?
As Ian Dales’ post shows the official Opposition has actually got ammunition to use against Brown, but none of it seems to be scoring a direct hit. I doubt it ever will while David Cameron is in charge, either.
Cameron may have been a necessary transitional Tory leader in that he changed the party structure, but he’s well outlived his usefulness now and is dead in the water – he just hasn’t realised it yet. Failed challenger David Davis and former party leader Willam Hague are just giving the Etonian Cameron enough rope to hang himself before swooping in to deliver the coup de grace and take the party back to it’s petty-bourgeois Thatcherite roots..
The Lib Dems’ seemingly unshiftable Ming Campbell, while being a throughly decent and principled man, has about as much oomph as a wet sponge. Saving the return of the bibulous Charles Kennedy there’s no-one with any gumption there at all. At the moment we have effectively no Opposition whatsoever and there is no political means to get an opposing voice heard, except by direct action, but try that and you’ll end up in pokey for terrorism offences. We seem to be turning into a one-party state.
