New Labour

It’s all change at the top of British government, what with a change of PM and a new deputy Labour party leader and all.

Except it’s not.

Gordon Brown has been the man in the shadows behind every failed Blair neoliberal economic policy of the past ten years and he’s responsible for a British society more unequal and more divided by class and money than ever before:

Wealth held by the top 10% has increased 7% to 54%
Fewer living in poverty than in 1997
Women more likely to live in poverty
People’s lives largely determined by parents’ social class and skin colour
Low voter turnout giving wealthier more political influence

Brown’s deceptively statist yet entirely market-driven theories of economic management are essentially exercises in creative accounting writ large. It’s as though Brown watched a WTO daytime commercials – “Consolidate all your debts! Unlock your country’s equity!” and thought “Aha! A theory of government!”

In order to move liabilities off the current balance sheet and off into the misty future where Labour will no longer be electorally accountable and to satisy WTO and GATT requirements, and to produce sufficient current income to finance Labour’s many current failed policies (not least in Iraq), Gordon Brown has mortgaged, and in some instances plain-out sold, our common property. It’s asset-stripping on a massive scale and the beneficiaries are the private equity companies, who also benefit from a tax regime that allows them to pay less tax than their lowest-paid employees.

A significant tranche of the proceeds of the sell-offs have gone on expensive free-market-ideologue consultants whose big ideas for government include guess what, more sell-offs;

Government spending of almost £2 billion a year on external consultants has been branded “a scandal” after an influential MPs’ committee said contracts often failed to achieve value for money.

In a report, the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said a better grip on the use of consultants would lead to efficiency gains of more than £500 million a year.

Brown loves him some City advisors: so much so that he’s brought them into actual government, even going so far as to appoint Bill Gates and the boss of Wal-Mart as economic advisors. Gordon Brown’s International Business Advisory Council meet once a year at Downing Street and will advise him on policies to improve the competitiveness of the UK economy. Members include:

Bernard Arnault, Chairman and CEO, LVMH
Lord Browne, Group Chief Executive, BP
Dr Jean-Pierre Garnier, CEO, GlaxoSmithKline
Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Microsoft Corporation
Sir Ka-shing Li, Chairman of the Board, Hutchison Whampoa Ltd
Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
Sir John Rose, CEO, Rolls Royce
Robert Rubin, Director and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Citigroup Inc
Lee Scott, President and CEO, Wal-Mart
Ratan Tata, Chairman, Tata Group
Meg Whitman, President and CEO, eBay
James Wolfensohn, Special Envoy for Disengagement and Former President of
the World Bank

Hardly hardline socialists, are they?

Under Brown the boundaries of the City and the Treasury have become so blurred it’s hard to tell which is which. The private equity industry and the global accounting companies are driving UK economic policy and it’s not to our benefit.

It’s all about moving public service and welfare expenses from one accounting column to another. Blair and Brown both signed up to trade and economic agreements that require it: it’s what Browns baby, the chaotic tax credit scheme, is all about: it moves welfare spending from the heading ‘welfare spending’ and into the ‘tax’ column (it actually counst as a tax ‘cut’) as per WTO agreements agreed with the US and EU. These agreements say, in effect, ‘open up up public services to the free market, cut your welfare spending, cut business taxes. make the populace pay more for services, shrink government and drown it a bathtub’: Gordon says ‘hell yes’.

Because of Brown’s enthusiasm for this kind of Enron accounting and sleight of hand our children and their children will be paying exorbitant sums to private equity companies for decades to come for the use of their own public services, which they and we once owned in common. Not only will our children will be at the mercy of unaccountable private companies for medical care, welfare and so on, the government is selling their very identities: even the data the government’s collecting on individuals, the biometric details, the DNA, our children’s fingerprints, we don’t own that either. All of it’s being shared with those companies too.

Most of Britain’s infrastructure, even our tax offices, hospitals, defence establishments and materiel, has been auctioned off to pay for New Labour’s repressive, incompetent, surveillance and database society. The shortfall in income is taken from those least able to pay: they are indirectly taxed the most, on food and rent and heating and light and children’s clothes and even water…

I could go on and on.

It’s not so much the lying about what Brown says he wants (equality and justice for all and a pony), and what he actually does (feed the rich, starve the poor) that worries me: after all, we’ve lived with that for ten years. What worries me about him is that although he is strongly rumoured to be, on a personal level, a complete and utter bastard, bad-tempered, arrogant, dismissive of those of lesser intellect, conniving, underhand and prone to go into monumental sulks when thwarted, the media is already helping the Brown spin machine find it’s shaky feet, by colluding in the construction of a new cuddly persona. Now Brown has power, all those previously dissident voices are shutting up. They’re all Polly Toynbee now.

Already this past weekend we’ve had encomiums to his ‘human side’, pictures artfully cropped or lit to make that sardonic mask of his look a little less creepy and a more little soft-focus and twinkly, and heartwarming human interest fluff about his humble Scots origins and calvinist values. The Scotsman’s “Brown the healer as he sets out to woo Britain” is just one oleaginous example.

We are not fooled though. Brown is a nascent autocrat, a dictator in embryo. Do you think that a single one of those repressive terrorism, police and criminal justice laws– and let’s not forget the scary, scary Civil Contingencies Act, got by without Treasury approval?

Every would-be dictator needs a compliant sidekick, and in new deputy party leader Harriet Harman Brown has his perfect foil. It’s dour and dumber.

Harriet Harman is a type I know well: there’s a Harriet Harman somewhere in the upper middle management level of every local authority. There’s a Harriet Harman on the management board of every medium-sized charity or NGO too.

They left university with mediocre degrees, soft left politics and a taste for self-importance, went into the civil service or local council at junior management level, supposedly because of committment to public service (but in truth because it’s safe and has a safe pension) then they joined the public service union, Unison (despite the fact they’re management not workers) then they proceeded to use the union’s structure, hierarchy and women’s sections to propel their political career upwards, on the way acquiring a partner or spouse who’s handily influential in party circles, either in Westminster or the unions and/or who is related to a famous Labour ‘name’ – which influence they proceed to leverage to maximum political effect, despite their very public espousal of feminism.

Oh, they mean well, most of the Harriet Harmans, but they have never known real life for an instant, having been featherbedded all their lives since getting themselves safely ensconced in the bosom of the Labour bourgeoisie. I doubt she’s been on a bus or gone to Sainsbury’s herself in 20 years or more.

It’s that Labour bourgeoisie that Brown’s likely to bring into government with him. Look for these names to pop up in the news in the coming week:

Ed Balls – Brown’s wormtongue at the Treasury, tipped to be new Chancellor despite being barely able to shave yet

Sue Nye – married to head of the BBC, nuff said

Ed Miliband – brother of David, legacy Labour welfare recipient.

Andrew Brown and John Brown – Gordon Brown’s brothers: one a PR consultant, the other a Channel 4 news producer

Ian Austin – Labour party enforcer. The commissar.

Yvette Cooper– former youngest MP, married to Ed Balls

Colin Currie – hopsital doctor and university friend, Brown’s Lord Falconer

Shriti Vadera – investment banker, involved in many privatisation deals, former Oxfam chair.

Not exactly a Ministry Of All The Talents, is it?

And what about Iraq? What’s Brown planning on doing? Who knows. He certainly doesn’t. There have been no official pronouncements as yet, though Washington is apparently getting a bit jittery on the topic.

We don’t know what Brown is going to do, or who he’s going to bring into government, or even what is his policies, are, except more of same served up the garnished with a few new platitudes. Meet the new boss same as the old, but with added dismality.

UPDATE: The BBC is reporting that, with the appointment by Brown of a general election co-ordinator, that a snap election is in the offing. We’ll see – I think that’s a bit hopeful myself, the Brown bounce isn’t so big it can redeem the Iraq war.

Or maybe, it occurs to me, that since he approached senior Lib Dems to join his cabinet over the weekend that he’s not impressed with Labour’s own homegrown political ‘talent’ and may be hoping for a hung parliament to get the Lib Dems into cabinet that way.

Who knows. No doubt all will become clear in due course. Or not, as the case may be.

UPDATE II: The Grauniad agrees with me on the hung parliament thing:

New parliamentary boundaries may cost Labour a dozen seats. It has 19 MPs with majorities below 1,000, mostly in the south. And asking for a fourth term is always asking a lot. Even with no campaign miscalculations, that is enough to plunge Mr Brown’s 67-seat majority into hung parliament territory, forcing him to phone Sir Ming again.