If your answer is Gordon Brown, then you're asking the wrong question. posted by Richard Seymour

You know trouble is brewing when one of the most ardent exponents of the Blairite model rounds on the master. Here is how two editors of Renewal , until recently a Blairite house journal, announced their disaffection with Blair:

"Recent results and events disturbingly echo the fall of the Tories. First you lose your active members (on current projections we will have no members by 2018), then your councillor base, finally after a moment of epiphany (like Black Wednesday) the fall amongst the wider public is frighteningly far and fast.

"In the party, members simply walk away in silence, leaving behind them an increasingly empty shell - frustrated and disillusioned but, curiously, not especially angry."

They go on to say:

"As it stands, none of the major rationales for the war stand up. There are no weapons of mass destruction, the country, the region and the world are not safer places, the lives of the Iraqi people are not safer and it remains an open question whether they are or will be much better.

"And the debris has inevitably fallen primarily on Blair, given that he took an unwilling and unenthusiastic party and people into the conflict.

"Tragically, Blair still appears to believe that if he can only explain it one more time, we will get it. But Tony, we get the message - we just don't accept it.

"Iraq is Blair's poll tax, a fundamental breach of trust, demonstration of arrogance and strategic blunder for which the party as a whole is paying the price."

This is spectacularly wounding stuff from two intellectuals who might have been counted upon as staunch allies. And, more importantly, it is right on the money. The sad and frustrating aspect of this, however, is that the authors still believe that Gordon Brown might offer a way out of the current deadlock:

"It is undoubtedly the case that the social democratic successes of this government belong primarily to Gordon. If he becomes leader then the party will be more at ease with itself, the pace of redistribution could increase and the public sector will be safer from creeping privatisation."

This isn't even half-right. Economic policy (at least according to most accounts, to wit Anthony Seldon's recent biography of Blair) has been ceded to Gordon Brown from day one of New Labour being elected. Creeping privatisation, tax cuts for the rich and company profits, miserly redistributive measures and alarming opposition to EU laws which offer working people minimal protection - all of these policies can be traced right to Number 11 (although, if my memory isn't playing tricks on me, I think Blair and his family are currently holed up in Number 11, because next-door was too small for them). There is no justifiable reason to believe that Gordon Brown would offer anything but an even more boring version of Blairism.

It is a fact that income inequality has increased under New Labour, and that this is a direct reflection of the Chancellor's commitment to a slender version of egalitarianism in which the central priority is to improve the endowments for workers, thereby improving their chances in a globalising economy. Equality of outcome is eschewed in favour, not of equality of opportunity, but rather a certain supply-side levelling up (improving educational and training opportunities, etc.). And since Brown accepts the monetarist doctrine that there is a natural rate of unemployment, the priority is to lower that natural rate by improving conditions for investment (hence the cuts in corporate tax, small-business tax, and some highly repressive measures hidden in legislation supposed to benefit trade unions).

Brown has supported the New Labour project, has provided its intellectual backbone (albeit backbones are unfashionable in New Labour), has been supportive of or has actually promulgated most of this government's objectionable policies. As the slogan goes: If your answer is Gordon Brown, then you're asking the wrong question.