Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Brown Fudge posted by Richard Seymour
The scary ones are right. Gordon Brown is proving much more savvy, and a lot less fanatical than Blair. It was one thing to bring a few people into the cabinet who condemned the war, and sack Lord Goldsmith. It was one thing not to respond to the latest attempted attacks without a great deal of fuss about new laws and the rules of the game being changed. Now to introduce proposed legislation, ceding a few more powers to parliament, and let Straw go out and diss Blair's record on live television, and noisily refuse to engage in the Islam-baiting that Blair and his acolytes did - well, that suggests a very clever and adaptible political strategy. None of the fundamentals have changed, and nor would one expect them to. Brown supported the war on Iraq and bankrolled it, and still does. He is expected to go ahead with extending the length of time that terror suspects can be detained without charge. He is going to continue with his neoliberal policies and privatisation. But he is reaching out to those who were pissed off by the illiberalism, crackdowns on civil liberties and parliamentary powers that he himself was party to.By the way, did any of you notice that apart from introducing de facto pay cuts before ceding control of the Treasury to New Labourite Alistair Darling, he actually sneaked through some huge public spending cuts? Sneaky fucker.
Labels: gordon brown, new labour