Gordon Brown... is back?

C

clivex

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He has many faults but my view has been that some of the personal criticsm of him over past year has been too extreme

Take quite a battering from "events" (dear boy)

But maybe turning to his advantage. He will never be able to sell you anything but trust him in a crisis? Maybe...

Didnt see speech yesterday but was impressive on R4 this morning...although James Naughtie not the toughest interviewer
 
Very good speech, and you could tell he had been waiting to utter the 'this is no time for a novice'!

I think Britain would be safest in his hands for the time being; he's essentially a good man, well-principled but lacks the charisma of Blair or Cameron. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
 
Try and keep the racing out of this please or ill have Warbler ban the lot of you. this is serious stuff :(
 
Didn't see the speech myself, but - as they say in my (and Gordon Brown's) neck of the woods - it disnae matter, his tea is oot.

If he seriously used the words "This is not the time for a novice", I strongly suspect it's more about stopping Milliband biting at his heels, than a jibe at Cameron.

Labour are in an iredeemably fucked position. Call it incompetence, call it unlucky timing, call it what you will - it's largely irrelevant. The economy isn't going to recover sufficiently to save Labour before the next election, and the Tories will canter all over them.
 
The Tories still retain the capacity to shoot themselves in the foot, and although the election is theirs for the winning, it's also theirs for the losing. Ironically, the economic crisis means that while Brown is fighting an uphill battle, it's a battle he will thoroughly enjoy (for once) and he will only improve his popularity rating as the campaign mounts, and if "Dave" drops a bollock, he might sneak in up a gap on the rails. Sorry, had to include some racing analogy. ;)
 
I ain't buying it, rory. Dangerous Dave is clever enough to keep his gob firmly shut during this whole crisis, and only ever open it to shout "Incompetent po-faced c*nt!!" across the floor of the House. :D

The Prime Minister has a mountain to climb, people have long memories, and it isn't so very long ago that Broonie was telling us that he was the best Chancellor since an Austrian painter got into the Reichstag. Any credibility he had has been blown out of the water by dint of the fact that they were denying this calamity up until three or four weeks ago.

Broonie can do the square-root of sfa to solve the credit crisis, other than extend credit to the Banks, which is tantamount to applying elastoplast to an axe-wound. Beyond that, he can't do much, but he will personally take a large part of the rap for it. Once unemployment starts ramping up, which it almost inevitably will, the Governments popularity will only nosedive.

I see no polling bump on the back of this speech, and they would be as well as drafting marching papers now. The only strategy that might save Labour's long-term electoral bacon, is to call a snap election now, have the Tories trot-up, and allow them to deal with the credit-crunch fall-out, whilst Nu-Labour retreats, recovers and tries to learn the lessons of playing the Tories at their own game.
 
i usually laugh at your posts Grasshopper but must admit laughed with that one

Spot on im afraid

I reckon Vincent Cable should take over. lives at end of my road which is a strong positive of course. he is in fact a lovely bloke and razor sharp too. Knows his numbers too

More seriously, i dont think that labour will seriously make much ground here. As much as his fairly poor handling of many issues so far, Brown has too many lurking enemies (Kelly now it seems...wasnt that timed well) in both his party and the media to call on much goodwill. Contrast with Blair who had remarkably few real personal fallings out (brown beng the obvious one lol) basis and despite faults was seemingly respected by both constituencies.
 
Grassy,

how can I listen to you when you don't even know what's going to win next year's World Hurdle (the answer is Pettifour btw)? I've tried to get interested in politics but now I'm bored. :(
 
It's got to be for his long-term good that Kelly jumped ship though
Click to expand...

from the point of view thats shes pretty ordinary IMo and a religous maniac...yes

but timing was designed to damage. That sticks. Public will know that it was down to spite and thats never good for any leader
 
Ah, what a post I had lined up for you guys, I even had a good 2 paragraph Brown analogy, Rory Bremner style. What is it with this forum, if it takes you a good five minutes to type something, you submit it and get told your not logged in! Unfortuanely there's no undo button on this damn computer.
The analogy went something along the lines of "I believe in promoting British values, er, thats why I opened our borders to Eastern Europe. Er, it pays to make freinds with the rich and famous. People like Alex Ferguson, Jk Rowling, even George Clooney, will never abandon me, for the economic sloth I particiapted in for 10 years made them a hell of a lot richer. Tory council's know the problem but have no substance, we know the solution but don't know the problem.

Probably a bad analogy cut short.
 
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It was perfect timing by Brown's administration to announce the eagerly anticipated and economically benefical ID cards this week
 
martin said:
What is it with this forum, if it takes you a good five minutes to type something, you submit it and get told your not logged in! Unfortuanely there's no undo button on this damn computer.
Click to expand...

Type and save it in a Word document first. Then it's just a cut and paste job when you get logged in. It's a habit I got into when I was on dial-up and still do it if I think I'm going to type something longish.
 
Or type it as normal, but before hitting Post press CTRL-A and then CTRL-C. If you lose it, it's only a CTRL-V away!
 
Paul Krugman received the Nobel Prize for Economics yesterday.

His NY Times article from Sunday begins:

"Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?

O.K., the question is premature — we still don’t know the exact shape of the planned financial rescues in Europe or for that matter the United States, let alone whether they’ll really work. What we do know, however, is that Mr. Brown and Alistair Darling, the chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to our Treasury secretary), have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/opinion/13krugman.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
 
Krugman is an excellent writer. One of the very best on economics. But he is from the liberal left and given Browns close past associations with that east coast democrats, might not be totally impartial

However, Brown's strength is crisis managemnt and intially to my eyes they have thought through the actions well. Certainly more so than Paulson
 
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