He goes or the party dies

Can Brown keep up?

THE former chancellor's reputation for economic competence has been erased by bad economic news and forecasts of slower growth and rising unemployment. He has led Labour to a string of embarrassing electoral defeats. His plodding ways at a time of a worsening international credit crunch and disenchantment at home after more than 11 years of Labour rule are killing his party in the polls. According to one newspaper analysis, the party is destined to lose nearly half its seats in the next national election, its worst showing since 1935.
Brown may not even make it that far. An increasingly serious plot to unseat him has electrified British politics -- all the more so because allies of former prime minister Tony Blair are rallying behind another potential boy wonder, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in an endeavour to save the party.
The betting among MPs and political professionals is that there's a 50-50 chance Brown will not last out the year. The case against Brown is "pure and simple," said one angry MP: "Either he goes or the party dies."
In a parliamentary system like Britain's, a prime minister can fall at astonishing speed. Recall that Margaret Thatcher was toppled in 1990, less than a month after the resignation of a key cabinet minister over policy differences.
Now London papers are full of reports of ministerial resignations, and three MPs who were cabinet members under Blair have publicly criticised Brown for nudging Labour to the left and shying away from some of the more radical free-market reforms.
Even if Brown hangs on until the last possible date for a general election, June 3, 2010, it appears that the Blair-Brown era of British politics is drawing to a close. The Conservative Party has recovered from more than a decade in the political wilderness, and now looks likely to return to power under the fresh leadership of David Cameron.
Meanwhile, a new generation of Labour politicians will have to resolve the tensions between the Brownite wing and the now emboldened Blairites. The party is split along a left-right divide.
Blair was pro-business and anti-union; he enjoyed the support of organised labour because it had no other party to turn to. Brown's policies are more traditionally to the left of Blair's. Furthermore, because Labour is politically weaker, under Brown, it depends more on its union allies for financial support. Labour's next generation will have to address the debilitating left-right fissure if the party is to move forward again.
Miliband is the unofficial leader of the Blairite rebellion. He once headed Blair's policy, spearheading reforms, which Brown sometimes sought to block.
At the end of July, Miliband wrote an article in The Guardian setting out his vision for Labour's credo and critique of Cameron. He defined Labour doctrine as he would like to see it -- "a political creed … combining government action and personal freedom" -- and made a lucid attack on Cameron as "a politician of the status quo."
Miliband was not acting alone. Phil Collins, a former speechwriter for Blair and a veteran of think tanks that were incubators of Blairite thinking, had a hand in it as well. In June Collins helped write another critique of the Tories: "Radicals or Conservatives?" by James Purnell, a former special adviser to Blair, who is now secretary of state for work and pensions in the Brown government.
Along with a growing contingent of Blairite MPs, a number of other Blair-era aides are reported to be informally advising Miliband, including Peter Hyman, another former speechwriter, and D. J. Collins, a former Whitehall special adviser.
Blair has avoided any connection to plots against Brown. He's kept busy working in his foundations and his role as special Middle East envoy for the Quartet. But recently, a memo came to light in which Blair analysed Brown's spectacular drop in popularity after last year's Labour Party conference. In the memo, Blair criticises the "hubris and vacuity" of the Labour conference, and complains that Brown "junked" the Blair policy agenda "but had nothing to put in its place."
Blair dismisses Brown's ability to fix what's wrong. "I am passing this message on to GB -- not in these terms -- and will try to help; but at present, there is every indication that the lessons will not be learnt."
But Brown won't be easy to force out. He spent a two-week holiday on the Suffolk coast devising new policy initiatives and public relations strategies. Over the coming weeks, Brown will throw his government behind what amounts to a personal rescue operation. The word is that government may suspend the "stamp duty" tax of 1 percent on residential home purchases below £250,000.
With fuel prices as high as they are, he may offer some people price breaks. He might reshuffle his cabinet in early September.
Bold personnel changes could demonstrate strength, entrench his supporters and possibly even straitjacket some rivals in the cabinet, like Miliband, by keeping them busy with new jobs.
Brown will then briefly transplant the entire cabinet from Whitehall to well outside London to try to show he hasn't lost touch with the people.
Finally, he will use the party conference to try to re-launch his government by pledging, among other things, to steer Britain safely through troubled economic waters.
But, somewhere, Brown must know that there is little he can do to satisfy the members of the unofficial Dump Gordon movement. They bitterly resented his involvement in the "coup" against Blair two years ago. They also complain that Brown thwarted some of Blair's public-service reforms that were more market-oriented than Brown would have liked.
Indeed, they blame Brown for many of the perceived shortcomings of Blair's years in office. In their view, Brown -- politically to the left of Blair and harbouring a grudge against him over the leadership showdown between them many years ago -- was bound not only to play a role in Blair's undoing but also to make a poor prime minister.
Still, the drama unfolding this summer shouldn't be all about the past.
The more important battle concerns the nature of the Labour Party after Blair and Brown are both gone and the Conservative Party readies itself for power once again. "For the Labour Party to have a future, it has to overcome the gulf of the past," says a source close to Miliband.
Whether Miliband is the one to breach the chasm remains an open question. But whoever does it and whenever it is done, Gordon Brown will have to get out of the way first.

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