The politics of Brownism
One of the great clichés of 1980s vox pops was hearing people contend that you could say what you like about ‘that Maggie Thatcher’, but at least you knew where you stood with her. The basic idea here was that the politics of Thatcherism could be boiled down to a single sentence, such as ‘the free economy and the strong state’, or even a pithy two-word designation such as ‘authoritarian populism’. Now try this for an intellectual exercise; can you encapsulate what Gordon Brown is supposedly all about, in seven words or less? Difficult, eh? Unfashionable as it is to discuss such foreign nonsense as ideology in a British political context, an inability to devise a straightforward bullet point actually does matter, if only because it makes it harder for the spin-doctoring classes to get the USP over to the public. I’m not aware of any pollsters having asked a cross-section of the electorate what policies automatically come to mind when they hear the name of the present occupant of Number Ten. But I suspect that one little-credited reason for the prime minister’s woes right now is that most voters probably couldn’t come up with an answer. Part of the Great Clunking Fist’s present predicament is his seeming inability to distil anything resembling a distinctive and coherent set of ideas of his own. This is curious, when you consider the man's undoubted intellectual ability. Perhaps it is simply too difficult to pull off such a trick, given the paradox that while Brown was one of the co-architects of New Labourism after 1994, for presentational reasons he has to present himself as the negation of Blairism on the basis of Blairism itself. But Blairism minus the ‘pretty straight guy’ routine is not proving much of a vote winner. Such ideological passivity gifts the opposition the chance to set the agenda. Cameron and the team around him may not be doing particularly well, but at least are making efforts in this direction. Once Gordon Brown is gone - perhaps by palace coup over the summer, perhaps following ejection by the electorate in 2010, even perhaps in some manner not yet foreseen - we may have very little by which to remember him. http://www.davidosler.com/2008/07/the_politics_of_brownism.html
One of the great clichés of 1980s vox pops was hearing people contend that you could say what you like about ‘that Maggie Thatcher’, but at least you knew where you stood with her. The basic idea here was that the politics of Thatcherism could be boiled down to a single sentence, such as ‘the free economy and the strong state’, or even a pithy two-word designation such as ‘authoritarian populism’. Now try this for an intellectual exercise; can you encapsulate what Gordon Brown is supposedly all about, in seven words or less? Difficult, eh? Unfashionable as it is to discuss such foreign nonsense as ideology in a British political context, an inability to devise a straightforward bullet point actually does matter, if only because it makes it harder for the spin-doctoring classes to get the USP over to the public. I’m not aware of any pollsters having asked a cross-section of the electorate what policies automatically come to mind when they hear the name of the present occupant of Number Ten. But I suspect that one little-credited reason for the prime minister’s woes right now is that most voters probably couldn’t come up with an answer. Part of the Great Clunking Fist’s present predicament is his seeming inability to distil anything resembling a distinctive and coherent set of ideas of his own. This is curious, when you consider the man's undoubted intellectual ability. Perhaps it is simply too difficult to pull off such a trick, given the paradox that while Brown was one of the co-architects of New Labourism after 1994, for presentational reasons he has to present himself as the negation of Blairism on the basis of Blairism itself. But Blairism minus the ‘pretty straight guy’ routine is not proving much of a vote winner. Such ideological passivity gifts the opposition the chance to set the agenda. Cameron and the team around him may not be doing particularly well, but at least are making efforts in this direction. Once Gordon Brown is gone - perhaps by palace coup over the summer, perhaps following ejection by the electorate in 2010, even perhaps in some manner not yet foreseen - we may have very little by which to remember him. http://www.davidosler.com/2008/07/the_politics_of_brownism.html