Guy Beres

There’s quite a lot ado about parliamentary expenses at the moment, a little bit locally, but to paraphrase the Prime Minister, there’s a whole shitstorm going on in the United Kingdom right now. Even as Kevin Rudd clings gingerly to repeat-offender Joel Fitzgibbon like one does with a somewhat disliked cousin, it is beginning to look as though the ever-escalating UK expenses scandal might be the straw that finally breaks the back of the Brown Labour Government.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is reportedly set to resign from Cabinet, and Communities Secretary Hazel Blears resigned in a shock announcement today. Now backbenchers are threatening to push a petition letter throughout the partyroom calling for Gordon Brown to abdicate, and the Guardian has taken the extraordinary step of calling for the Prime Minister’s resignation in an editorial:

All must agree that the die is cast and a hard judgment made. Otherwise progressive politics will be dragged down at a general election in May 2010 that could lead to a much bigger defeat than Labour suffered in 1979. That might bring a chance for other parties to take it forward, as the Liberal Democrats are trying to do in this election. But they are not placed to enter government. Labour has a year left before an election; its current leader would waste it. It is time to cut him loose.

It’s a little unfair that Gordon Brown should be made to pay a price for the current expenses drama, a drama in which every sitting member of parliament has a stake. The Guardian editorial is nevertheless spot on. Gordon Brown has been given a good run, but he and his government remain on an express train to electoral irrelevance at the polls next year unless something drastically, and changes very soon indeed.

Roll on David Miliband as a fresh alternative to Gordon Brown, and a man of more substance than David Cameron.

In a political sense, it is increasingly looking like the global financial crisis has been just what the doctor ordered for British Labour and in particular Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As The Guardian reports today, a Mori poll has Labour trailing the Tories by only three points now, an amazing seventeen point improvement on what polls were suggesting a few months back before the worst of the crisis hit. For someone like myself, who lived through an extended period whereby it seemed that David Cameron and the Tories were interminably ahead of the Prime Minister by ten points or more, it’s really all quite astonishing.

So why the shift? There is surely a multitude of reasons, but I am going to offer some observations about the comparative public images of Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Brown comes across in the media as a dour, boring, wonkish man. I dare say that a majority of Britons descend into a microsleep the very moment that he appears in front of them on the television, the very second that his voice starts droning across the airwaves in earshot. While the going was good economically, twelve months or so ago, it is probably fair to say that Brown was not really in tune with the entrepreneurial energy of the times. The British people wanted boldness; they wanted action. They were not adverse to a little risk taking by their government. This is of course where the poll success of David Cameron comes in; a young business type actually willing to embrace new age concerns like global warming. He represented a fresh change and a clean break from the past. Sure, he was probably a little wet behind the ears compared to his rival, but he promised to deliver the energy that the Prime Minister seemed to lack.

Now, the tables have turned. We have entered troubling economic times, when suddenly ordinary people are interested in what dour, boring wonks have to say. They are concerned for their future. They are worried about their employment prospects. They are no longer in the mood to take financial risks, or to take a punt on an unknown quantity like David Cameron. They want surety and certainty, and someone who has a lot of experience behind them and the intellectualism required to fortify the nation against the chaos of the global financial situation.

It would be an interesting exercise to plot the poll ratings of Gordon Brown against the FTSE over the last twelve months. And it will be interesting to see if Gordon Brown manages to surge to a lead in the polls over the next six months, on the back of his superior credentials with respect to the financial crisis that seems to currently have observers the world over in a bit of a tizz.

I am really not sure what to make of this article in Uncle Rupert’s Times today. When I first saw the headline plastered over the free morning shitsheets on the tube this morning, I thought that just maybe, Tory Leader David Cameron had taken a step too far in his belligerent, wealthy-folks-oriented conservatism and would get a well-deserved whack for it. The title of the article is “David Cameron tells the fat and the poor: take responsibility”, and remarkably enough, the title is in fact a fairly accurate synopsis of what Cameron is reported as saying:

In a conscious shift of strategy, the Tory leader said he would not shirk from discussing public morality and claimed that social problems were often the consequence of individuals’ choices. “We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise,” he said. “We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things — obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction — are purely external events like a plague or bad weather.

Of course, this being the Times, these comments are described matter-of-factly in the article, with nary a hint that just perhaps Cameron’s comments are controversial, or for some, offensive. Certainly what we have an example of here is the rhetoric of individualism taken to yet another fanciful extreme, the prejudices of an arrogant upper-class twat fashioned crudely into a faux-bold pronouncement. I don’t believe it to be true that modern society makes individuals feel blameless for their various predicaments, as Cameron seems to be suggesting. If anything, both Britain and Australia have over the last couple of decades moved away from being societies where one’s rights towered over one’s responsibilities, to societies where the balance between one’s rights and responsibilities are more evenly (and perhaps, more effectively) poised.

It is interesting that Cameron is all for heaping responsibilities onto individuals who may or may not have the capacity to solve their problems on their own, but does not seem to be very interested in the responsibilities of society. Moreover, is it not true that society has a responsibility to lend individuals a helping hand when they fall foul (whether partly or wholly through their own hand) of afflictions like poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, or obesity? Isn’t it not just the individual that has failed when this scenario unfolds, but society itself? What is clear from these sorts of questions is that conservatives like Cameron seem to lack the very basic human ability of taking a walk around the block in someone else’s shoes. Not everyone grows up in a wealthy family, with excellent parents and a good understanding of how to play the 21st century economic game to perfection. Not everyone emerges, blinking, into the light of the global economy at 18, ready to plug in with a metaphorical USB cable dangling from the back of their skull. I don’t see why we should be surprised that people who come from difficult backgrounds might struggle to make the right decisions in their lives, perhaps leading to some of these afflictions taking hold.

The people of Great Britain would do well to remember at the next election that a vote for David Cameron is a vote against the sorts of people right across the kingdom who need a helping hand. If you are thin, white, rich, and don’t give a shit about other people, the Tories are making it damned well clear with comments like this that they are your party.