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Nothing To Lose
A man with nothing to lose is dangerous
Thanks to Guido for pointing to a column by Johann Hari in the Independent, urging Gordon Brown to "go down with all guns blazing."
Hari reckons that Brown should go the Butch and Sundance route because he's lost: A Conservative victory in the next general election is a certainty. So, the PM has two years at most to be the Prime Minister he "always wanted to be." That means, Hari says, "Over the next few weeks, choose three or four progressive causes you can push through before 2010 that the Tories would find it hard to reverse."
Hari kindly suggests a couple, ranging from the populist, the controversial to the crackers. The wealthiest should pay a 50 or even 60 percent tax rate and the cash raised used to increase tax credits for the poorest. Hari says the poorest could be £4,200 a year better off if Brown put this counsel into practice.
Next, global warming: "Make it economically rational to make the environmentally rational choice", he writes: Treble the cost of all domestic flights and use the money to reduce rail fares. Price SUVs off the road.
Then, Iraq and immigration. Brown should apologise for the invasion and fly in a "fair share" of the 5 million displaced Iraqis. Hari uses the Vietnamese refugees of the 1970s as an analogy, pointing out that these immigrants enriched the US massively.
We won't go into the rights or wrongs of Hari's suggestions here; in any case, Guido has already questioned the journalist's sanity in his blog. It's amusing, too, that even Hari implicitly admits that the policies he proposes are likely to finish Brown and Labour off entirely rather than make his re-election more likely. In other words, the public will hate them.
But Hari has a point regarding Brown's position. New Labour has an unfinished agenda for change at every level - constitutional, research, law, the family, culture, education. A Conservative government is highly unlikely to reverse any of Labour's "reforms" despite the squawks of some left-leaning journalists, but it will slow the pace of progress, perhaps for a decade.
We've touched on several of Brown and Tony Blair's reforms in recent columns, but we're leaning towards Constitutional Reform as the one Brown targets. Senior Labour figures have been calling for a new Constitution for Britain, having wreaked havoc on the old "unwritten" one in the past decade. Jack Straw said that a new Constitution for the 21st century could be ten years away. Brown has a choice to intensify efforts to secure a new Constitution, or wait a decade until the Tories are booted out again and try to introduce one as part of the 2020 "Agenda for Change." Who knows? People get reckless when they're cornered, and Brown is desperate to secure his place in history as something other than a two-year failure.
