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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Regrets: They’ve Had a Few
On Radio 4 Peter Hennessey has been interviewing politicians who are no longer in the front line and asking them to reflect on their careers, mistakes, and things they might have done differently. Blair does not regret Iraq, his view still being that it is better (for whom one wonders, surveying the state of Iraq these last 15 years) for Saddam to have been deposed.
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Blair, I really don't know. He still seems simply unable to allow his mind to embrace even the possibility that he made a dreadful mistake; both the decision itself and most particularly the way he went about it. Perhaps his obvious torment suggests he knows, but simply can't admit for the damage it would do to his standing, credibility and place in history?
Not keeping his promise to change the voting system is another candidate for a Blair misjudgement with potential long-term repercussions.
May's situation was different from Brown/Blair - in the latter case Blair would (and should) have won the contest. The alternative to May was Leadsome, who Tory members could easily have chosen, particularly if May's weaknesses had emerged on the stump.
Corbyn had the self awareness originally not to actually want the job when he put his name forward. Beyond that, who can say?
Merkel and May have many parallels in their lives, female, same age group screwed up an election
but Merkel has been all success and May has been all struggle, there;s a thin liine between success and failure
Blair ruled as president.
Cameron went too far the other way. Gove, IDS and in particular Andrew Lansley were left to their own devices with over-ambitious and badly executed reforms to their departments. There were leaked complaints from inside the Cabinet that other ministers were in the dark about the scale of Lansley's NHS reforms.
Under Cameron, though perhaps due to Osborne, the Conservatives imported the cynical politics of the American Republicans and its Tea Party: gerrymandering, laws on deficits that were designed to embarrass Labour rather than constrain Tories, and, fatally for Cameron's premiership and Britain's place in Europe, the tactical referendum.
It is however disturbing to think that just one Labour leader elected in the last fifty years has won an overall majority, and in that time they have only three times exceeded a 40% share of the national vote (compared to six times for the Tories).
The mere fact that it was a constitutional disaster in the long run probably won't bother him much. Long term thinking never seems to have figured largely in his plans or he wouldn't have made such a fearsome mess of PFI.
getting May mixed up with someone else as you noted
The big ideological split isn't and wasn't solely between Remainers and Leavers. There is a also a fundamental divide between those who care passionately about Europe/Brexit, and those for whom it really isn't important. (And unlike the Remainer/Leaver divide, one side of the Important/Unimportant divide really has been marginalised and silenced in the debate).
Just as when totting up votes for our party at elections, it's tempting to assume that every one was cast decisively in favour, where the reality is that enthusiasm varies and many votes - indeed the more important and precious ones - are cast with an unenthusiastic passivity
Essentially, Cameron, like myself, fell into the 'passive Remainer' quarter (in a party where 'active L:eaver' was probably the more dominant position). This was and is an entirely valid ideological stance and not necessarily indicative of laziness or arrogance.
The referendum was neccesary for many reasons, undesirable for almost as many, and probably something Cameron would rather have done without, not because it was something in which he was strongly ideologically vested, but because it wasn't. In his mind there were more important things to get done, but the party (and those that had temporarily or permenantly abandoned it) had largely been obsessing over Europe for 25 years.
Just because he's gone doesn't mean that 'passive Remain', 'passive Leave', and indeed 'don't even give enough of a fuck about any of it to even bother picking a side' don't exist.
As I say, it's the other great divide. The one where one side *really* doesn't get a fair airing these days. And anybody chiming in with a 'yes, but Brexit actually IS really important because...' completely misses this point.
Ultimately I think the financial crisis probably made a change of government inevitable.
Both Brown and Blair could and should have done a better job of making sure that the UK was better protected - so I would have that as their big (non-Iraq) mistake.
Funding came from the rich and powerful rather than the local party. The phrase of "Who pays the piper, calls the tune". The members, local supporters and voters increasingly felt disenfranchised and their efforts ignored.
The result is Corbyn. Like him or loath him, anyone with a solid leftist background could have retaken the membership's heart and soul.That he has, increasingly being seen to run rings around the mini-me's of the LP and the Tories, and the self promoting intelligencia in the media, means that Corbynism is being considered by the electorate as an answer to the present political elites.
Of course, he has had luck, the incompetence in allowing him to stand as the token lefty for the leadership, the incompetence of the Chicken Coup Plotters in planning and keeping secrets, the incompetence of May who accidentally saved Corbyn from another plot at the LP conference this autumn.
@EuroGuido: Pretty sure that a couple of months ago Corbyn sacked 3 frontbenchers for voting to stay in single market. Now it is policy? Not credible.
I agree entirely that a Corbyn premiership would be a litany of regrets.
When both Chris Wood and Harry Kane played similtaneously for Leicester, Wood was preferred. He is a good player, this being his most memorable goal!
https://www.joe.ie/uncategorized/video-manuel-almunia-responsible-for-hilarious-ball-in-the-face-goal-during-leicester-v-watford-384690
So not only were we done over on price, but what we got for the money was near worthless.
Corbyn encompasses a leftist populism that has real power to transform Britain in a way that New Labour did not. I think the reshaping of Labour European policy is a side issue for him, part of a broader deal where in return for backing softer Brexit that he gets a freer hand in setting other policies. This area of potential division at conference is now shut down. The atmosphere will be so much more positive than at the Tory conference that follows.
His real error was to leave Brown at the Treasury at the one moment he could plausibly have been moved elsewhere - June 2001. With that, he forfeited the chance to take total charge of the government and get the radical policies he always talked about if he could never quite describe into place.
However, moving Brown would have meant finding an alternative, which given Brown had locked out virtually the entire finanacial expertise in the party would have been less than easy. Can anyone see Straw as Chancellor?
I'm thinking here of UNITE and their preferred candidate lists.
https://twitter.com/politicshome/status/902059107523448832
Bangladesh have beaten the Aussies in an important one-day of course. Famously, at Cardiff a few years ago.
'In the end he took Tony out to a restaurant in Islington where he told his oldest political ally, who had very much risen in Gordon's shadow, that he would stand aside for him. I hope Tony paid for the dinner.'
That sounds to me more like Brown decided to withdraw and at most in exchange got a pledge it would be his turn next.
So don't blame the tool; blame he idiot who used a screwdriver to plaster a wall.
Even then, PFI-style schemes could work well with hospitals (and from what I've read have in a few cases), but it requires people on all sides to be sensible and to want to work together. Which may be why so many projects perform poorly ...
The Tories blame him for the shape of the UK economy prior to the crash which was anything but good, and allowed the crash to hit us far worse than other nations
On your point, yes the shock that tipped it over started in America, but Brown made some serious errors that left us very vulnerable to it. For example, in 2000 net debt was 30% of GDP, by 2006 after six years of continuous growth it had risen to over 40% (not including PFI). When you have a headline PSBR of £33 billion a year in a boom time you are not managing the economy well. It left him very little room for manoeuvre when a contraction set in.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3804449.stm
The comments are very interesting too.
Edited because I got the date wrong - I had thought it was to mark 10 years as Chancellor.
What makes it worse is the term of some of these contracts run for 30 years or more. Local priorities change, but we are stuck with the consequences of these deals for decades. Not only would it have been considerably cheaper to fund many of these projects through private borrowing, it would also have meant planning was not stymied for a generation.
What utterly infuriates me about them is that it's often impossible to get the full details of what happened, as government cites "commercial confidentiality" as a reason for non disclosure.
Theresa May had the worst hand dealt to any incoming Prime Minister since 1940. She has played it very poorly but it would have defeated almost all of her predecessors too.
It's equally likely that she's just rubbish.
Strikingly prescient......'meddler....psychologically flawed.....too much borrowing'
Never mind it started in America
I feel tnat Brown would have done a great deal more for our economy if he’d got to grips with the rising household credit, which, IMHO was largely due to the irresponsible behaviour of the banks.
@OldKingCole yes that's also very true. The fact that we had mortgages lent out to 125% of value of house - well, that tells you all you need to know really about the way people viewed (a) houses and (b) reality. It is fair to say however that practically nobody foresaw how badly it would end so Brown doesn't deserve as much blame for that as for borrowing money to fill potholes and pay wages.
Indeed, there should be comfort in the figures which show that he has overseen the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in the UK in the last two centuries. The UK economy has expanded during every quarter since Mr Brown became chancellor, averaging 2.7% output growth per year, despite a string of global upheaval such as the Asian financial crisis, the end of the dotcom boom and the 11 September attacks.
http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2017/08/28/pour-une-defense-europeenne-integree_5177301_3232.html
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/brexit-deutsche-industrie-kritisiert-regierung-in-london-a-1164848.html
...
I have to go. Have a good morning.
The stock market, industrial production and home ownership were all lower than their level around 2000 while unemployment was higher.
What we had prior to Northern Rock was a credit pumped consumption and property speculation bubble.
I once met someone near Ilfracombe who was attempting to walk the South West Coast Path (anticlockwise) using just a folded A4 publicity leaflet he'd picked up in Minehead. It's a well-signposted route, but I'm amazed he'd made it as far as he had.
https://twitter.com/freeman_george/status/902057982938230784
Instead of which, every criticism of spending was met with the Brown mantra "we're the fourth richest country in the world"...
tomorrow ok?
glad we agree
still cant see why you would be proud of it though, it's not a sound basis for a modern economy
The labour party cannot seem to get past the mindset that the state is simply an enormous resource to plunder to pursue vague ideas of social and economic justice, and to improve the living standards of their voter base. Laura Pidcock is an excellent (for the wrong reasons) example of this flawed thinking.
I think like you my time in the labour party is over.
but the spineless gits didnt argue for keeping the UK in the EU when Cameron needed friends, so tough
Mr Brown was fortunate in that he inherited a strong economy from the Tories.
What does he say in the paywalled bit?