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Should Brown Throw Caution To The Wind?
Labour supporters in the press know the game is up; Gordon Brown will lose the next election, Labour is likely to be decimated and condemned to a decade, at least, in the wilderness of opposition. The Project will be over.
Hence calls from some in the ranks urging Gordon to ignore polls and the Daily Mail and spend his final two years as Prime Minister pushing through a radical agenda both he and his predecessor Tony Blair were too frit to introduce before.
In May, it was Independent columnist Johann Hari who called on Brown to force three or four progressive causes through parliament that "the Tories would find it hard to reverse."
Hari recommended, among other things, trebling the cost of internal flights and bringing in some of the five million Iraqis displaced by the war.
Today, Polly Toynbee advises a similar course in The Guardian. She isn't specific on policies, but says,
"Two years is a long time in politics, Labour ministers keep saying to reassure themselves. Indeed, waiting for the inevitable may feel interminable. Unless they seize their last chance. What couldn't you do with two years and a majority of 66? With the recklessness of those about to die, they could do everything they never dared for fear of the Daily Mail and the polls. Things couldn't get worse - that could be liberating. Fearlessness is now the only possible chance of victory. The question is whether they still have the will to live and the youthful energy to remember what it was they meant to do."
It's quite telling that both Hari and Toynbee realise see through the opposition Tories for what they are. In their view, Brown can introduce the most bizarrely radical policies, safe in the knowledge that the Conservatives, on gaining power, will never repeal their legislation. It's bound to be a tempting proposition for Gordon Brown, who would love to seal his place in history as something other than a disastrous Prime Minister; but if the Tories had any cojones, they would simply face down any radical new laws by making a manifesto promise to tear them up the minute they enter office.
