Why On Earth Mandelson?

I know the UK, like all countries in the World is facing a difficult time with the global credit crisis. I know Prime Minister Gordon Brown is not only having to tackle these issues, but seems to have been written off politically by British society despite the fact, that the Conservatives still have no policies even after their party conference this week. The Conservatives threaten to make the UK far more divided and will follow policies which will exacerbate the difficulties for average people in the UK. However, that seems to be overlooked. Another, possibly even more crucial factor that has been overlooked is that Brown lost the showdown with the energy companies. He was unable to introduce a windfall tax, despite their huge profits, because they said they would simply recoup it from consumers by raising prices so totally undermining the point of the tax. Many people will die this Winter in the UK because of the greed of the energy companies. No UK prime minister now has the ability to stop that, it was proven last month, but no-one seems to have noticed that. Now that EDF (known in its home country, France as Electricite de France has now bought British Energy Group which controls the UK's nuclear power, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has even more control over Britain's energy prices than he did last month. EDF is 85% owned by the French government. In France Sarkozy (a conservative, not a socialist) prevented Electicitie de France raising prices by more than 1.5% this year, in the UK all energy companies have raised prices by 25-34% this year. So the head ot the French government has more control over our prices, because he runs one of our leading suppliers, than Brown does.

How has Brown addressed both the issue of him having no ability to control energy prices and also struggling to face down the economic crisis? Well, he has a cabinet reshuffle and introduces a 'war cabinet', though at 18 members it is only a few people short of the full Cabinet. Traditionally war cabinets in the UK have had 6 members. He has made Ed Miliband (brother of David Miliband his glamorous rival for control of the Labour Party, and probably his successor), head of the new Department of Energy and the Environment. It is sensible to combine these two, because issues such as wind power, new coal power stations, nuclear power, all impact on both of these. However, unless regulations are tightened, or in this atmosphere of the UK government nationalising things, a leading energy company is taken over by the state (I suggest British Gas, it is the largest supplier, the greediest and it used to be state-run) there is little Ed will be able to do, certainly in terms of changing energy prices to consumers.

Again, I will emphasise that people will die. Already, even before the sharp price rises this year, Help the Aged has noted that 25,000 elderly people were dying each year in the UK as a result of being unable to heat their houses. That figure will rise sharply in the next few weeks. In every street in the UK, you will see the corpses of dead old people being carried from their houses because of the greed of energy companies in the UK.

There are 11 million elderly people in the UK, 2.5 million live in one room so they can keep warm, 2.2 million turn off their heating entirely because they cannot afford to run it; 2 million wear outside clothing indoors to keep warm. These were last year's figures which will be worse now prices have risen. It is predicted all of these figures will treble this year, so we are probably looking at 75,000 dead this Winter, equivalent to every single person living in the Scottish town of Paisley or the English town of Southport simply dying.

Sorry, my anger at that fact always distracts me. Back to the issue in hand, the reappearance of Peter Mandelson. What was going through Brown's head when he decided to bring Mandelson back into the Cabinet? Mandelson is the smarmiest character in British politics of the last thirty years. The way he talks makes your skin crawl. He is smug, very self-satisfied and everyone assumes he has abilities that he has never proven he has. At best, he is good at 'spin' altering media perceptions of challenges being faced, and I accept that Labour probably needs at a time when the media have effectively given the premiership to Conservative leader David Cameron, without him having done anything to earn it. However, Mandelson has no clear ability in economic or business issues. It would do the Cabinet far better to reanimate the corpse of former Labour leader John Smith, with his friendly bank manager demeanour, than to bring Mandelson back. My opposition to Mandelson does not stem just from his unpleasant manner and the fact that he appears on television as if he considers everyone around him to be fools unable to see the truth of his brilliance.

The other thing about Mandelson, which I feel should bar him from office whether in the UK, or in the European Commission where he has been Commissioner for Trade since 2004. Basically he is the most corrupt politician in recent British politics. In December 1998 he resigned at Secretary of State for Trade & Industry after only 5 months in the role after it had been revealed that he had been given a cheap loan for £373,000 from the Paymaster-General Geoffrey Robinson, a millionaire who was under investigation for his business dealings with Mandelson's department. As Tony Blair, for some reason, thought highly of Mandelson he came back in October 1999 as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, a very challenging role which he was highly unsuited for. Fortunately he had to resign in January 2001, so after only 14 months in this post, because he has accepted a £1 million donation from the Hinduja brothers towards the Milennium Dome (this had fallen in his remit when Minister without Portfolio before he had gone to Trade & Industry) in return for being given a British passport. This time Mandelson will be made a lord so does not have to stand for election, and will be a member of the House of Lords, so part of the parliamentary system, for the rest of his life.

Is the UK so lacking in talent that the government has to bring back a man who has been proven to be corrupt and so without talent that it is stunning; who has had only 19 months in ministerial positions? Is there no-one else in the UK who could feel this role, as least as well, if not a great deal better? Mandelson is not even popular within the Labour Party, probably because of these major flaws in him and the fact that he was never nothing more than a smarmy crony to Tony Blair. Send him off to be Blair's assistant or his butler; do not bring him into British parliament for the next 10-20 years. Mandelson was born in 1953 so could still easily be in House of Lords in 2028 if not 2038! Why has Brown shackled our government to this despicable, incapable man? After it seemed he was recovering some ground on the clueless Conservatives, he has now given his government a self-inflicted injury. Drop Mandelson now before he damages this country any further.

Brown's Golden Age?

Well, as regular readers of this blog will know, I have been waiting for the departure of Tony Blair from politics since 1994. His smug, authoritarian attitudes have made politics very unpleasant. I note that commentators from the right, notably Dan Atkinson and Larry Elliott's New Right volume, 'Fantasy Island' and from the left, are now savaging him without restraint. I may not subscribe to either view, but add my condemnation to the pile. The arrogance of the man to leave being an MP to become an envoy to a region where he has caused so many deaths is stunning even for Blair. As someone said of an IT manager at my company, 'he's a man who knows he's God'.

I was angered by David Cameron saying that the change of prime minister needs an election. He seems to forget that of the six times the prime minister has changed mid-term of parliament (1916 Liberals Asquith to Lloyd George; 1940 Conservatives Chamberlain to Churchill (though effectively a new coalition was formed); 1955 Conservatives Churchill to Eden; 1957 Eden to Macmillan; 1976 Labour Wilson to Callaghan; 1990 Conservatives Thatcher to Major) four of these have been Conservative premiers. If such a rule like that existed, heaven help us, we would have probably had both Thatcher and Blair, so alike in many ways, clinging on for another 2 years or so.

Right, that is enough pixels wasted on Blair. Let's turn to Gordon Brown. As you know, I am interested in 'what if?' history and it is curious to think what would have happened if rather than Brown backing Blair as leader of the Labour Party, the situation had been reversed and we would now see Brown stepping down after 10 years in office and Blair coming to the fore. I guess, Brown, unmarried and without children at the time of the 1997 election was seen as unsuitable in the family obsessed British society. He has picked up both along the way and all the better for him, no doubt. However, I hate to think we could never have a single or a gay prime minister in the future and that Blair has scorched the family requirements on the post.

Now, there is a lot of expectation of Brown. Like Blair he has a religious side, but it seems more restrained and he seems more able to separate state and religion in the way it should be in a modern society. For some Old Labourites, who have been clinging on through the years of a Blair party (see my earlier posting about how we have not had the Labour Party in power 1997-2007) see some hope in Brown. He might be the heir of John Smith (Labour leader 1992-4, held a similar position to Neil Kinnock as Labour leader as Brown did to Blair and was also Scottish and like Brown, looked like he could have been a bank manager), he might be the heir of more in the Labour Party's history. I doubt in 2017 I will be sitting here bemoaning the Brownite Party.

What is interesting is the clean sweep (almost) of ministers from the Blair Cabinet. Harriet Harman, the winner of the deputy leadership of the Labour Party has only become Leader of the House of Commons, there is no deputy prime minister to replace Prescott; there does not need to be. Partly that indicates the breadth of Brown's support across the party that he does not need someone from one side of it to be his deputy. I am glad to see Peter Hain and Hilary Benn (Environment) in the Cabinet, but there are some odd compilation roles, nothing of the Churchill 'overlord' or Edward Heath's 'super-ministries', more maybe reminiscent of the Department of the Enviroment, Regions and Transport that Prescott had under Blair. Hain gets Wales (though he was originally South African), Work and Pensions and Innovation, Universities & Skills (John Denham) and Defence & Scotland (Des Browne - at least he is Scottish). The Miliband brothers, (David as Foreign Secretary and Ed as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) both being in the Cabinet seems somewhere between Victorian Cabinets with family members in them and the Kennedys. Alistair Darling as Chancellor of the Exchequer, from the days when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury he seems to have been in waiting for the top Treasury post almost as long as Brown was for the leadership. Now we have a Home Office, shorn of its prison role which goes to the new Ministry of Justice under the pretty draconian Jack Straw, it has been felt safe to leave it to a woman, Jacqui Smith and I welcome that change; she of all the newcomers has been put immediately to the test by the terrorist attacks this week (assuming they were not staged by MI5 to emphasise to Brown that he must listen to them).

The one thing that does seem to have been overlooked is Brown effectively ending the SDP's history. He has used a 19th century phrase, 'Cabinet of All Talents' and brought in Lord Lester and Lady Williams, both former members of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) which was the right-wing of the Labour Party which broke away in 1983 arguing that Labour, in the face of the Thatcher government was becoming too left-wing. It worked in the so-called Alliance with the Liberals until 1988 when the parties merged to form the Liberal Democrat Party which we have today. Some see Brown, with his appeal to actual Liberal Democrats like Lord Ashdown (who would not join the government) and Lady Neuberger (who has joined) as seeking to locate Labour in the centre of politics. However, what people forget is that the Liberal Democrats are actually to the left of the current Labour Party, certainly the Blair Party. In addition Shirley Williams and Anthony Lester respectively were part of and advised the Labour government of 1974-9, so actually despite their sojourn into the SDP which was more anti-Thatcherite than Blair, are links to Labour's past. So as not to scare the business and financial sectors, that have been pretty good to Brown he has former head of the Confederation of British Industry, Digby Jones and has set up a Department of Business & Enterprise under John Hutton. Whilst it may appear that Brown is throwing open his arms wide, interestingly, his large tent has people that you would associate with traditional Labour values. Labour was never anti-capitalist, it sought until Blair got rid of Clause 4 in 1994, supported a mixed economy, which we re-nationalisation of parts of the railway system we may be moving back to. It liked to work with enlightened business people. Brown has cleverly 'spun' Old Labour again, and repackaged its traditional views for the 21st century at a time when they are probably most needed in the face of exploitative multi-nationals and the migration of jobs and the suppression of rights and welfare.

I am too cynical to really expect much from Brown. At best we have a prime minister whose manner I can stomach a little more easily. I would love to be surprised and to have the true revolution that 1997 so falsely promised. However, ten years from now, I suspect I will be bemoaning Brown's support of US foreign policy in invading some country and his inability to rein in avaricious utility companies, much as I would have done with Blair.