Gordon Brown had to make the speech of his life at the Labour Party conference last Tuesday to silence Labour’s rebels and revive confidence in his leadership. And he did, says the Daily Mail, and Simon Jenkins in The Guardian agrees. Brown clearly feels his job is not finished and “plainly expects” his party to support him. They will. Labour is “good at sadism, but terrible at murder”.
But it’s not just his party’s good opinion Brown needs, says The Independent. Without the support of the country, Labour is doomed. Unless the opinion polls over the next few weeks show Labour eroding the Tory lead, Brown will be “in exactly the same predicament as before”. MPs, “terrified of losing their seats”, will be lobbying again for a new leader.
Brown was delivering his speech from a “very big hole”, says Steve Richards in The Independent. His strongest card was his experience, and he seized it. He argued now isn’t the time for political novices – directed ostensibly at David Cameron, but also at George Osborne, David Miliband, or a number of other critics. But his speech wasn’t “epic” enough to transform the political landscape.
The problem with the speech was that it was all about his own survival and almost nothing to do with the “survival of UK plc”, says the Daily Mail. It seems “the whole Cabinet is in denial” about the economic crisis. Instead of talking about how all of us – mostly the Government – would have to change our assumptions about living on credit, he rolled out a list of spending commitments, from bedside PCs for NHS patients to free prescriptions for cancer patients. “Where in the name of sanity does Mr Brown expect to find the imaginary millions to pay for all of this?”
Brown’s list of “new bribes” shows the extent to which he’s lost touch with reality, says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. Much as he’d like to deny the Government has anything to do with it, 12 years of Labour leadership has rewarded us with dismal schools, dirty hospitals, millions trapped in welfare and an “authoritarianism that holds civil liberties in contempt and is efficient only in persecuting harmless members of the public who use the wrong wheelie bin”.
That’s before we start on the economy. We are in this mess not because of high energy and food prices, as Alistair Darling claimed on Monday, but because when Gordon Brown was Chancellor, the Government created excessive amounts of money and did a “prodigious job of spending much of it itself”.
Yet Brown didn’t always do such a bad job, says Hamish McCrae in The Independent. He built up a surplus in the fat years of the late 1990s dotcom boom, which meant that Britain came through the ensuing bust better than any other major economy. Then it all went wrong with his unrealistic spending targets, which he met by borrowing. Now “it is payback time”. Brown knows he hasn’t got it right, and he wants to undo his mistakes. “But we won’t give him the time, nor should we.”