Brown skids?

More details of the Prime Minister’s troubles fill today’s newspapers

Ex-Labour minister, Brian Wilson explains in the Telegraph why Brown is facing pressure from MPs.

“For many, the problem is that they are being asked to support an agenda that they cannot make head or tail of and which, for all the worthy deeds being done in every ministry, is extremely difficult to explain coherently to the electorate.

The most problematic conundrum is why a Labour government should be penalising some of the lowest-paid wage earners in our society by abolishing the 10p tax band. As with the poll tax in days of yore, this succeeds in offending not only the victims, but also a large body of opinion that does not wish to benefit at their expense.

I heard one of Mr Brown’s loyal lieutenants, Ed Miliband, attempting to defend this perverse outcome by repeating over and over again that there would be more gainers than losers. That may well be true, but it is also, most definitely, not the point when one is talking about exactly those people that most Labour MPs -
Old, New and In-between - believe they came into politics to assist.”

He also seeks to explain his difficulty in positively connecting with the public:

“Then there’s my “15-year rule”. After any politician has been a fixture on the nation’s television screens for that length of time, the public is likely to have grown weary of him or her.

In an age of 24-hour news coverage, there are very few exceptions to that rule and little evidence so far that Gordon Brown is one of them. If a government is going to seek to renew itself in mid-term through a change of leader, it is probably more sensible to bring in a relatively fresh face - not an option that presented itself when Tony Blair departed.”

The Daily Mail wades in with further details of GB’s relationship with his backbenchers (note that this blogger wouldn’t normally read this rag, but it was reported on the Today programme and New Labour have something of an obsession about it feeling the pulse of Middle England):

“Pressure on Gordon Brown was mounting last night as Labour MPs began to openly question his leadership.

It also emerged he has faced more Parliamentary rebellions than any other post-war Premier – 66 so far.

In an indication of the restive mood on the Labour benches, researchers at Hull University revealed that MPs had rebelled against the Government 66 times during Mr Brown’s first ten months in Downing Street.

In his first month, there were nine Commons revolts – more than four times as many as in the first months of all other prime ministers combined since 1945.”

But we shouldn’t be surprised that right wing newspapers are printing stories like these about a man they have long loathed – even if the first article was penned by a former Labour minister.

The revolts.co.uk website takes a closer look at the figures from the Daily Mail, which were in fact generated at Conservative HQ:

“Here’s four other things to bear in mind.

First, we wouldn’t normally compare periods of ten months like this, because rebellions are not usually constant throughout a session. Better really to compare full sessions with each other.

Second, the figure for the number of rebellions Gordon Brown’s period as premier is somewhat inflated by lots of small rebellions over the Lisbon ratification, which had its committee stage on the floor of the House, thus driving up the total, even though most consisted of just a handful of MPs.

Third, although there have been lots of rebellions so far in Brown’s premiership, most of these have been tiddlers. The (mean) average for this session so far is just seven, and the largest was 36. The largest in Blair’s last ten months was 95.

Fourth, although it’s true that 79 Labour MPs have rebelled against Brown since he became PM (and we bet that’s more than most people realised), it’s a lower figure than in Blair’s last ten months (the rebellions over Trident alone involved more) and nearly all of Brown’s rebels are simply Blair’s rebels, carrying on as before. Just two of the 79 had not rebelled against the Blair government.”