Bye bye Gordon.After Peter Mandelson's wry description of "a bit of a week", he went on to deny that the prime minister had lost his authority.
However, Gordon Brown shows every sign of having lost the respect, the fear and habit of loyalty from his party which are the foundations of prime ministerial authority.
Apparently Nick Robinson has it on good authority that Gordon Brown (via Alistair Darling) is going to bring in a new higher tax rate of 45p for those earning over £150,000 (after the election of course). What a complete and utter tw*t. I'm not calling him a tw*t because I earn that much - I don't. I'm calling him a tw*t because if he pushes through this idiotic policy, we will see the biggest brain drain this country has ever experienced. Not only that, but those that stay to pay the higher tax won't even make a dent in our massive national debt.Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti alleges that the government have sexed up the evidence for an extension of detention without charge to 42 days. Her claim comes because ministers have cited the example of two people alleged to have taken part in the alleged plot to blow up planes across the Atlantic in 2006. In these cases yet to come to court the suspects were held by the police for 27 and 28 days respectively - up to, in other words, the current legal maximum. Liberty's claims are right but their defence lawyer has revealed that the police had the evidence to charge them after four days and 12 days respectively, thus demonstrating that no extension of the period allowed to the police to question terror suspects is needed.As Nick points out, this echo's the WMD claims made before the Iraq war. I think we all expected Gordon Brown to pull out all the stops to win this vote at any cost. And talking of cost, a last minute concession has been offered to rebelling Labour MPs. Any person held over 28 days and not charged will receive £3000/day. That's £42,000 for the full 42 days. So now we know how much our liberty is worth to the government. Our loss of freedom comes at £125/hour. It has often been debated - "What price do you put on freedom" well thanks to Gordon Brown, we now know. I'm not sure I'm very happy about the government being able to buy my freedom for £125/hour.
Nick Robinson is often accused of being soft on Gordon Brown by the right and of showing contempt for the PM from the left. To be honest this is probably down to Nick writing his articles from the centre ground - you can't please them all. Anyhoo, Nick's latest post directs his readers to an essay he wrote for the Today programme at the end of Gordon Brown's extraordinary week (as he describes it). The essay gives us an insight into what is really happening behind the scenes in the Labour party. Nick hits Gordon Brown's nail right on the head:"Imagine. Imagine just for a second. What if there had not been an emergency Budget this week. What if the government had not borrowed an extra £2.7 billion to pay for a tax cut to 22 million people? Ministers are in no doubt. Labour MPs would have defeated the Finance Bill - that's the legislation that implements the Budget. That would have been led to the resignation of the Chancellor, Alistair Darling. The prime minister's long-term ally would have been seen to have paid the price for Gordon Brown's errors. Thus, his future would have been in real doubt.You can read the rest of Nick's essay by clicking HERE.
The 10p saga toxically combined Gordon Brown's political weaknesses with the economic consequences of what the governor of the Bank of England has called the "death of the nice" decade. It was the squeeze on family finances caused by rising food and fuel prices that made the losses from the scrapping of the 10p tax rate intolerable to many people. However, it was the prime minister's stubborn denial that there were any losers and his insistence that there was no political problem that made this row so dangerous. Gordon Brown did not just ignore the warnings of the experts or backbenchers like Frank Field but of many of his closest allies in the cabinet. Some in Whitehall talk of the PM living in a parallel universe. Even when he finally acknowledged that the problem had to be solved he insisted at first that it would only require a tweak of his beloved tax credits and a few hundred million pounds.
