Gordon Brown urges Labour not to be party of protest by electing Corbyn
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| Gordon Brown during his speech at the Royal Festival Hall |
Gordon Brown arrived at the Royal Festival Hall in London and after
the usual introductions to the specially invited audience of party
members and journalists, spent the next 50 minutes perambulating
backwards and forwards across the platform wearing at least half an
inch off the soles of his shoes and saying precisely nothing. That
is, nothing that Blair, Straw, Clarke, Campbell, Kinnock, Johnson,
Polly Toynbee and others including it is now revealed Mandellson have
not said already.
Gordon Brown, the man who droned on about being “credible, radical,
sustainable and electable” and (after selling off £billions of UK
gold reserves) “economically credible”.
We would do well to remember that Brown is a man who has never won
an election (apart from those in his own constituency) in his
political life. The man who never stood in an election for the
position of leader of the Labour party and yet became its leader, a
man who never stood before the British people as the person to become
Prime Minister and yet was “anointed” to the post in 2007 (only
to be defeated at a General election less than 3 years later).
The same man who, while pacing around the meeting room, giving a
speech heavy with “thinly veiled warnings”, revealed the true
nature of his Labour party and paradoxically why thousand of people
are flocking to join the party and why there is growing support
amongst the public for Jeremy Corbyn.
Gordon
Brown reiterated
what others, including the other 3 candidates, Polly
Toynbee and other journalists have argued over recent years that
power is necessary in order to implement programmes and consequently,
as Toynbee put it (4th August 2015 and repeated by Alan Johnson the
following day) “you have to win power to get anywhere at all. Once
in power, with the levers of persuasion, you can take people further
than you dare tread in opposition”. This proposition, so popular
with the right in the Parliamentary Labour party and
elements of the wider party, sections
of the press and other media
press, emphatically
states that the Labour party the holds the opinion that
it is acceptable and even desirable, to lie, cheat and deceive the
people of this country with hypocritical promises of anything and
everything in exchange for their votes in a General election. It is
this attitude that has soured the perception of politics and has
given credibility to the public view that “They are all the same
once they get elected”.
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| Jeremy Corbyn stands for making a clean break with Tory policies, |
Jeremy Corbyn has changed all that by
providing a new emphasis, where policies and principle are more
important than personalities and sound bites, where truth and honesty
are more important than hypocrisy and duplicity and where there is a
vision that there is a real alternative to the “Westminster
establishment” and the status quo. It is this that has attracted
thousands of people into the Corbyn camp and it is this that the
right fear. Bringing out the failed “old guard Grandees” of the
party seems to have had little if any effect and if anything has
hardened the determination to take the party back into the control of
its members rather than the Westminster clique.
Gordon Brown spent 50 minutes yesterday
saying nothing other than to repeat the tired old clichés of a
section of the Labour party which will resort to any tactic in order
to retain its grip on power.
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