Who brought on this implosion? Not Gordon Brown, but his predecessor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/13/gordonbrown.labour

Everyone wonders how it is that this fearsome election-winning machine, New Labour, which has been pre-eminent in British politics since the mid-1990s, can suddenly have sunk to levels of support not seen since the days of Ramsay MacDonald and the Wall Street crash. Gordon Brown, unsurprisingly, is the obvious answer most people come up with.

But a better answer would surely be Blair, or rather the absence that is Blair. Take him away from New Labour, and what is one left with? He is like a driver who took a bus on a long and hazardous journey without using a map. To begin with, the passengers rather enjoyed the ride, but then they became alarmed and fractious and demanded he hand the keys over to someone else. Now the bus is stuck in darkness and fog and all that the passengers can see out of the window is their former driver cheerfully hitching a lift back to town.

Well, Blair may think, that's their problem, they wanted Gordon and now they've got him, and the worse things get under him, the better I look in retrospect. And things are bad, make no mistake about it. It's not so much a crisis of leadership as a crisis of purpose - of existence, in fact - that has overwhelmed the government. What is this thing called the Labour party for, exactly? One can see why the Tories exist, and why the Liberals have endured. But Labour - this friend of global corporations, this ally of the neocons in Washington, this raiser of income tax on the poor - where is its place supposed to be in the political firmament? With Blair as the charming public face, it all made a kind of sense, just about; without him, it seems merely baffling.

This existential crisis for the government, which is so much bigger than Brown's awkward personality, may be flattering to our former prime minister, and awash with the most exquisite schadenfreude. But in the long run the man whose reputation is really going to suffer by the disintegration of the New Labour project is Blair. For despite the great debits racked up under his leadership - the calamity of the Iraq war, the loss of nerve over the Euro - there was always one great historic credit in the account book: his restoration of Labour as a natural party of government.

If Gordon does lose to Dave the Prat, it will prove (in Tony's view) that Tony was the only one who could have led Labour to victory. Hell hath no fury than a politician scorned by their own party; and Tony certainly feels that his party were insufficiently loyal to him.

When the history of this period does get to be written I expect that neither Blair nor Brown will get glowing reviews. Tony's sole gift was timing. he came to power at the right moment and he quit just before the SHTF. Apart from that his premiership will be classed as a failure. He will be judged as a man who could win elections but achieved virtually nothing while in power.

The Labour Party couldn't wait to get rid of Blair, his approval rating was about the same as Shrub's.

Brown's honeymoon went well in his first three months because he seemed solid and devoid of spin.

But the whole early election build-up and false alarm proved that he was no better than Blair. It was all downhill from there.
(And of course he'd left himself a ticking timebomb from his final Budget with the whole 10% tax debacle.
It was a transparent attempt to catch the Tories out that backfired - he would have been better off giving a boring budget).

Brown comes from the same position as Blair in economic terms, but without the PR shinyness of Blair New Labour is exposed for the vehicle that it is.

The 2p cut in the standard rate was supposed to catch the Tories off guard, but it was also something out of the Keynesian era as Brown does appear to hope the 2p cut will stimulate consumer spending amongst the middle class. The government only have fiscal policy left to increase supply of currency in the economy now that the Bank of England has no room to cut interest rates due to inflationary pressures.

The agenda was always to reverse the disaster of Bush1's Gulf War humiliation viz Saddam with a Blair/Bush2 dreamticket.

Those Tory/Bush ties go right back to cold war secrets concerning traitors Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean and one or two otherds.

Lord Carrington, Viscount Astor, Baron Redesdale and the Duke of Devonshire probably the dirtiest goalpost shifters ever to slime their way onto the public stage.