Events | 2009.03.15
Martin Kettle: Brown's finest hour won't change the political weather
Engaging with the global crisis in Washington and the G20 wins plaudits. But only honesty about errors can win back voters
Washington got the best of Gordon Brown. His speech to the US Congress said exactly what he meant it to say to an American audience about the great crisis of the day. It generated unaccustomed good coverage at home. Brown connected well with the new administration. Protocol did not require the president to phone the PM to congratulate him on the speech - but Barack Obama did so. It would be perverse not to recognise that Wednesday on the Hill was a personally fulfilling and a manifestly important moment in Brown\'s career.
This is not to deny that there was plenty in the speech for the usual Beckmessers to mark down. The worship of America was laid on with a clunking trowel. He also bottled the opportunity, which he had won for himself by his earlier praise, to say tough as well as nice things to the protectionists in Congress. And Brown starts far too many sentences with the word "and".
All this nevertheless misses the larger point - the message that the nations, led by America, must engage to staunch the global recession and then build a more resilient regulatory framework for the next era of growth. Hands up anyone who thinks that is an unimportant message? Not me.
Yet just as the carpers always miss the larger truth, so in the opposite way do the courtiers. Good though it was, Brown\'s speech was hardly Churchill after Dunkirk. To call it a historic speech, as the Mirror did yesterday, is as much of a misjudgment as the Telegraph\'s claim that it lacked its own voice. The reality is that very few speeches change the political weather. When they do, it is often because they define someone who was until then an unknown quantity. It is far harder for an already deeply familiar figure like Brown to recast his reputation overnight.
Yet Brown is a man desperate for such a transformation. He is 16 points behind in the polls. Two-thirds of Labour voters think he is an electoral liability. Hence the overselling.
In the country, Labour is the tired party. At Westminster, its MPs are increasingly fatalistic. But Brown himself has not given up - as some others have now done - on the possibility of a Labour recovery before the next general election. Whether inside his well-defended inner soul he really believes that victory, as opposed to a respectable showing, is still possible, is hard to know. But his injunction in Washington for America to seize the moment to rescue the global economy echoes his own sense that he and Labour can still seize the moment to retrieve their standing among British public opinion.
The trouble for Brown is that his moments of opportunity are diminishing and his approach is too narrow. He is betting the entire Labour farm on a spring treble of key events at which he hopes to pull things round and redefine the politics of 2009. The Washington visit was the first of these. The second comes with the G20 summit in London in a month\'s time. The third is the budget on 22 April, a later than usual budget whose date has been deliberately aligned with the later than usual local and European elections on 4 June.
This treble embodies Brown\'s characteristically instrumental, almost Marxist, view of politics. In his eyes, votes are decided by power, influence and material self-interest. So Washington was a display of power, proof that a British prime minister commands priority attention. The G20 is to be a display of influence, at which the leaders of the world\'s largest economies, Obama above all, line up behind Brown\'s agenda. Finally the budget will seek to confirm Brown as the defender of the people\'s material interests in times of tumult.
Unfortunately for Brown, the world is messier and less mechanistic than he would like. It\'s not solely the economic crisis, stupid. Other things still matter, above all the perception that the government remains energised and has a clear direction. Though Washington was a success, it can hardly have done more than dent the Conservative opinion poll lead temporarily, if at all. The G20, in Brown\'s view, is far more important. If the summit goes the way Brown wants, the public will be presented with an international agreement that echoes Brown\'s mantra that this is a global crisis. It will allow him to parade himself, in substance if not style, as Obama\'s European counterpart. The outcome will be an implicit repudiation of the supposed "do-nothing" approach of the Tories. And its embrace of government borrowing to stimulate recovery will provide political cover for any spending plans in Alistair Darling\'s April budget .
Yet will this all happen? It seems unlikely right now and there is less than a month to go. The Obama administration may be more committed to Dr Brown\'s free trade and financial regulatory prescriptions than it was before his visit, but there is still a significant gap with the White House and a larger one with Congress. In Europe, meanwhile, prospective bankruptcy and consequent instability in the east looms far larger than plans to remake the International Monetary Fund. Italy is not onside. China, most important of all, is instinctively wary. Brown will do everything he can to conceal it, but for him the political danger of the G20 is that it will be awash with high-minded declarations that have little to do with voters in the here and now. It could be more train crash than triumph.
That is one of the reasons why Brown cannot ignore pressure for him to strike a more credible note in discussing the financial crisis. At the moment, many voters have simply tuned him out. In the Guardian\'s last ICM poll only 26% of all voters and only two-thirds of Labour\'s own voters thought Labour has the best policies for sorting out the economic crisis. Labour voters are far less certain to vote than supporters of other parties. These are dire numbers for a centre-left party in the midst of a systemic financial crisis that is not of their direct making but for which Labour must accept a share of responsibility. It is fine for Brown to work his socks off in Washington and at the G20, and it is right to stress that voters have not sealed the deal with David Cameron yet. But this is not enough. Brown also needs to regain the right to be listened to. He will only do this by being more honest about Labour\'s errors. This is not the Tory trap that he imagines. It is the threshold he must cross in order to regain the public\'s attention and maybe even to survive the verdict of the looming June elections.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rown-congress-speech-recession
