CORRELLI BARNETT: As a historian, I believe this is one of the most dishonest and incompetent regimes of modern times


Every day we open our newspaper, switch on the television news or trawl the internet, we learn of yet another monstrous but mistaken decision by Gordon Brown and his demoralised rabble of a government — and each decision is yet more proof of his extraordinary talent for preaching like a Presbyterian elder while acting like a dodgy hedge-fund manager.

After newspaper revelations about MPs’ outrageous expense claims milking the taxpayer, Gordon Brown promised us that ‘transparency’ would henceforth be the watchword of public administration.

‘Transparency’! As manifested by the official records of MPs’ expense claims published this week, consisting of vast splodges of black ink — sometimes acres of it — blotting out everything that might reveal who was on the take, and how much they were taking, especially in regard to the ‘flipping’ of second homes to maximise a claim.

Dishonest: Gordon Brown chats to ousted Speaker Michael Martin

Dishonest: Gordon Brown chats to ousted Speaker Michael Martin

Too bad for the Whitehall and Westminster Establishment that we can all compare these ‘redacted’ (i.e., censored) files to the unexpurgated records already published in full by The Daily Telegraph and debated by a deeplyshocked nation.

And that weasel word ‘transparency’ was hardly out of Gordon Brown’s mouth when that same mouth was telling the Commons that the official inquiry into Britain’s participation into George W. Bush’s Iraq War would take place in secret.

What’s more, the commission of inquiry appointed by Brown consists of the usual kind of safe Establishment appointees, so promising if not a whitewash like Lord Hutton’s 2003 report on the death of Iraq weapons expert Dr David Kelly, then at least a bland coating of magnolia.

For instance, the two distinguished historians on the inquiry are both known to support Tony Blair’s belief in ‘liberal interventionism’, the doctrine whereby democracies have the right to invade any sovereign state of whose internal regime they disapprove, such as that of Saddam Hussein.

Moreover, both these academics were awarded their knighthoods under Blair’s regime.

So what kind of forensic ruthlessness will they bring to their work? Especially as Brown has said that it would not be the purpose of the inquiry to attribute blame to individuals or agencies for our entanglement in this calamitous adventure.

No blame? Why ever not? Surely to identify blameworthy judgments and decisions ought to be the inquiry’s central purpose?

It should see itself as a grand court-martial, hauling before it for cross-examination the men who were at the helm when Britain was steered into a war even more needless and disastrous than Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure in

And yet the commission comprises not a single senior military figure to advise on questions of intelligence, strategic judgment and the armed forces’ state of readiness for war.

Perhaps Gordon Brown fears that to have generals and admirals on the Iraq inquiry would be to risk an Exocet fired into his carefully contrived lifeboat.

Public indignation, then, at Brown’s attempt to emasculate the inquiry into the Iraq War — and especially on the part of the bereaved families of fallen servicemen and women.

Dr David Kelly

Whitewash: The inquiry into the Iraq war will have the same Establishment appointees that looked into the death of scientist Dr David Kelly (above)

But national rage at the enormity of MPs’ expense claims — rage now superheated to incandescent by the official attempt to conceal the enormity by lavish use of black ink on the published files.

Since all this has happened when the country is wallowing in the worst depression since 1931, it must seem like the perfect storm to Brown.

Yet he ought to remember — but he won’t, of course — that he is the man responsible for the unseaworthiness of SS Great Britain.

As Chancellor, he was the nation’s ultimate bank manager for ten years.

But he did nothing to curb the mutation of once-respectable banks and building societies into reckless gamblers. He did nothing to curb the colossal expansion of private and public debt under ‘New Labour’.

We know why he did it — because this borrowing fuelled the bogus ‘feel-good’ boom that followed the election of 2001 and enabled ‘New Labour’ to win again in 2005.

Private spending in the shops and car show-rooms; public spending on New Labour’s favourite social projects, such as the NHS, where merely splurging money on an unreformed Stalinist monopoly failed to lead to commensurate improvement in the quality of service.

Or splurging on the Welfare State — really the dependency state — which simply reduced more and more citizens to a life on handouts.

What a mess! As a historian, I find it hard to think of a period in modern times when a British Prime Minister and his entire government were so comprehensively tainted with failure, with incompetence and with tolerance of corruption.

David Lloyd George

Echoes of 1918: David Lloyd George (above) was the last Liberal Prime Minister

First, let’s examine Lloyd George, Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922.

When Chancellor in the Liberal Government in 1911, he unwisely invested in the shares of the American Marconi company while the Government was negotiating a contract with it. He was cleared by a Commons select committee.

But in any event this was an isolated case and there was no question of a general culture of sleazy dealing by the politicians of the time.

Having founded the Welfare State with his ‘people’s budget’ in 1909, Lloyd George went on to become an inspiring prime minister during the Great War. He lost the premiership in 1922 only because of a mutiny of Conservative backbenchers in his Coalition government, who fervently believed that he was a trickster not to be trusted. Now, who does that remind us of?

Under Lloyd George, the oncegreat Liberal Party, its traditional mission exhausted, split into two factions, never again to form a government. Perhaps Gordon Brown and the Labour Party today should ponder this sad history.

In 1931, the world slump that followed the Wall Street stock market crash doomed the minority Labour Government, led by Ramsay Macdonald.

He was a Highlander, a romantic spinner of political dreams, in contrast to Gordon Brown, the Lowlander, whose idea of oratory is to spout statistics.

And unlike Brown today with his Commons majority of 62, Macdonald depended on Liberal support.

And unlike Brown, who believes that pumping borrowed or newly printed money into the economy will overcome the depression, Macdonald’s Chancellor, Philip Snowden, was an old-fashioned Gladstonian who thought that when times were hard, you should spend less, not more.

Ramsay MacDonald

A Scot who ran out of ideas: Labour PM Ramsay Macdonald in 1931

This meant cutting back on unemployment benefit at a time of soaring unemployment — hardly welcomed by the Labour Party’s trades union backers.

The truth was that by the summer of 1931, Labour had run out of ideas and political coherence. In the words of the party’s historian, Kenneth Morgan (now Lord Morgan): ‘The Labour Party had thrown in the sponge. It presented a pathetic spectacle of indecision and intellectual emptiness.’

Well, you could certainly say the same today about Gordon Brown and his sorry front bench of misfits and has-beens.

Thw consequence of Labour’s political bankruptcy in 1931 was a Conservativedominated coalition (or ‘National’) government, with Macdonald as titular Prime Minister, although Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative leader, was really in charge.

At the 1935 General Election, the Labour Party was reduced to fewer than 200 MPs. It took ten years and a world war before they could form another government, winning the 1945 General Election with a majority of 171 over Conservatives and Liberals.

The huge project of creating ‘New Jerusalem’, a socialist Britain, was begun — great industries to be nationalised, an NHS and Welfare State caring for the citizen from crib to coffin.

It seemed as though Labour had become the party of government for decades to come.

Clem Atlee

Out of energy: `in 1950

Yet, within five years, it had all turned sour — not because of any pervasive scandal in Whitehall and Westminster like today, but because Britain’s war- weakened economy simply could not carry the cost of creating New Jerusalem at home and also trying to maintain Britain’s status as a world power, with garrisons, fleets and air squadrons spread out from Germany to the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Far East. 

Despite a $4 billion American loan in 1945, and then, from 1948 onwards, massive help from Marshall Aid, Britain suffered two desperate sterling crises, in 1947 and 1949, threatening the country with outright bankruptcy.

If sterling had finally collapsed, we would have been unable to buy the overseas food and raw materials on which we depended.

As it was, bread rationing had to be introduced in order not to waste precious dollars on importing American wheat, and rationing in general was not abolished until 1953.

By 1950, the high hopes of 1945 for a new, sunlit Britain of happy people had turned to a dank reality of shortages of every kind, from housing to food and clothes.

The Labour Government seemed to have run out of ideas and energy.

This was the opportunity for the Tories to offer a way out of this grey, highly regulated way of living.

As for the Labour Party, it had nothing to offer but stale ideas, such as a further wave of nationalisation — banks, insurance companies! — when existing nationalisation had apparently meant only slow and dirty trains, lack of coal for the home fires, and electricity cuts.

So the 1950 General Election saw the overall Labour majority fall to just five.

They struggled on until October 1951, when another General Election killed off the sick and bewildered beast that Clem Attlee’s government had become, and installed Conservative governments for the next 13 years.

But it’s important to remember that it wasn’t any kind of sleaze, or a widespread culture of corruption in Westminster, that doomed Attlee’s post-war Labour administration.

Attlee was too high principled, too straightforward, and too strong and decisive to tolerate such things.

The same could not be said of Harold Macmillan when his Conservative Government went down to defeat in 1964 at the hands of Harold Wilson. Macmillan was to prove a master of ‘spin’ long before the term was invented.

A political showman, sleight-ofhand conjuror and all-round manipulator, he ranks with Lloyd George — and Tony Blair. He, too, created a bogus sense of prosperity by generous public spending and judicious tax cuts.

However, he was fatally undone by a scandal destroying senior colleagues — not so much sleaze as sex and national security. His Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, was exposed for having an affair with Christine Keeler — at the same time as Keeler was sleeping with the Soviet naval attache. Sadly, he was not the only minister exposed as betraying the marital bed. 

The scandal was enough to taint the whole government, reducing Macmillan himself to ridicule for failing to be aware of what his ministers were up to. The Profumo affair fatally gave the impression that Macmillan was a floundering incompetent.

If Cabinet colleagues going to bed with the wrong women can destroy a government, how much more toxic is today’s combination of a financial crisis, an industrial slump, pervasive dishonesty in Parliament and a floundering incompetent in Downing Street?

As for the era of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, it’s sufficient to say that the ‘Winter of Discontent’, with uncollected rubbish piled high in the streets and the dead left unburied, serves as the gruesome reward for the Labour Government’s cowardice in failing to crush the over-mighty trades union barons and their mutinous memberships.

The fate of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 after 11 triumphant years in government marks a special case. She headed an administration free of sleaze and dodgy practices, which she would not have tolerated for a moment.

Unlike the Downing Street of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, her Downing Street disdained outright lies, character assassination and sheer bullying as tools of leadership.

Yet just the same, she went down, stabbed in the back like Julius Caesar.
What about poor John Major, a grey man, a decent man, doing his best with a tiny majority and in the face of a ruthlessly disloyal group in his own party?

One or two Tory backbenchers were found out taking money. One or two greedy individuals — not the kind of systemic culture of dishonesty we see revealed today by the expenses scandal.

Yet it was enough to enable the Labour opposition successfully to accuse his whole government of sleaze. The smear supplied one key element in Blair’s victory in 1997.

Back to Gordon Brown, that deceitful blunderer, and the culture of greed and near-fraud which he has permitted to flourish. His government is surely doomed.

But far better for the country that it is killed off quickly so that a new Government and a new House of Commons can restore our public life to the high standards we expect.

Truly, I believe this is one of the most dishonest and incompetent political regimes in modern times.

  •  Correlli Barnett is author of The Verdict Of Peace: Britain Between Her Yesterday And The Future (Pan, £8.99).


 

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