Brown-bashing: In the Doldrums

Another poll, another kick in the face for Gordon Brown. And there is much that the Brown hater can relish. Like his party trailing the Tories. Or a third of voters thinking he is worse that Blair. Or that the voters think that the country is going in the wrong direction under Brown. And the fact that he has achieved these dire approval levels after less than a year in power. Even better are the headlines of some of the articles on the Times website: “The Last Hope for Gordon Brown…”, “Gordon Brown: Stalin to Has-been”, and “Labour MPs revolt…” For anyone who shares my naked scorn of Gordo, these are wonderful headlines. I only hope he has seen them. If not, I’m sure he’ll get the chance to revisit them when he is enjoying his long retirement after a likely defeat in the next election.

However, one sentence does stand out in the article:

“The Tories have been in the lead for all but three months of the past two years, although they are well below the level of the Labour Opposition in the 1990s.”

The question for me (originally posed via e-mail by the Moai) is why aren’t the Tories at the level of the Labour Opposition in the 1990s? I mean, the situation politically is similar – we have a grey faced former Chancellor replacing a once-popular, long serving Prime Minister. We have a fresh-faced, media savvy policy vacuum leading a resurgent opposition. And we have the Liberal Democrats eating each other like cannibals at a picnic. So why aren’t the Tories more ahead in the polls?

Well, it is the economy, stupid. By the mid 1990’s, the Tories had royally fucked the economy through the ERM debacle. And despite having worked to undermine the Tory led recovery (after 1992) systematically since becoming Chancellor, it is only now that the disastrous nature of Brown’s policies are becoming clear to the electorate as a whole. Brown based his economic policies on smoke and mirrors. Only now is the smoke clearing, and the mirrors are breaking.

Which is the scary thing. It is not a case of “things can only get better”; whilst Gordo clings to power, things may well get worse before they get any better. It is a terrifying thought, but the Tories might yet hit the dizzy heights of popularity of Labour in the 1990’s. But only once Gordon has taken our economy and flushed it completely down the toilet.