Socialism, New Labour, Blair and Brown

There's been a lot of talk this week about the Blair-Brown changeover and when it will or won't come. Will the team work with Brown as the PM? Blair was the visionary but Brown kept his feet on the ground. Blair had the ideas and Brown counted the cost. But can Brown come up with it all by himself? At heart he is a Scottish Puritan, and his socialist roots are only thinly veiled.

I think what will eventually undo labour isn't going to be a wonderful campaign by David Davis or whoever the next Tory leader is, but money. Quite simply, labour governments run out of money. This tax and spend policy by Brown is nice when things are going well, but he's broken his own rules. The IMF were proved right, growth is slowing, public sector borrowing is ballooning, something will have to give. We'll run out of money.

Anyway,Anatole Kaletsky has written a very insightful piece about the would-be PM. It's called Gordon Brown is still tempted by the besetting sin of old-style socialism

THE MOST IMPORTANT sentence spoken from the Labour Party conference in Brighton this week was Tony Blair’s simple definition of his entire political project: “New Labour was first and foremost about disentangling ends and means.” Read the rest of this article here