Brown says his serious style is what UK needs

MANCHESTER, England (AP) — As a mutiny swirled in his ranks and pundits took aim, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stood before his party's faithful Tuesday and argued that the qualities his critics disparage — his seriousness and lack of flair — are exactly what Britain needs as it faces economic turmoil.

Joking about his gloomy demeanor, a relaxed Brown thrilled his governing Labour Party's annual meeting with an address studded with pledges on totemic issues for loyalists and sharp attacks on the main opposition Conservatives.

"Everyone knows that I'm all in favor of apprenticeships, but let me tell you this is no time for a novice," Brown said with a grin, delivering a swipe at his two young rivals: Conservative leader David Cameron and, within his own party, Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

Plummeting poll ratings and public anger over rising gas and food prices have prompted a simmering rebellion within the Labour Party, whose members fear the statistic-spouting micromanager lacks the presence and eloquence to win over voters in the next election. Dissidents have urged Brown to step aside — perhaps for a leader more charismatic and telegenic than the paunchy Scotsman. One junior minister resigned last week rather than offer his backing.

The Conservatives hold a huge lead over Labour in opinion polls and are predicted to win a landslide victory in the next national election — which must be called by mid-2010.

But Brown, Treasury chief for a decade under former Prime Minister Tony Blair, hopes jitters in the world economy will give him the chance to prove his leadership credentials and expose the inexperience of his rivals.

Brown used his address to the party, crafted with a new team of speechwriters, to quell any mutiny.

"I know who I am, I know what I want to do in this job. And I know the best way to deal with tough times is to face them down," he told delegates.

His wife Sarah, who is rarely heard from, set a warm tone when she walked on stage and reminded the delegates that as well as being prime minister, Brown is also a husband and father. A video clip featuring Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama praising Brown while visiting London drew thunderous applause.

Skirting over foreign policy challenges in Afghanistan and Iraq, Brown rooted his speech in domestic concerns: child care, the health service and education. He posed a direct challenge to the Conservatives — promising to expose them as a party of the few, not the many.

"What has become clear is that Britain cannot trust the Conservatives to run the economy," Brown said, speaking in a vast conference hall in the northern city of Manchester.

He spoke with confidence and offered a rare glimpse of his emotions. He said a revolt over income tax changes that would have raised levies on Britain's poorest workers had jolted his confidence.

"It really hurt that suddenly people felt I wasn't on the side of people on middle and modest incomes. ... From now on, it's the only place I'll ever be," Brown said.

His voice cracked as he recalled care he received from Britain's health service after a rugby accident which cost him his sight in one eye, and almost left him blind.

Tony Travers, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, said Brown's strategy seemed to be to humanize his image, which has long been derided as wooden.

"He obviously tried to warm his message up a bit with the use of his wife. She's certainly a softer and more user-friendly image," Travers said. But he stressed voters will be the judge of Brown's success in remaking his image.

Loyalists whooped with delight at pledges to make sweeping cuts to Britain's carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 and to scrap charges for cancer drugs. While Brown basked in rich applause, the acclaim didn't match the fervor once commanded by Blair. Brown acknowledged he is very different from his charismatic predecessor.

"If people say I'm too serious, quite honestly there's a lot to be serious about," he said.

Rebels insist defeat in a tricky special election pending in Scotland — or during new Parliamentary battles over unpopular terrorism laws — could still lead to Brown's ouster.

But Brown's prospective challengers have held their fire during the five-day party convention, which closes Wednesday.

Miliband, Brown's likeliest rival for the leadership, praised the speech as he left the conference hall.

"I think Gordon found his true voice," he said.

source: Brown says his serious style is what UK needs
The Associated Press

A leadership challenge is the last thing the country needs

It would be a tragedy if the gains of Labour’s three terms of office were wiped out by incompetent stewardship

Labour delegates meet in Manchester in the middle of profound economic turbulence. The crisis engulfing the global financial markets is now moving into the UK's high street building societies and banks. Failures here could trigger a chain of collapses and threaten the wealth of every household in Britain.

The leadership crisis in which Gordon Brown finds himself seems trivial in comparison. Yet the two are intimately intertwined. At the last Labour party conference, the newly appointed Prime Minister, with an 11-point lead in the polls, the job he had always wanted and the confidence of a man sure he could deal with the challenges ahead, faced two important decisions: how to respond to the collapse of a bank, Northern Rock, and whether to seek a mandate for his leadership by going to the country. At conference this year, the same two issues confront him: the economy and leadership, his predicament over each intensified by the choices he made last year.

The economic crisis has proved far more extensive than the problem of a few "sub-prime" mortgages, while Mr Brown's lack of authority in the party is all too apparent.

It is vital to keep in perspective the relative importance of these two crises. Though Mr Brown's short-term future must seem to him, to his cabinet and to his would-be assassins (particularly in the febrile run-up to conference) a matter of life or death, the truth is that, two years hence, no one but political historians will care which disaffected junior ministers resigned, who tried to wield the knife or who loyally defended.

We will all, however, be living with the consequences of how our government negotiated Britain's course through an economic crisis, variously described as the most perilous since the 1890s (which followed rash speculation on precious metals), since 1929 (the so-called Great Crash, which preceded a decade of despair, impoverishment and high unemployment), or since the Oil Shock of the 1970s when the Opec countries raised the price of oil. No one yet knows how extensive and devastating this crisis will prove.

Will working families be under even greater pressures of inflation and increasing unemployment? Are our pensions secure? Can we reduce our dependence on volatile global energy markets? How our government deals with these questions will determine Britain's future for years to come.

So, who takes the reins of government, and what policies they pursue, certainly matter. It would be a tragedy if the gains of Labour's three terms of office (for example, its impact on reducing child poverty, its ambitious schools and hospital building programmes, its steady improvement of pensions for the elderly) were wiped out by incompetent stewardship during this critical period. Yet in the hyperbolic media coverage of Mr Brown's leadership we have seen much vitriol and analysis of the Prime Minister's personality flaws but very little creative policy discussion.

In short, for all the media despair about the leader, there are few new political ideas being discussed, as David Marquand argues on page 32. The ideas coming from groups such as Compass and commentators formerly friendly to Labour are variations on old themes. The wider question of how, following the collapse of the neoliberal model here and in the United States, government should be conducted, with what strategies and to what political end is scarcely debated.

In such a vacuum of new ideas across the political spectrum (the Tories and Lib Dems are virtually policy-free zones), it is hard to see how a Labour leadership contest will achieve anything more than a temporary increase in spite, gossip and factionalising.

The New Statesman has argued here before that the Labour Party should use its energies to force change under Mr Brown rather than try to oust him, for example by introducing strict regulation of the financial sector; by a fairer tax regime and a commitment to fair pay, particularly for public-sector workers (who, while bankers take million-pound bonuses, are asked to curb their claims in order to help control inflation). The worse the economic crisis becomes, the more urgent it is for this government to declare its prime concern to be the protection, not of the banks and City institutions but of the weak, the lower-paid and poor and middle-income families.

This is not only just, it is sensible politics. Alex Brummer suggests on page 18 that the Northern Rock scandal was a decisive turning point in Mr Brown's reputation for competence and, as a result, in new Labour's popularity. It was not, he argues, that Mr Brown ultimately took the wrong decision but that, when he had the chance he failed to act courageously and decisively (as the US political leadership has done since by nationalising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and throwing the collapsed bank Lehman Brothers to the wolves). If Mr Brown hopes to convince Labour that he can lead it through the coming uncertain months, he has to heed the lesson that his concern not to upset bankers and business interests loses him support.

One clear impediment to Mr Brown making the kind of policy changes that could begin to turn round his poor poll ratings is that he faces not too many challenges, but too few. Many of the young ministers whose talents he has rightly fostered (such as Ed Balls, Ed Miliband) lack political experience. They do not challenge him. Those who do are on the outside and seen as enemies. The mood emanating from No 10 is of a prime minister under siege. He needs "big beasts" back in cabinet to help counter attacks from the press and to put the arguments for Labour's response to the crisis. In the words he himself used when he took office, the Prime Minister needs "a government of all the talents".

But first Mr Brown has to survive Manchester. Those who think this a suitable moment to switch leaders can fairly be accused of a selfish disregard of reality. A leadership fight is the last thing the party or the country needs at this time of emergency.

source: A leadership challenge is the last thing the country needs New Statesman

A Green New Deal for our times

Banks wobbling, massive fuel price rises, the vulnerability of the food supply chain... it looks like a long, uncomfortable and shaky summer. Then there is an even more threatening problem: a biosphere threatened by potentially irreversible global warming.

Britain faces a 'triple crunch,' a combination of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices underpinned by an encroaching peak in oil production. These threaten to develop into a perfect storm, the like of which has not been seen since Great Depression.

To help prevent this, a group of specialists in finance, energy and the environment has been meeting since early 2007. Something along the lines of our Green New Deal can, we believe, begin to stabilise the crisis. And we can also lay the foundations for low-carbon economies, rich in jobs and more based on independent sources of energy.

With food and energy insecurity set to rise, this will create a more stable economic environment in which there is likely to be a lot more local production and distribution, but will fit a pattern of global reform, where the goals of international poverty reduction and 'one-planet living' become more viable.

The deal combines economic stabilisation in the short term with longer-term restructuring of the financial, taxation and energy systems. It is a massive environmental transformation whose economic boost will insulate us against recession, while delivering the rapid transition needed if we are to play our role in averting runaway climate change.

First is a focus on the specific needs of the UK. This includes a vision for a low-carbon energy system that will include making 'every building a power station'. Involving tens of millions of properties, their energy efficiency will be maximised, as will the use of renewables to generate electricity. This will require a £50bn-plus a year crash programme.

Linked to this is the creation of an 'carbon army' of workers. The plan envisions hundreds of thousands of high- and lower-skilled jobs created in the UK. This will be part of a wider shift from an economy narrowly focused on financial services and shopping to one that is an engine of environmental transformation. Germany is already employing 250,000 in renewable energy alone.

Next, we need to ensure more realistic fossil fuel prices that include the cost to the environment, and are high enough to tackle climate change by creating the economic incentive to drive efficiency and bring alternative fuels to market.

At $10 a barrel, oil companies were in profit; at around $130, they are rolling in unearned cash. We advocate a version of the Norwegian approach, establishing an Oil Legacy Fund, paid for by a windfall tax on the profits of energy companies. The monies raised would help deal with the effects of climate change and smooth the transition to a low-carbon economy. Norway built up its oil surpluses to weave a safety net that at the last count was worth around £198bn.

But we need wide-ranging financial innovations and incentives if we are to assemble the billions that need to be spent. The focus should be on investments and regulations that not only finance the development of efficient energy infrastructure but also help to reduce demand for energy.

Vitally, we need much tighter controls on lending and the generation of credit. Very large banks make very large mistakes. Instead of institutions that are 'too big to fail', we need those small enough to fail without creating problems for depositors and the wider public.

Because of the banking system's growing inherent instability, we need to break up discredited financial institutions that have relied on huge amounts of public money to prop them up in the credit crunch. The Green New Deal calls for the forced demerger of large banking and finance groups. We need to return finance to its role as servant, not master, of the global economy. This means, in part, the restoration of policy autonomy to democratic government, and implies the reintroduction of capital controls.

Recent months have revealed how thin is the ice upon which our economic livelihoods depend. Highly abstract and complex derivative products and other exotic financial instruments have finally divorced the finance sector not just from the productive and social, core economies, but from any recognisable reality.

Behind collateralised debt obligations, is only thin air, wishful thinking and greed. All such exotic instruments should be subject to official inspection. Only those approved should be permitted to be traded.

Our proposal is a first word, not the last. If you can enhance the Green New Deal's response, please tell us.

· Andrew Simms is policy director and head of the climate change programme at the new economics foundation. This article is adapted from the report 'A Green New Deal: joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices' available at www.neweconomics.org

A Green New Deal for our times
guardian.co.uk, UK