Where Is The Way Out, Mr Brown?

How is it all going to end for Gordon Brown?

It's interesting to watch the decline in his power and influence in such a short space of time. Only a year ago he was being hailed as the new leader of the Labour Party who was going to shun all the worst aspects of Blair's hegemony that had kept the country in thrall to one of the best political spin machines (think Mandelson, Campbell) we have ever seen.

What has gone wrong? Basically, Brown was never the right man for the job in the first place. He made his (now heavily corroded) reputation as a financial mastermind. Largely, this was illusory as he stuck to the Conservatives' spending plans for the first two years but, and here was the clever bit - the only clever bit as it turns out - he spent that time amassing vast amounts of our money through some very damaging stealth taxes - remember the pension funds raid that has left so many people without the safety net that they thought they were paying for? Remember too the way that other direct and indirect taxes were pushed up by fiscal drag so that the average family has ended up paying about £4,000 more a year.

Then he went on to create a disastrously complicated system of tax credits to begin to implement his socialist redistributive paradise that has resulted in the Labour client state and which, in reality, has done nothing but perpetuate and reinforce a variety of underclasses that are now so dependent on the State that they cannot afford to drag themselves up by their bootstraps.

I could go on .... and on .... but you get the point. Brown is not the answer, never was and never will be. More to the point, Labour is not the answer and they have no one of any stature to get them out of the hole they are in. This piece by the usually Brown arch-apologist David Aaronovitch in the Times shows why this is the case.

Unfortunately, the only way we are going to get them out is if Brown falls on his sword or he struggles on for another two years when we should do all we can to obliterate Labour for a generation.