Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Brown can't win the next election. More serious, any democratic reform agenda is now in jeopardy.
Brown can't win because the moment of genuine popularity of his first three months of office, when he appeared to be different from Blair, is long gone. That positioning has been shot to pieces not least by himself. From now on he has to fight on his record of continuity. But already the voters have given this the two-fingers. Their verdict could only be reversed by a brilliant economic revival. This seems inconceivable. The heart of New Labour's strategy was the embrace of globalisation as the deliverer of wealth plus Gordon's supposedly robust and prudent management of the economy leading to unrivalled stability as well as growth. Today the UK faces the prospect of an economic downturn, a collapse of the housing market and the inflation of staple commodities. This is the harvest of backing the US model over that of the EU, which Brown orchestrated. At the same time the explosion of the super-wealthy, which is one consequence of this strategy, has fatally undermined Labour's claim to be the party of fairness that is central to its appeal. Brown is doomed.
Much of his attempt at a reform agenda may go down with him. Brown's strategy on coming to office was to present himself as the candidate of political "change": reforming the terms of government; restoring trust in politics; making a coherent and legitimate case for "Britain" as a centripetal answer to the disintegrative forces generated by parliaments in Scotland and Wales, immigration and the EU.
For this ambitious "Britishness" agenda to succeed as Brown conceived it, it needed to be consensual, overseen by him as the revered father of the modern nation. It can hardly be embarked upon by what is now electorally the third party, scoring less than even the Lib-Dems around the country! A pity. I never thought it would succeed on Brown's terms but I did think it recognised, or at least acknowledged, and sought to address, some fundamental problems about the British state, our democracy and the way we are governed. It was therefore welcome as it might open the way to having essential arguments.
The likelihood now is that the government will retreat from the broader elements of the "governance" agenda, while the Conservatives believing that the system is now working in their favour will also see no reason to debate why it should be changed. It feels like a victory for the old regime.
PS: I have been asked how this fits with my meditation yesterday that Cameron might prove the "Next Kinnock". The answer is that to suffer the fate of a Kinnock you need your Mrs Thatcher to be pushed aside or resign, i.e. Brown would have to go. I don't agree with the otherwise strong post by Steve Richards in OpenHouse that Brown can't resign. There already is a full blown "sense of crisis". Also, comparison with the changes of leader by the Tories after 1997 don't count as Labour would be create a new Prime Minister after a leadership contest which could hardly be more divisive than the one when Heseltine ran against Thatcher.
