Though Cowards Flinch

I’m so sick and tired of all this talk about how PLP rebels are damaging our image. I’ve spent several weeks in sporadic argument on this point with a would-be MEP, Steve Carter, who is on the north east selection list. On this post as well, we have consistent attacks upon Angela Smith and the others for their attitude over the 10p tax band. The insinuation is that these MPs who publicly rebelled against Gordon are partly to blame for the bad press we’ve been getting over the last few weeks.

Frank Field and Angela Smith aren’t left wing rebels by any stretch of the imagination. One has to ask, how Field can credibly make a new threat to Gordon Brown so soon after our election defeat. Evidently the PLP is feeling the pinch and is worried that a hundred or so of them may be facing imminent unemployment. I think Susan sums it up pretty well:

‘Basically, around 100 or so MPs now know they have had it unless there is a change of leader – and policy direction. The prospect of redundancy can sharpen minds wonderfuly and Ken Livingstone’s demise in London will also have been a wake-up call to MPs hitherto , as John puts it, “sleepwalking to disaster.” ‘

I don’t think that anything short of a full-fledged assault upon the capitalist edifice is going to change the fact of our impending electoral rout, even though I will be on the ground fighting against that. Even then, Labour has lost so many activists that there’ll be plenty of cities where the left-wing ideas won’t be able to penetrate to any meaningful extent. I think, regardless of what we do now, we’re going to lose.

That’s a secondary issue however. It is that fear, that pressure, which can allow Frank Field to give an interview to the Mail on Sunday demanding specific compensation. What is driving that pressure is the belief that, if the government is left to its own devices, it’s never going to extricate itself from the mess that it has made. All of this can squarely be left at the door of Gordon Brown.

This objection to Brown is not ideological, except insofar as I’m one of those paying for this new tax upon the less well off. I’m interested in what happens next, and I’ll be interested to hear with what policies the Prime Minister and the government go firefighting, against the Conservatives. Yet having watched the coverage of Ministers saying we’ll listen and blaming the economy, I don’t think Brown has any bolts left to shoot.

Elections like this one don’t catch us on the hop – and even Labour favourites have the opportunity to vote against the whip when it serves them in their constituency. Oxford East MP Andrew Smith’s vote against Trident renewal was calculated to precisely that end. From the start of Brown’s reign, we have walked from disaster to disaster. The Brown ‘bounce’ has turned into a trough of catastrophic proportions.

All eyes should be fixed on what the government do next. If more platitudes, about Gordon’s “conviction over charisma” style of politics, are the order of the day, if the government simply redoubles its efforts in the current direction, then we may as well give up and go home. We won’t, of course; large numbers of Labour Party members are die-hards and will go down fighting hard.

However, if anything is salting our game, it’s not the rebels. If Ken can achieve more than a million votes by being seen to be relatively independent of the New Labour machine, then the last thing we need to be worried about right now is what a few insignificant MPs say.