'Golden Brown' & 'Brown and out' - The policies and perceptions of Gordon Brown

At the risk of fisking Steve Richards’ article, Richards is generous in his description of the Brown government’s achievements and underplays the influence of the economy on public opinion. Nonetheless, it is recommended reading as it highlights that the media and electorate are preoccupied by personality and that the portrayal of Cameron as substantive and progressive is maddeningly deceptive. Richards warns that the problem for the Brown government is that despite some heartening policies, “Policies are easily lost if they do not fuel the prevailing narrative”.

Tony Blair had a genius for making the incremental seem exciting. Between 1994 and 1999, if Blair had announced he was going for a short walk around the garden of No 10, the world would have hailed a revolution in transport policy. So, imagine the excitement if Blair had declared in 1997 that a Labour government would take over greedy train operators, high earners would pay more tax, the free market in energy was over and that we must all plan to pay for care for the elderly, with the well-off paying more.

The present government has announced policies along these lines in recent months and quite a few more, too. Yet it is loathed by voters from left and right. It has no support in the media and is accused of lacking purpose. [...]

The disparity is striking. When Blair was cautiously dumping the referendums on electoral reform and the euro, ruling out any tax rises, keeping to the previous Tory government's spending plans and refusing to touch the privatised railways, he and Labour were hailed for their energetic crusade. Now, by comparison, Brown looks pale and miserable and some of his ministers hide away in a state of indifference - yet they display erratic boldness.

[... In response to increasing taxes for high earners] The papers screamed their disapproval, but polls suggest the move was by far the most popular the government had made for some time. [... The policies] announced in recent months hint at a coherent outlook that would certainly enhance the quality of most voters' lives. [… Yet] voters see only the obvious flaws. Brown is a hopeless communicator who when questioned looks irritated at best and at worst miserable. In public, he is incapable of using humour, a powerful weapon in the political artist's armoury. [...]

The comparison between the adulatory response in 1997 to a timid government and the contempt shown towards one that dares to be bolder shows the limited relevance of policy in shaping perceptions. To reinforce the point, a Conservative Party that has returned to its comfort zone of sweeping spending cuts and Euroscepticism is hailed for its modernisation and seen widely as an agent of change.

Obama’s Cairo speech

What he did say was largely inoffensive, what he failed to say …

Fisk writes

About the Venue

[P]lease note that Obama has chosen Egypt for his latest address to the Muslims, a country run by an ageing potentate – Hosni Mubarak is 80 – who uses his secret police like a private army to imprison human rights workers, opposition politicians, anyone in fact who challenges the great man's rule.

And that: …

The Egyptian Organisation of Human Rights, a separate group, discovered that 10 of the 29 died after torture. In one case, rights groups acquired a videotape of a prisoner being anally raped with a stick by a police officer. Other videos show one of Mubarak's political opponents – a woman – being sexually molested by a plain-clothes police officer in a Cairo street.

As for the speech itself: …

when Obama said that some governments, "once in power, are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others", there was a roar of applause from the supposedly obedient audience. […] As the Palestinian intellectual Marwan Bishara pointed out yesterday, it is easy to be "dazzled" by presidents. This was a dazzling performance. But if one searched the text, there were things missing.

There was no mention – during or after his kindly excoriation of Iran – of Israel's estimated 264 nuclear warheads. He admonished the Palestinians for their violence – for "shooting rockets at sleeping children or blowing up old women in a bus". But there was no mention of Israel's violence in Gaza, just of the "continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza". Nor was there a mention of Israel's bombing of civilians in Lebanon, of its repeated invasions of Lebanon (17,500 dead in the 1982 invasion alone). Obama told Muslims not to live in the past, but cut the Israelis out of this. […]

For a man who is sending thousands more US troops into Afghanistan – a certain disaster-to-come in the eyes of Arabs and Westerners – there was something brazen about all this. When he talked about the debt that all Westerners owed to Islam – the "light of learning" in Andalusia, algebra, the magnetic compass, religious tolerance, it was like a cat being gently stroked before a visit to the vet. And the vet, of course, lectured the Muslims on the dangers of extremism, on "cycles of suspicion and discord" – even if America and Islam shared "common principles" which turned out to be "justice, progress and the dignity of all human beings".

There was one merciful omission: a speech of nearly 6,000 words did not include the lethal word "terror". "Terror" or "terrorism" have become punctuation marks for every Israeli government and became part of the obscene grammar of the Bush era.

An intelligent guy, then, Obama. Not exactly Gettysburg. Not exactly Churchill, but not bad. One could only remember Churchill's observations: "Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare."

Chomsky notes that:

Obama's June 4 Cairo address to the Muslim world kept pretty much to his well-honed "blank slate" style -- saying very little of substance, but in a personable manner that allows listeners to write on the slate what they want to hear. CNN captured its spirit in headlining a report "Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world."

Whereas John Pilger - Smile on the face of the tiger [Please read in full]

President Barack Obama made his “historic” speech in Cairo, “reaching out to the Muslim world”, reported the BBC. “Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Obama, “does not serve Israel’s security.” That was all. The killing of 1,300 people in what is now a concentration camp merited 17 words, cast as concern for the “security” of the killers. This was understandable. During the January massacre, Seymour Hersh reported that “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” for use in Gaza.

“In relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was”. It was Blair's classic lie, which passed unchallenged.

John Pilger on Blair’s current role – ‘Fake faith and epic crimes’.

In a separate indictment, former Judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court E.W. Thomas wrote: “My pre-disposition was to believe that Mr. Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr. Blair deliberately ands repeatedly misled Cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate.” […]

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East Envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. […]

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer’s former leading Blair fan, declared that “this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried”. He demanded, “Did Blair never ask what was going on?” This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: “Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?” In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Iraq’s “contribution to international terrorism” and Saddam Hussein’s “frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction”. Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a “point of principle” for Blair who, he later wrote, was “fated to be right”. He lamented, “Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short.” In the subsequent six years at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys. […]

Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his “James Bondish-ish Gulfstream” where she was privy to his “bionic energy levels”. She wrote, “I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?” Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. “That is war, I’m afraid,” said Blair, “and war is horrible”. No counter came that Gaza was not a war but a massacre by any measure.