MPS SQUEAL AT LEADERS

With the smokescreen of the Blair-Brown spat being pushed into our faces yet again it’s time to take a step back from the power-hungry feuding and take a look at their policies.

This is a distraction. Brown is every bit as New Labour as Blair he’s just not such a nonce. He’s strongly Atlanticist, absolutely committed to PFI / PPP and all the other rotten free-market initiatives the project has conceived.

No doubt a Brown government would be more credible than Blair’s, but the tendency for self-preservation urges Labourites to over-exaggerate Brown’s achievements and cleave to him as if he was Nye Bevan himself.

Yet he bank-rolled the Iraq war to the tune of £3 billion and uttered not a squeak against it.

Even his latest utterances on debt leave you cold with despair as he cynically milks his human kindness for all the PR points he can muster. So the World Bank (the fucking World Bank!) will delay their demands of extortion while the poorest countries re-build their tourist industries enough to entertain western holidaymakers. Brown in fact sits as a key governor of the IMF, the very body which has imposed austerity plans and structural adjustment policies across the globe and condemned millions to poverty and death.

Worse still, small reductions delivered through the Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) have come with even heavier chains attached - in the form of economic conditions that harm the poor, but benefit big business.

The tsunami has stripped a lot of cant and hypocrisy back to the bone. Let’s hope people don’t get hoodwinked into thinking Brown is a credible alternative.

Brown was the key figure in pushing through the privatisation of air traffic control and of London's tube, purely on the back of his feud with ken Livingston.
In hospital and schools it is Brown who insists that privatisation in the form of the Private Finance Initiative must be implemented. Brown dares to talk of making people's opportunities in life "not depend on class or background". Yet he champions the tuition fees which will deny working class people access to the education which he and all the New Labour cabinet enjoyed for free themselves.

Today he’s declared he trusts Tony “Absolutely”. Yesterday he’d never believe him ever again. What a pair of jokers.

Guardian story here.