Gordon Brown resigns…. but why?

While I will yield to no-one in the heel-clickin’, high-fivin’ stakes in response to the news that Gordo is finally running his thieving fingers through the yellow pages (and you know he doesn’t use Google) for a removals company, I can’t help but feel suspicious given the fact that the Lib Dems are suddenly talking to him formally. Here’s why.

If he puts together a ‘rainbow coalition’ of Labour, the Lib Dems and the assorted stragglers and local interest parties to form a government of sorts then it opens up some interesting possibilities. Putting to one side the issue of whether this is just taking the piss elevated to artform, then picture what happens in the first weeks of the government.

Short of an overall majority, Brown presents his new administration as a ‘government of national unity’ and announces it will only stay in power to achieve economic stability for a limited time. Then, he brings forward a Queen’s Speech containing some unrealistic economic measures which the Tories vote down and think they’re well clever for. This forces another election.

But now Labour – under a new leader – can go to the electorate proclaiming that the Conservatives are the enemy of the recovery and don’t care about the future of the country. Through this strategy, they claw back enough seats to win back power, with or without the Lib Dems. This successfully marginalises the Tories (possibly forever) and the Lib Dems (until they’re needed as a contingency in future). Labour back in power to carry on as if nothing happened. Job done.

OK, that might sound a bit on the sinister, calculating side, but Brown’s a politician to his fingertips and stood in the shadows is The Dark Lord Mandelson, who has made his reputation – nay, personal mythology – by playing such games.

The clamour rides on the recently minted myth of a ‘progressive majority’ in the country. There is no such thing. If Labour and the Lib Dems were actually as naturally allied as this phrase suggests, then they’d just be one party. And if the kinship between the parties were so great then there would probably be no such thing as Tory/Lib Dem marginals and the Tories would more consistently be the third party in many more constituencies than they are.

In truth, the Lib Dems have a slightly dotty program and an appealingly blank image onto which voters can project their own fantasies and register a protest of sorts by voting for them, safe in the knowledge that they won’t come to power.

The extent to which large swathes of the electorate are insulated from reality is indicated by the amount of people who now, in retrospect, seem to think that the big issue of the last election was the voting system. In truth, neither Labour nor the Tories support PR and no bill for a referendum will ever get through the House of Commonsas turkeys do not, in the main, vote for Christmas. So the Twitterati can backslap each other by Twittering aimlessly about voting reform.

The real issue – and still the elephant in the room – is the public sector deficit. All those hundreds of billions that have to be paid back with all the pain and cutbacks and tax hikes that will entail for us. All the parties know what that means and yet even now none of them have ‘fessed up (the Tories “emergency budget” was always a thinly veiled excuse so they could pretend to have discovered that Labour’s figures were terrible and needed to take action).

It is this fact, rather than sideshow debates about voting reform and the attendant political quickstep, that is why these machinations could prove ruinous for us all. If the markets are presented with the uncertainty of another election  where the economy is off the agenda and the primary legislative issue is whether we’re going to fanny about tinkering with the voting issue, then they’ll pretty rapidly pull the plug on the largesse they’ve been showing us in credit terms for the last year or two.

A better bet for Labour in the long term would be, in my opinion, to do what they always do: let the Tories clear up the mess by taking unpopular measures and thus further entrench their reputation in the popular men as the Bogeymen of British politics.

The folk memories of the 80s are evidently part of the general conscious as some kind of horrible national nadir – even among people who were too young to remember them. The Tories have been well slack letting that happen, seeing that the bodies were piling up on the streets, the lights were on 3 days a week and the IMF had to come and bail our ass out under Labour in the 70s.

Funny, eh? Unless you’re David Cameron.