Ok I'll have a go at this one, but I will state at the outset that I am particularly cynical about Gordon Brown and some of the things he has done.


Thinking on this, the answer is yes and no. Yes he is a very visible public figure in that I would expect everone here knows who he is. But no he isn't because he is not seen and heard as much in the media as many other ministers and has manged to keep his powder dry on many of the more contraverisal issues, such as Iraq.

A definate yes to the stealth taxes. One of the recurrent hot potatoes at election time is direct taxation i.e. income tax and national insurance: the taxes that we see taken out of our wage packets. Labour say they wont put it up, the Conservative say they will put it down, and the Liberals say they will have to put it up because you can't afford everything people want the state to do if you don't. What the country missed was Labour's caveat and took no tax increases, to mean exactly that, when what they meant was no increase in direct taxation. As a result we have seen an increase in the tax burden, but not recognised that it has happened i.e. increase in fuel duty, excise duty, increase in the employer's share of national insurance. I am not sure that he is avidly pro-American though he is wont of holding up the US enconomy and US productivity as something to aspire to.

This is where my personal (cynical) views creep in. Whilst many view him as prudent with the economy, I take a differing view. Many of the issues we are now seeing with personal and company pensions can be directly attributed to his removal of tax rebates on share dividends, thus removing at a stroke a significant amount of income for pension funds - something that I class a far greater scandle than the pensions misselling of the 1980's.

He has brought in the Child trust fund, where each child has a trust fund which they can access at 18, and into which the state pays £250 (or there abouts) at birth and other key points, parents et al are then encouraged to make further payments. A brillient idea you may say, but given that the non-equity based trust fund was a mere after thought and was downplayed by the government in favour of the equity based fund, my cynical view was that it was and is a back door way for the government to invest in the stock market, thus boosting its value hopefully alleviatng some of the pension issues.

There are other initiatives of his such as child and family tax credits which appear to be good new but have turned out to be bad news primarily for the people they are meant to help, but that is a whole other discussion.

One of the major questions is if, how and when Tony Blair will step down and whether there will be an unopposed succession. At the moment Tony Blair is making himself unpopular not just with the populis but with his own MPs. So will Gordon Brown's silence tar him with the same brush, will he have time to rebuild bridges both within his party and with the public? Will another Labour MP feel that it is his duty to force an election so that the membership have choice rather than an unopposed succession? I have no idea and only time will tell. One thing that I do believe is that he will not have the necessary gravitas in the Labour party if there is a succession rather than an election, which could spell the demise of the party for a period of time.

As I noted in the Contemporary Issues in Economics, Politics and Religion following the departure of Thatcher, the Conservative party was incapable of electing a leader whom the MPs were all willing to follow. Thus you had factional infighting mainly arround the issue of Europe. All this made them unelectable, and in effective and as an opposition. They finally got their act together in time for the '05 elections with Micheal Howard. However having lost the election he decided to step down and we have David Cameron who has been likened to Tony Blair when he took over the leadership of Labour, in that he is young dynamic and willing to ditch conviction infavour of populism.

As for the Liberals they had been doing well steadily gain share, but they have been pretty illiberal of late and are potentially going the same way the Conservatives went.

One of the quirks of our first past the post electoral system is that you can have a Government majority on a minority vote. Hence the minority parties tend to push proportional representation, and then forget about it once they have a majority. But what it does mean is that Governments have to loose elections rather than the opposition winning them.