Gordon Brown's Vision For Britain

The mainstream media are pushing this rhetoric that Gordon Brown doesn't have a vision.

Of course he does.

- He's the architect of New Labour's use of private finance (both PFI initiatives, and the slow motion car crash that is the PPP of the London Tube). He'll extend and deepen the part-privatisation of the public sector that he has led for the last 10 years.

- Brown's Britain will be unequal:

"To give the children of the well-off a £1.4bn inheritance bonus while the children of the poor only got another 48p a week in tax credits is symbolically far worse than that notorious 75p for pensioners. The halfway mark to abolish child poverty by 2010 will be missed by miles. Holding down public sector pay rises to 2% for three years, only half next year's expected private sector increase, will increase inequality."

- Road pricing? Shelved. Pay-as-you-throw? Running scared. Funding for microgeneration on household roofs? Starved of funding. 20% by 2020 as an EU target for renewable energy? Desperately wants to avoid it. So unless the tone dramatically changes, his vision doesn't include the environment.

- He's tough. Focus groups are asked if Gordon Brown is a machine, which one is he, and they say he's a bulldozer. He's a tough man in tough times, willing to make tough decisions. He has the Strength To Change Britain. When you combine this with his talks on Britishness, his apologia for empire, his support for the US on Iran, his funding for CCTV as Chancellor, his support for ID cards, extending the use of police stop-and-search powers, his support for doubling the 28-days detention without charge, and his attempts to attract defectors from the Lib Dems and Tories, it's an authoritiarian vision for Britain. Britain doesn't need to have an opposition, it just needs a strong top-down leader. And if you don't believe the show's all about Brown, ask where Harriet Harman has disappeared to.