Gordon Brown And 2008

Gordon Brown looks set to continue the Blair tradition of endlessly confronting his own backbenchers.

- He's going ahead with a "new generation" of nuclear power stations. Britain does not have a repository for high-level nuclear waste, and there is a limited amount of high-grade uranium in the world, which will be drained by nuclear expansion elsewhere.

- Brown plans to greenlight the expansion of Heathrow. This despite a poll, released by HACAN on 30th December, that 19% of Britons want airport capacity reduced, and 52% favour a standstill on new capacity.

- Brown feels that "nobody should fear ID cards," despite his government's lack of caution in handling our personal data.

- Brown wants to find a "compromise" on extending detention to 42 days without charge.

Brown repeatedly frames his policy choices as "the difficult long-term decisions, even if at times it may be easier to do simpler or less difficult things."

The hard thing to do would be to oppose the nuclear power lobby, as well as the oil, gas and coal lobbies, and do what Germany has done and stand behind a policy to support renewable power on a nationwide level.

The hard thing to do would be to tell Britons taking short-haul trips that they can't go from flying twice a year to flying eight times a year and think it has no impact on carbon emissions. The hard thing to do would be for Gordon Brown to take the train when it's feasible to take a train to Paris/Brussels and then a night train to a morning meeting.

The hard thing to do would be to avoid the creeping installation of a surveillance society and reject ID cards, or to stand up for civil liberties and stick with 28-day detention.

In short, Brown is taking a series of centralising decisions, that remove control over our energy production, over our information, our civil liberties. He's taking the easy options, not the hard ones of his propaganda.