Monday, August 06, 2007

The Great Escape(s) could damage GB


Only last week I was admitting that I thought Gordon Brown may stay in the lead poll-wise right through into next year.

But the last 48 hours have highlighted an inescapable fact which may bring that time down to a few weeks.

What Gordon Brown has been trying to show is that he is a 'new' Government but already the sins of the past are catching up with him.

Both the escape of Foot and Mouth from a Government lab and the escape of 26 foreign nationals from a secure transit camp have been firmly blamed on years of under-funding.

This follows much analysis of wether the recent floods were worse than they might have otherwise been had there not been cuts in the budget for flood defences.

After ten years holding the purse strings it gets harder and harder for Gordon Brown to avoid becoming suspect-in-chief for Government failings -especially since he so often intervened personally when Chancellor to cut or divert funding away from projects he didn't personally support.

Initial euphoria that Tony Blair has finally gone will quickly be replaced with a deep scorn for the 'new' Prime Minister if the press get their teeth into one or two of these funding scandals, with more trouble certainly to come.

More trouble certainly to come? Do I know something sinister?

No. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was famously asked by a journalist the surest thing to push a Government into trouble and his answer: "Events, dear boy. Events" - is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The question of whether there were any cuts to the Rivers Authority budget has been hotly disputed, but I agree Gordon is now right in the firing line whatever goes wrong.

Luck comes into it, too. Mrs Thatcher was generally a lucky Prime Minister and so was Tony Blair.

Callaghan and Major were both very unlucky - lots of things went wrong for them that other prime ministers might have gotten away with but they did not.

Brown looks like one of the unlucky guys to me.

Barrie Wood said...

I think you need to worry more about the ferocious reception David Cameron got from angry Tories in Yorkshire.

Are the wheels are coming off the Cameron wagon ?

Anonymous said...

On the subject of 'great escapes' what are you doing about Devon proposals to cut back manning levels on the fire service and specifically, the extending latter crews?