No More Brown Sound

The date: 25^th July 2008. A date that may stick long in the memory banks of a certain prime minister as the day he realised the damages to his government were irreparable. Is this finally the beginning of the end for Gordon Brown?

Today, the SNP pulled off one of the biggest shocks in by-election history by de-seating the Labour candidate, Margaret Curran, from her throne in Glasgow East. Prior to the election, it was this seat that had been considered one of the safest Labour-held seats in the UK. This is certainly no longer the case.

Usually, whenever there is an election, a swing of maybe 2-3% wouldn’t be considered as being out of ordinary. Any swing from 5% upwards, and we begin to enter the realms of drastic changes. The 22.54% swing seen today to launch Labour’s on-going plight into further chaos, was astounding, and quite frankly, could not have been presaged. No matter how poorly Gordon Brown has been handling the important issues that are crippling our economy and society, such a huge shift in voting patterns was never to be expected; the change was so shocking, a few suggested that this was a protest vote against Labour, not a supportive vote for the Scottish National Party.

Statistics were carried out, and in summary, all but 5 of Brown’s cabinet would have been axed from their seats with a swing that great. The casualties would have included big names such as Ed Balls (Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families), Alistair Darling (Chancellor of the Exchequer), David Miliband (Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs), and Jacqui Smith (Home Secretary).

What has transpired cannot be ignored; this is no longer the time to shrug off a defeat and promise to “bounce back” stronger than ever. The calls for a general election need to be heeded. And they need to be heeded soon.

If our country is going to progress any further (i.e. fight off the possibility of a recession, which is said to be less of a threat now than it was a weak ago), we need big changes at the top. Traditionally, I would never support backing the Tories. But right now, even though I’m worried the job they’ll accomplish won’t be much better than what Gordon Brown has done so far, there will be a level of improvement.

I never disagreed with Tony Blair as our PM. I personally thought he was the best PM we’d had in years. The only major furore he caused was over his foreign policies, namely Iraq and Afghanistan. Scratch that from the equation, and he was practically a model prime minister. It’s all too clear that we’ve put ourselves at the wrong end of a “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” situation. Fine, we didn’t elect Gordon Brown to succeed Blair, but we put so much pressure on the latter that he only had choice, and that was to step down. I would choose to have him back at the helm than David Cameron any day.

The sun is setting on Brown’s time in 10 Downing Street. The question is who will be the next to move in?