So I think I might have mentioned that I’m not Gordon Brown’s biggest fan. It might not then come as a surprise that I was hardly impressed with the debate last night, and failed to see how one writer I know described him as magisterial and sincere, thus the vastly better option in the coming election.
It’s possible he picked up after the first half, after which I changed channel because they were boring me and I was starting to rant at the TV, but my impression of his remains that he is a blustering incompetent who’s spent so many years lusting for power he’s never taken the time to consider a) what to do with it and b) whether he would be any good at it, quite aside from his three-year unelected reign also showing him to be a coward who doesn’t really care how he got to power in the first place. The recent assertions on electoral reform, lords reform etc etc are rightly being considered with suspicion by the country I believe. Promising a new way of politics in 1997 Labour failed to deliver on a whole lot of things, not all of which was their fault (ie powerless under global pressures) but a fair amount of it was hugely insincere and seemed to have been blindly accepted by the majority of the country out of some sort of wilful desperation that anything had to be better than the Tories.
However, he’s got one big plus and it wouldn’t surprise me if it was enough to win him a coalition government – he’s not David Cameron. Honestly, after years of failed promises, unpopular and illegal wars, spiralling national debt, scandals and a prime minister everyone hates, what sort of charmless moron with a head like stapled ham can fail to be crushing his opposition until they cry like my three-year-old nieces (seriously, tread on them and they just don’t shut up…). Cameron frequently paid no attention to the others during the debate, continues to have few coherent policies and even the ones that I do support (inheritance tax reform, not the most popular of choices I know but you look at house values these days and it’s not the super-rich being double taxed to buggery but the middle classes, the super-rich having accountants to avoid stuff like high taxes) have been done in the most half-arsed and crap manner.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I’ll be voting Lib Dem and don’t consider it a wasted vote. Most especially in my district (where the vote actually counts) they’re the only alternative to the incumbent with a chance of winning, but also bearing in mind I couldn’t in all conscience vote for Brown or Cameron and the Lib Dem view of international relations tends to match mine far more closely, something that I care about far more than most, it’s a no-brainer. The fact that they’ve got the only chancellor-figure with any decent clue what to do with an economy is, in these post-recession times, also an incentive. The fact that Vince Cable is also published by my employer is a mere bonus ;0)