Wilf Stevenson Discussion
Posted by Matt Juden on November 6th, 2007
Thank you to everyone who left their Guy Fawkes Night celebrations to attend Wilf Stevenson’s address to the society yesterday evening. The occasion drew a wide range of undergraduates, graduates, fellows and others from Cambridge and featured a particularly excellent question and answer session.
Feel free to use the comment section of this post to discuss yesterday’s event and any of the many issues touched upon.
The video of Wilf’s talk will be available in the archive as soon as it has been processed.
Filed under: gordonbrown, speaker discussion, ukpolitics on November 6th, 2007
Congratulations on another great talk guys - I thought Wilf was remarkably frank about where he thinks Brown, and politics generally, is going.
I’m particularly interested in Wilf’s suggestion that Brown wants to lead a government that has a much more historically grounded sense of what it means to be Labour. For those of you who weren’t there, I asked Wilf how this could be reconciled with the recent accommodation of Tory proposals on inheritance tax. To his credit, Wilf said it couldn’t be reconciled, and that the inheritance tax change was basically a question of the messy business of short-term politics. He also suggested that inheritance tax is an issue that Brown wants to debate and that he thinks he can win.
I suppose my question is whether that’s really possible. Short term politics isn’t going anywhere any time soon, so when will Brown feel he can afford to reveal what he believes Labour really means? Of course, for Blair this was never a problem: there was no ‘other’ vision that the demands of politics forced him to hide. But if Brown really does have one, will he ever dare let it slip out?
What strikes me as interesting is the unabated optimism of the Brown camp despite the election wobble (an incident Wilf spoke of with puzzlement). The sense that despite the Brown bounce being over, things will some how get easier for the government such that Brown will be able to implement his vision in an uncompromised fashion. I got the feeling from Wilf that this stemmed from a rather low regard for Cameron who they saw as a merely tolerated leader of the tory party, a figure that the tory old guard saw as merely a necessary encumbrance of the modern world. Polling evidence however suggests some real popular appeal, and hints a potentially resurgent lib dems post-Ming.
Personally I can envisage some of Tory party’s concerns about Cameron’s ‘green-ness’ in both senses, dissipating, moreover in a way that is just about unprecedented, anything approaching an economic wobble will be laid squarely at Brown’s door despite that door now being number 10. With public questions about his mandate to lead made more acute the more strident and the less Blairite his policies, I’m not quite sure where the political freedom and leadership confidence to implement this vision is going to come from.
Brown is going to suffer without an early election. Being a dour, poor oratory with a regional accent was the vogue for summer 2007 - because it was the antithesis of Blair. Brown’s manner led people to associate him with everything else that was the antithesis of Blair: transparency, integrity, long-term vision. That will have worn off in 2-3 years. Oratorical skills, a crisp accent and a friendly, trustworthy face will once again become factors that swing voters, and only Cameron possesses them.