Gordon Brown has convinced his party that they are back in the game. Now all he has to do is convince the country. For a few electrifying moments at the beginning of his speech in Brighton – when he was running at high speed through the list of Labour’s achievements in government – it seemed that the energy would flow from the past into the future and present the possibility of doing just that.
Mr Brown asked his party, and all those in what he identified as the mainstream majority who share the values of fairness and equality, to dream the impossible dream of another Labour victory, explicitly recognising the enormity of the task. It was a message grounded in the reality of the torpor into which Labour has drifted. Part of the task was to lift that depression and in that he succeeded. “We are not done yet” was a declaration as much about his own hold on office as it was on the task ahead for the Government and will have buried any lingering speculation of a serious challenge to his leadership.
The broader aim was to magnify the choice between David Cameron’s Conservative Party and Labour, and he succeeded in that in varying ways. Standing in front of a backdrop carrying the words “Securing Britain’s Economic Recovery”, Mr Brown delivered an excoriating demolition of the Tories economic competence and their ability, had they been in power, to handle the economic crisis. “The Conservative Party were faced with the economic call of the century and they called it wrong”, was a damningly accurate blow which conveniently camouflaged responsibility for the crisis in the first place.
In a speech that dwelled more on the theme of Labour values than the immediate press response gave credit, there was a telling reference which placed more clear water between the Tories and Labour. To pay for our schools, hospitals and police, choices will have to be made about public spending and taxation, Mr Brown said, pledging that frontline services would be protected, contrary to what the Tories propose. The Tories, he said, would make deeply damaging cuts to the social fabric, not because they feel economically they have to, but because “these are spending cuts they are making because they want to”.
The list of policy announcements was delivered in language – “I am sick and tired of others playing by different rules or no rules at all” – which should please Daily Mail-reading voters in middle England, while some – the apparent reversal on national identity cards, recall for MPs proven to have committed fraud, which would apply to none of those caught up in the expenses scandal – carried more symbolism than credibility. But the establishment of a national care service is a step that will be universally appreciated, as will the free childcare for two-year-olds. The promise of a referendum on the voting system neatly addresses public concern about the worth of their vote while deferring any action until the next election is decided.
“Dream no small dreams,” Mr Brown said. Just, perhaps, impossible ones.
