Political Edge
Here’s a question. What has everyone in Brown’s new cabinet got in common? Answer- Not one of them is less than 45 years old. Is this really the refreshing new cabinet the party so urgently needs? It seems like it’s almost game over for Labour. After the Local Council results of last weekend coming in worse than even the harshest critic predicted, there’s no saying whether a general election will be next year or next week.
The much anticipated cabinet reshuffle was probably Brown’s last real chance to save himself and his party, and it seems like he’s made some pretty awful calls. Sure, 45 is young in politics (let’s not forget 47-year-old Obama’s bad press over his own age), but filling a new cabinet with well known figures is just going to leave Labour looking a bit stale in the eyes of the electorate.
Labour is going to lose the next election. This much seems pretty certain. Knowing this, surely it makes more sense for Brown to fill the cabinet with relative unknowns? Nothing the cabinet can do could fix the financial crisis, and the situation can’t exactly get worse for Labour, so Brown should have taken the chance to shape the party’s future leadership and given some unknown MPs the chance to experience being in government.And what is there to lose? He’s all out of political capital, so why not appoint the people he really wants? Getting backbenchers who will attempt to implement the policies he really wants, even if they won’t be the most popular, could be his last chance to achieve the things he really wanted to.
It will, after all, only be a ‘new’ New Labour that will give the party any chance of winning. Labour is going down and out, and Brown’s decisions now should be for preservation of the party. A complete facelift is exactly what Labour needs. The appointments he makes will decide how long exactly the party will be down for.
The Tories had the same problem in the 90s. Leaving the same old figures in office meant the public couldn’t see any hope for change, and the party was left flailing for a whole decade trying to get some new blood to re-invigorate. Let’s not pretend that a cabinet of experienced Labour ministers can change the mistakes of the past. Maybe Brown should have spent time thinking of ways to solve his problems for the future.
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