Proud, as ever, to be a small part of the Silverfish team behind this great Gordo film which had millions of views across social media.
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Tag Archives: Gordon Brown
Notes to AM – Resignation
12th May, 2010
Labour’s Love Lost
I would not trivialise your demise dear bro
with half-baked bons mots about that day or this
but I will say
What stunned me
– in the back of the car
crossing town for that brutal farewell –
what slapped me in the face
(and does today)
was the way
the world despite calamity carries on
oblivious.
There was your name
in bold blunt prison
behind Ham & High wire mesh
searing
and yet
the impudent business of living
– bastards standing at bus-stops –
went ridiculously on
as if any meaningful bus could ever –
a girl on her mobile
laughing
laughing?
another, taking leave, hand on hip, of a guy,
skirt stretched, one heel braking her wheeled suitcase
going somewhere
as if going somewhere
still meant anything
when we now know it’s just
going ridiculously on.
And later, when Downing Street called
it’s not that I wasn’t grateful
it’s that it was too late for prime ministerial tea
and sympathy to sugar the shock of earth’s outrageous turning
(he’s gone, by the way, I meant to say, your decent friend,
just yesterday, with two bonny lads and some dignity).
Of the numbing fractured kaleidoscope of that day’s images
one alone spoke sense:
Closing Down Sale
acknowledging as it did
resignation
acknowledging as we must
passing
heydays’ ebb and heydays’ flow
and look, here’s one again, on Oxford Street,
Everything Must Go.
Nick Clegg’s argument
27 April, 2010
1. If nobody wins the election outright, I might hold the balance of power.
2. If Labour and Gordon Brown come third, they will have “lost the election spectacularly”.
3. It would not be legitimate for anyone who had lost spectacularly to run the country, therefore I could not work with Gordon Brown.
4. However I could work with Labour, even if they had lost spectacularly – as long as I can choose the leader.
No smoke-filled-room power-broking for Nick Clegg, then.
Only fresh, new, principled politics.
Big Society? It’s not big, and it’s not clever.
Gordon Brown has recalled the Cabinet and, literally, marshalled the troops (or at least the ships) to start bringing our people home.
It’s, er, convenient that this mini crisis is happening now. No denying that. And I think there was some glee in Gordon’s voice when he mentioned Ark Royal was on its way.
But ask yourself these questions:
- is the guy at the car rental desk in Malaga or Paris or Rome who smirks as he quotes you 3000 euros for a hire-car the kind of guy who, in the UK, would vote Labour, or the kind of guy who’d vote Tory?
- is the guy who texted Radio 5 Live this morning and said people who travel should be prepared for contingency – and if they’re stuck they have only themselves to blame – the kind of guy who’d vote Labour, or the kind of guy who’d vote Tory?
- is the prime minister who would marshall the resources of our country to bring home ordinary people likely to be a Labour PM or a Tory one?
Come on people, it’s not hard.
When governments intervene, they set themselves up for all kinds of criticism. They make mistakes. They waste money. Doubtless they succumb to a little hubris from time to time.
But do we want someone to take action or not? Do we want someone to take responsibility for the big stuff or not? Do we want a society or not?
The Tories, cleverly, have hijacked the word ‘society’ with their ‘big idea’ of big society, small government. It’s a mind-game. Society and government are not two different things, in tension with each other. Government is just the organisation of decision-making by a mature society.
The ‘modern Conservative party’ (again, very clever use of words) is as clueless about what society means as Thatcher. She revelled in the notion that there was ‘no such thing.’ Now Cameron wants to repackage ‘every man for himself’ (or, let’s say, every bunch of disgruntled parents for themselves) as society.
It is, I’m afraid, the opposite.