Fitaloon at MicroShaft

I have been saying for a while that Labour is paralysed with Brown at the helm, Jenni Russell at the Guardian agrees and with some devastating stories.

Try this one, read in shock at how this man behaves, and just remember he is our Prime Minister now. No wonder Frank Field said “you can’t let Mrs Rochester out of the attic”.

One of the many people who has witnessed Brown’s tantrums is a man who spent a considerable time advising the government on one of its policies. He told me how he went to brief Brown, then chancellor, on the implications. The adviser – a sophisticated man, accustomed to professionalism and good manners even at times of stress – could not believe what happened next.

He’d had very few encounters with Brown in his life, and he was expecting to have a civilised, thoughtful discussion about the details and consequences of the proposal. Instead he encountered a glowering chancellor, puce with fury, who within minutes was picking up pieces of paper from his desk, rolling them into balls, and throwing them at the adviser’s head, screaming: “You’ve fucked up my political career!” Even an outsider was not immune from being treated with complete contempt.

This was not a leader making a judgment about what’s best for the country. This was a man behaving like a spoilt three-year-old, concerned only with getting what would further his own ambitions. And that is the truth about Brown, for all his claims about his good character and his tiresome references to what he learned from his clergyman father. His chief concern is, and always has been, the progression of his own career.

As Jenni Russell says at the start

Far from being irrelevant, Brown’s behaviour explains much about Labour’s indecisive and ineffectual governance under him

Brown’s bullying has paralysed Labour | Jenni Russell | Comment is free | The Guardian.

Jenni Russell writing for Comment is Free in the Guardian believes that Labour’s great mistake is to think we are all automatons.

She starts out with the issue of  why Labour Politicians and advisor’s are whining. Apparently, these people want to know, why aren’t the electorate more grateful for what’s been done for them? They have spent all our money on us  and still we aren’t happy and are going to turn to the Tories.

Jenni thinks, and I would agree, that much of the reason is because

we’re not the automatons New Labour thought we were. We’re not remote and dispassionate observers of our society, making cool calculations about its success or failure on the basis of government-generated numbers. We’re complicated, vulnerable, emotional creatures, and we live with the consequences of official decision-making every day of our lives. What matters to us aren’t the figures we’re fed, or the targets that get hit, but what the experience feels like to us. Yet that part of the process has been almost completely neglected in official eyes.

Basically it’s not the statistics its how we are treated.

Jenni finishes off with the following:

When it wonders why we’re not grateful to it, the answer’s really simple. It’s the experience, stupid.

It’s a a good article and highlights the gross stupidity of the government and it’s chief statistician Gordon Brown.

This is the man who has asked for all numbers and who prizes them alongside his formidable range of tractor production figures. Whenever he is questioned about something, he always has the statistic at hand to indicate it’s all working and so much better than under the Tories.

The problem is that Gordon seldom ever goes out into the Real World and experiences his statistics.  Maybe he can go out to the Front Line in Afghanistan and see how his statistic of 60% extra helicopter hours is working out for the Armed Forces, then he might realise that not everything can be measured by numbers.

New Labour’s great mistake is to think we are all automatons | Jenni Russell | Comment is free | The Guardian.