The flurry of excitement from bloggers writing about the events of the last few months is starting to dry up. There is a dullness descending on events. There is no dramatic tension, no sense of possibility, only the sure sickening knowledge that it could take a long time before Britain is freed from the slide into corruption and hopelessness that the Brown regime signifies. The only flurries of excitement come from news which means the Brown regime might end quicker.
Brown's flawed. He's not an actor, a showman, who gives out energy. He's a sponge who absorbs all the juices out of the people around him, as he neutralises initiative. He's a black hole. No one is allowed to shine bright lights which would immediately expose his dullness and slowness of thinking. He is there, not to give out to people, but to receive, to take in credit for the successes of others, and to deny responsibility for his own failures. He's the total opposite of a leader.
His understanding of people is non-existent. He thinks in money. He understands the language of donors giving and getting value. He thinks that public services can be treated the same way. Give them cash, and they will give service.
His understanding of business and enterprise is also flawed. He imagines the minds of people running businesses as calculating machines determined to produce the highest figure in profit that they can. He has a one-dimensional view of the society he is responsible for. He sees only cash.
People do not look only at money. They have other needs, emotional needs that are powerfully motivational - the need to give of what they have, to feel that their lives are worth something, to belong, to have an identity and a purpose, to feel secure and safe, to be able to relax, to take risks when there is a feeling of possibility, a prospect of creating something better than what has come before. To Gordon Brown, none of these emotions exists.
That is why he cannot manage. He doesn't understand that you look at the total picture, that before people need money, they need confidence to keep functioning, to keep borrowing, lending and building.
The Northern Rock is where Brownite philosophy declares its incompetence most loudly. First Brown and Darling allowed the markets to cease functioning, by not reacting to events, which killed confidence. Then they they intervened in a way that was guaranteed to bring crisis. And then they had no options available other than pumping in all the money needed to prevent collapse. Had they nurtured the confidence of the marketplace, of all the people involved, the catastrophy would never have happened. Now it's a UKL30 billion black hole which gets larger every week.
Brown is a tragedy for Britain. That's why Donorgate is biting so hard on the public's imagination. If people felt happy with how the country was being run, they wouldn't care much about the sleazy practices that Brown likes to engage in - as with the Smith Institute, and the maintenance of a few favoured cronies. After all Blair was little different in his deceitful fund-raising, but Blair, for all his faults gave out an aura of confidence, and enabled others he never met to ride on the tide.
It's because Brown's not giving people what they need emotionally, the confidence, the feeling of possibility, the feeling that someone cares about them up top (whether leaders ever do is a moot point, but some are able to make people think they care), and into this emotional void, the creepers and leapers see their moment to advance. They only have to do something to please the oversensitive Brown ego, and their advance and promotion is assured.
People feel the moral vacuum. They see the government milking good news as if they are the only issue of the day. This is why people will listen to anti-Brown news, while anti-Blair news never got very far. In all his years Brown has never learned how to seduce and that the customer has to come first.
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