Sir Alec Douglas-Home was a Scotsman. Ummm - so was James the First and Sixth.
Churchill was half-American, err, OK Blair has Scots ancenstory, Disraeli was Jewish, crumbs. Hells teeth
To be honest, Gordon Brown is a son of the Manse - from Fife - and I’m kinda looking forward to his stint at number 10.
It is a bit odd to consider the name and history of old party leaders though - Blair, Campbell, and Cameron. - all good Scots names.
Blair went to Fettes school, which is very classy and is in Scotland
It is described as the Eton of Scotland.
You have to be a bit careful with Scottish accents, totally Scottish people can have standard English accents - similarly a person from Manchester might or might not have a Mancunian accent. Without wanting to be offensive, a lot of it is down to ‘class’ - or possibly wealth. Perhaps some is down to self identification.
I’m not that keen on Brown, I studied Economics and find everything he says a complete load of waffle. Either he is incoherent, or he does not want people to be able to understand him - probably both.
He inherited a stabilizing economy from Ken Clarke, in a period when world inflation and interest rates were falling.
Handing over responsibility for inflation to the Bank of England was quite a good idea, although it is a bit of a con as the BoE only has one tool at its disposal - the rate of interest. However the BoE is well aware that internal inflation is largely governed by ‘expectations’ so the Monetary Policy Committee sort of works, even though it is just a charade.
Sadly Economics deteriorates into ‘I believe in fairies’ - ie: mass psychology.
Also - the idea was not that original, the USA uses a similar approach, as did the Germans and now Europe - although they don’t make such a soap opera of it.
Brown has made sneak attacks increasing taxation, the pension fund assault is the most visible, but employers NI changes and squeezing local government and allowing them to dramatically increase local taxes has not helped.
There has also been a lot of dubious manipulation with ‘Private Finance Initiatives’ which boil down to the government paying through the nose for private companies borrowing on the government’s behalf.
Personally I find Brown quite disturbing, he does not often take a stand on things, but I’ve a nasty suspicion that under the surface he is an ‘Old Labour Class Warrier’.
I would not be at all surprized if Labour imploded on itself with Old Labour fighting New Labour.
@BrainGlutton in the 1930s we had an all party coalition, for some time Ramsay MacDonald (Labour) was Prime Minister with a Cabinet of largely Tories, and you are right during WWII the government was an all party coalition.
However, Conservatives and Labour are opposite ends of the spectrum, the chances of any form of coalition without a national emergency are so slim that they are not worth considering.
Officially the Conservatives support the Iraq involvement, unofficially I’ve fair reason to believe that they think it is a mess (I’ve a friend who is a member of the Carlton Club which is the Conservative Party’s watering hole in London - quite a nice place incidentally) and if his and his friends’ views are anything to go by, then nobody thinks much of Iraq and any show of support is because we don’t want to let down the USA - note not Bush, the USA in general - and that is just because of historical loyalty.
Cameron is a completely unknown quantity, nobody, apart from a few close cronies, knows what he is really up to. However he went to exactly the same college at the same Uni, with the same tutors, as I did - so I know how, and by whom, his views have been moulded - I went up nine years before him, but the same people were there until recently.
Actually I did not know that he got a first, that means that he worked like heck or is pretty bright. Probably the latter as I can’t see him having been interested in an academic career.
He is quite an interesting character, he has studied Politics and Economics under some pretty impressive tutors - his closest crony appears to be Boris Johnson who is famous for saying ‘It is an outrageous lie that I never took drugs at university’ - which is pretty good coming from someone who plays the part of a Tory blimp.
Personally I suspect that this ‘Green’ buffoonery is just a ruse to avoid exposing his cards - there is not much point in exposing your position until about 8 weeks before a general election - especially when the current government is sleepwalking its way out of office.
I would not be surprized if they came out with a radical platform of policies that will appeal to the electorate - I would also be unsurprized if they proved effective at implementing them - and good at administration.
For fun, compare and contrast
Gordon Brown’s school and
Tony Blair’s school!
