A Strategic Blunder by a Prime Minister Living in a Fantasy World

Gordon Brown is an intelligent man but I’ve always thought him a better tactician than strategist. His speech to the Labour party conference yesterday confirmed that view and, indeed, strengthened it. Consider this passage from Jonathan Freedland’s column today:

The Brownites always loathed Blair’s “respect agenda”, regarding anti-social behaviour orders as dismal and sacking Blair’s respect tsar. But Brown devoted a full page and a half of today’s text to the topic, more than on foreign policy, defence and climate change combined.

So there were crowd-pleasing promises to crack down on Britain’s “50,000 most chaotic families” and to set up “supervised homes” for teenage mothers. Shades of the Magdalene Sisters, but such talk has focus-grouped well, and, I’m told, Labour’s polling suggests voters are sick and tired of doing their bit only to see others “play by different rules or no rules at all”, as Brown put it.

In so doing, the prime minister duly revived what had been one of New Labour’s defining ideas, captured in that slogan conceived by Brown and delivered by Blair: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”