Gordon Brown has been in power as prime minister for over 100 days now and as a nation we are starting to get a feel as to what our ex-chancellor has in store for us. On first impressions, Brown appears to be a welcome step-up from Tony Blair, who had been gradually losing support from the electorate over the past few years due to his handling of September 11, military campaigns in Iraq, and a few ill-considered decisions that he made without consultation with his Cabinet.
However, Blair’s reign did bring us one of the longest periods of economic growth in Britain’s history, as well as big spending in schools and hospitals, in addition to being the only Labour prime minister to have won three general elections, and having served more than one full consecutive term. The question is: Is Gordon Brown the man to turn this country around?
He has already illustrated the differences between him and Blair by reshuffling his Cabinet as to how he believes will benefit Britain’s future. He began his term by giving a speech outside 10 Downing Street stating, “Let the work of change begin… I will try my utmost. This is my promise to all of the people of Britain.”
Brown is certainly emitting a strong, patriotic image of working for ‘the people,’ and has spoken about issues that he aims to amend so that, “If we can fulfil the potential and realise the talents of all our people them I’m sure that Britain can be the great global success story of this century.” He has already stated plans for suppressing union anger of the British workforce because more and more British people feel that they are unemployed, and that their possible job opportunities are going to cheap foreign labour; Brown has promised to find an “extra 500,000 British jobs for British workers.”
The new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, compared Blair and Brown recently and said “Tony was the right leader in 1994, Gordon is the right leader today. It feels right. Gordon is defining his own style of leadership, which is right for the time and right for him.”
However, the first downfall with Brown emerged a few days ago at his controversial decision not to call a general election on November 1. When interviewed about his decision by the BBC’s Andrew Marr, the strong figure faltered and stumbled his way through the interview, trying to justify that he did not decide against the election because of the drop in the Labour polls.
If Brown wants to be respected and believed as our prime minister, he must make some changes and gain the public’s trust. Hopefully, the country will have the privilege of seeing the man that Miliband describes as “a man of depth – deep values, deep vision, deep sense of the future of the country, deep intellect, deep humanity.’
1 comment:
I was slightly worried at the thought of having to write an article about Gordon Brown and his time in power because I have never been a keen fan of politics.
Therefore I felt the most important thing for me to do was to make sure I had accuracy of facts, and conviction in any ideas I was putting across.
My first move was to research through newspapers since he had come into power and find any relevant articles describing his performance, and any articles portraying how Tony Blair had been as a prime minister.
It was then easy enough for me to have an idea of what angle I was going to take. The angle of my article actually changed because when I was first given the assignment and researched it, I felt that I was going to mainly praise Gordon Brown, as I found a brilliant interview with David Milliband with some very useful quotes to use.
However the day before I had put pen to paper, Gordon Brown decided not to call an election as expected and this news actually allowed my article to be more balanced.
I was very pleased with the finished project, as I previously had very little knowledge of the political world.
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