Across the pond

Seeing Brown strutting his stuff in Washington today with the new American President, and getting a most courteous reception, plunged me into depression.

Gordon still does not get it. He was not even elected by the British people to lead them. But he was properly elected by democratic processes as one of the main architects of New Labour, along with Tony Blair. But today, and tomorrow, when he addresses the US Congress, he is bidding for the leadership of the world, which is facing a grave financial crisis.

This blog, and most media commentators, have applauded Brown’s efforts to deal with the serious recession the world is now facing. But the opinion polls in Britain show that Brown is distrusted by the electorate and that if there were an election tomorrow he would lose.

Because the electorate remembers that Brown, even more than Blair, was cosy, cosy with the City bankers and business tycoons, like Rupert Murdoch.

Including such mis-guided honest men, like Fred the Shed, who is currently insisting on collecting a pension of £12 million, although he admits that the company he led, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was bankrupted by his leadership.

Fred has probably done nothing illegal. So that the only hope of getting him to forgo the obscene rewards he is asking for his failure, is a moral one. And the only person who can possibly move him, is the British Prime Minister, who can can make a moral argument.

But, as I realised tonight, Gordon Brown must apologise first. He played a vital part in nurturing the likes of Fred the Shed, in taking millions for doing an honest day’s work, although he, Gordon, is a son of the manse, and a life-long Labour supporter.

He should be preparing the party he leads to choose a new leader. A leader who has learnt from the mistakes he made, and Blair and the rest of the New Labour crowd, made.

Businessmen are required by law to further the interests of shareholders. Prime Ministers are elected to further the interests of their countries.

Fred the Shed is getting a lot of stick at the moment because he is in the news. But he has behaved in exactly the same way as hundreds of other bankers and top managers. Demanding salaries of millions, because they knew so much better than you and I, what to do.

We now know that most of them were just caught up in hubris. They thought they had the Midas Plus touch. They thought they could change the shareholders’ money into gold, because, unlike Midas, who failed, they were succeeding.

Fred the Shed, I believe from what I know of him, is a decent human being. Although he has a huge bank balance, I don’t think there is any possibility that he is going to enjoy it.

And I don’t know how he is going to live with the growing realisation that his children and his grand-children will have to grow up in the knowledge that they have been reared on the proceeds of these obscene gains.

And they are obscene gains. Not because Fred is immoral. On the contrary, his reputation was made because he exposed corruption in the financial community.

And although the rewards he is now claiming are even greater than those plumbers are demanding of the middle classes, he does not think them excessive. Becaue hundreds of banking and other employees have been demanding simiiar huge rewards for doing an honest day’s work.

Not risking their capital.

But for an honest day’s work.

Perhaps New ‘New Labour’ should be demanding a maximum wage alongside the now established (well, more or less) minimum wage.

If Labour, or the Cameron Conservatives, or the LibDems, can zone in on that, I think they may do more for the special relationship between Britain and the US than GB is currently doing.