{"id":139,"date":"2009-07-20T12:56:51","date_gmt":"2009-07-20T16:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=139"},"modified":"2012-07-08T10:46:49","modified_gmt":"2012-07-08T15:46:49","slug":"i-look-forward-to-gordon-browns-paul-martin-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/07\/20\/i-look-forward-to-gordon-browns-paul-martin-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"I look forward to Gordon Brown’s “Paul Martin” moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those of you who have already forgotten the premiership of Paul Martin, one of the most striking moments of his term in office was his leaving of it. His final speech, after the election results were in, was the best speech I think he ever made. There was a jauntiness, a cheerfulness in his voice that had been totally lacking at any point before that. After a successful term as Finance Minister under Jean Chr\u00e9tien, Martin, like Gordon Brown, couldn’t wait to get the current PM out the door. <\/p>\n

Martin, for all his faults, was not the ongoing disaster for his party and country that Brown has been. Martin also knew when to bow out. Brown has not been willing to go — and has been unwilling to risk the opinions of the electorate in a general election. Yet.<\/p>\n

Christopher Hitchens<\/a> looks at the wreckage:<\/p>\n

\n

Early this past June it became hard to distinguish among the resignation statements that were emanating almost daily from Prime Minister Gordon Brown\u2019s Cabinet. The noise of collapsing scenery drowned out the individuality of the letters — one female minister, I remember, complained that she was being used as \u201cwindow dressing\u201d — but there was one missive from a departing comrade that caught my eye. It came from James Purnell, a man generally agreed to have done a more than respectable job as minister for work and pensions, and it began like this:<\/p>\n

Dear Gordon,
\nWe both love the Labour Party. I have worked for it for twenty years and you for far longer. We know we owe it everything and it owes us nothing . . .<\/em><\/p>\n

I sat back in my chair. Yes, it\u2019s true. One suddenly could recall a time when membership in the Labour Party (or \u201cthe Labour movement,\u201d as it would call itself on great occasions) was a thing of pride. [. . .]<\/p>\n

The true definition of corruption, it seems to me, is the diversion of public resources to private or politicized ends [. . .] There are other and lesser definitions, such as milking the public purse or abusing the public trust by \u201ccreative accounting.\u201d The cloudburst of lurid detail about the expenses racket, which has made the current Parliament into an object of scorn and loathing, is a cloudburst that has soaked members of all parties equally. However, the Brownite style is by far the most culpable. It was Brown\u2019s people who foisted a Speaker on the House of Commons who both indulged the scandal and obstructed a full ventilation of it. As if that weren\u2019t bad enough, Gordon Brown still resists any call to dissolve this wretched Parliament — a Parliament that is almost audibly moaning to be put out of its misery and shame — because he still isn\u2019t prepared to undergo the great test of being submitted to the electorate. Say what you will about Tony Blair, he took on all the other parties in three hard-fought general elections, and when it was considered time for him to give way or step down, he voluntarily did so while some people could still ask, \u201cWhy are you going?,\u201d rather than \u201cWhy the hell don\u2019t you go?\u201d For the collapse of Britain\u2019s formerly jaunty and spendthrift \u201cfinancial sector,\u201d everybody including Blair is to blame. But for the contempt in which Parliament is held, and in which a once great party now shares, it\u2019s Blair\u2019s successor who is the lugubrious villain.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Ghost of a Flea<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those of you who have already forgotten the premiership of Paul Martin, one of the most striking moments of his term in office was his leaving of it. His final speech, after the election results were in, was the best speech I think he ever made. There was a jauntiness, a cheerfulness in his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,53],"tags":[363,77,834,769,770,76,78],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-corruption","tag-ego","tag-gordonbrown","tag-jeanchretien","tag-paulmartin","tag-socialism","tag-tonyblair"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2f","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15907,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/15907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}