FinancialSurvival

Hold the presses, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized. This is not something anyone can remember, and it was a little frightening.

This might well be the beginning of the end game for the Prime Minister’s loosening grip on his seal of office. Looking more relaxed than has been the case in the recent past he even smiled at some of the forceful questioning he was confronted with during several tough interview sessions over the last couple of days.

I think he’s smiling because he knows how desperate his political situation has become and realizing that the game is up has at last relaxed with the shrug of the shoulders a person about to get executed might display.

Perversely Brown is much more likeable when he relaxes and has a script he’s happy with. That script is based around the hypothesis that his government has done a great, solid, dependable job, that the problems are global and therefore the solution has to also be global but that the UK is singularly well placed to recover.

The British Labour Party is holding its annual conference in Manchester, England this week. It is sandwiched between the Liberal-Democrats and the Conservatives and usually it heralds the announcement of new initiatives, fresh beginnings and re-launches. This time around Gordon Brown will be thrilled to come out in one piece.

“I want to do better”, Gordon Brown said; admittedly he couldn’t do much worse in the eyes of most of the population. He went on to say, “I always want to do better. My school motto was, I must try my utmost”. This is the first time many of us can remember Mister Brown ever admitting that he is fallible so openly.

This is a testing time and no one yet knows whether Gordon Brown is made of the right stuff to pass that test. He is going to find it very difficult to convince the country that he will pull the nation through,

The crisis is in the Labour leadership according to Charles Clarke, a former Senior Minister, and no friend of his old adversary, is Brown himself. Clarke’s view is that he believes the leader must resign to give the party and the nation a leadership it will believe in. Or put it another way; give Labour a chance to recover in time for the election after next, as he has already written off his Party’s chances for the next contest.

The doubters will have their say, but at the conference there are more that will back him this week than not. Brown is clearly correct about one thing, this is a global crisis, not of his or Britain’s making. He will make it though this week, and to be honest the nation and the world needs stolid men like this right now.

Within the Labour Party there is no credible threat to Brown’s leadership, but this doesn’t mean there won’t be a threat to it after the conference. Right now no one is going to put his or her head over the parapet; but the time will come.

Next on the firing line was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling who appeared on this morning’s breakfast television. He still hasn’t worked out that his cause would be better served by his acquiring rudimentary communication skills. He is awful at the most basic question and answer technique without which modern politicians cannot survive.

The rather gentle interviewer on GMTV asked Darling 4 times whether he would rule out tax increases to pay for the present difficulties and he would not utter the words, “Yes” or “No”.

Quite clearly he cannot give an absolute reply right now, and he would be wrong to do so, but couldn’t he just say, “We have a problem, and I’ll do my best to keep taxes down but honestly no one knows the answer to that question just yet.”

I am not sure whether Brown and Darling’s recent pronouncements mean that they were not aware of the kinds of trades being undertaken and consequential bonuses given over the last few years in the City of London, or whether they were aware, and simply thought them OK. Either way they are culpable, probably to a greater extent if they knew and did nothing and are hypocritically now blaming their former City cronies.

Watching these two men, who run our country you are not filled with confidence and this is ironic since their performance improved since the Northern Rock fiasco. They seem to have been consistently in advance of their American colleagues reaction, which has been a bit too slow at times.

The economic and political price of the actions being taken at both edges of the Atlantic Anglo-Saxon financial world are yet to be known, but the price for inaction would have been catastrophic and unthinkable. The end game is still cloudy and undecided but there might be a glimmer of light if everyone now remembers the route to financial survival is to hold his or her nerve.