(Thursday 4 June 2009)
Britain's got problems...
It's a hard heart that can't feel a little sorry for a shy and introverted would-be diva from a small town in Scotland who dreamed furiously of playing the lead role on the London stage.
And who after many years won the chance to perform for the top prize of approval by the voting public, but then saw that expected triumph vanish in the chaos of despair.
No, I am not asking you to feel sorry for Gordon Brown.
Save your sympathy for Susan Boyle, who apparently became the most downloaded woman in history and had been tipped to win Britain's Got Talent. She is now in The Priory clinic being treated for "exhaustion."
Brown, though, is about to replicate Boyle's implosion.
The European elections are slated to deliver Labour's worst-ever election result.
Assuming Brown survives as Labour leader until the general election - which must happen within the next year - it seems he is doomed, with much bigger consequences for us all.
Instead of leaving the nation with some songs nicely sung, he'll be leaving us with a Tory government the likes of which made us collectively say "never again" in 1997.
I never bought into the Blairist myth that it was Blair who won the 1997 election for Labour. John Smith, had he lived, would certainly have won that election. Almost anyone would have.
In 1997 people would have voted for any Labour leader because they were voting against 18 years of dismal Tory misrule. They were voting against clear Tory sleaze in government. And they were saying never again.
The problem we have today is that they are now about to vote against 13 years of Labour misrule.
Despite an increase in public spending - and we owe some thanks to Brown as chancellor for that at least - we have seen growing inequality, privatisation, deregulation and disastrous wars on the basis of lies and deceit.
We can catalogue these disasters of new Labour, which we as socialists fought against, and wish that the outcomes had been different. But we still face the harsh truth now - if not Labour, then the Tories.
There isn't a left party out there which can challenge for government. There isn't, despite the collapse and even nationalisation of capitalist institutions, a revolutionary situation.
However, there is a huge appetite for democratic change.
I did actually almost feel a little sorry for Brown was this week when he came out of the bunker to say he was planning to set up a national council for democratic renewal - only to find that Alistair Darling's expenses was the story, and that front-bench ministers were hitting the deck faster that you could look up who they were on Wikipedia.
The Brown plan for democratic renewal, if it were to be taken seriously and make a difference, would have to be not just about the rules of the House of Commons. It would have to take on the system of elections and government in Britain.
A written constitution and bill of rights would be great - an elected House of Lords even more so.
But the electoral system is the crucial point. If Brown's national council for democratic renewal is going to work, it needs to meet two objectives.
First, it has to be open to - and preferably led by - the representative bodies of civic society, just like the Scottish constitutional convention in the 1990s, which achieved our democratic settlement and the Holyrood Parliament, which now command wide support.
More recently the Calman commission has shown a good example of how to conduct cross-party and broadly based consultation in its work on extending the powers on the Scottish Parliament.
Second, and like the Scottish constitutional convention, it has to confront the issue of proportional representation.
I am an agnostic about electoral systems, although I do know that the current one is probably the worst.
First past the post can only be fair and just if there are two parties contending. One wins a majority and that's that. As soon as there are more than two parties, it doesn't give fair results.
Worse, it leads to the kind of dismal relationship between government and governed which has characterised the last 30 years, since 1979.
Neither Margaret Thatcher nor Blair ever commanded a majority among the people - never more than 44 per cent - but they wielded almost absolute power, with disastrous consequences.
There is already a plan for PR in Britain. The Jenkins commission set up by Labour in 1997 recommended a form of alternative vote system, with additional top-up from party lists to get closer to proportionality.
Blair decided to kick it into the long grass, not just because he didn't need to worry as he had a huge majority but because Labour MPs have traditionally been hostile to PR, and he didn't fancy a fight over it.
There will be a fight in the Labour Party for sure if Brown proposes PR.
But Donald Dewar, then Scottish Labour leader, didn't propose PR in the 1990s. It was brokered by the convention in order to achieve consensus. The outcome proved very popular.
To the extent that a national council for democratic renewal can replicate the success of the Scottish constitutional convention, it may offer Brown's last chance to rescue his failing leadership, and also save us from more Thatcherite or Blairite misrule under David Cameron.
The problem for Brown - and all of us - is that he doesn't have much time left to make history.
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