RMT Ticket S ation S tivers port support ort @eaner the cleane iners "punching above its weight".
The economy is teetering on the edge - with interest rates and inflation hitting their highest for a decade. Inequality is higher than before and poverty is on the up again. And while a 2 per cent public sector wage freeze prompted strike action by civil servants and threatens confrontation by other public sector workers - the richest 1,000 saw their income rise by 20 percent last year.
Then there is the endless prison crisis, a decade in the making and a pure product of the government's neoliberal authoritarianism.
And corruption scandals gather pace with the abandoning of a bribery investigation into BAe and the police recommending prosecutions of two of Blair's closest aides and a leading party fund-raiser.
Despite talk of Brown "reconnecting with the party and the voters" his pitch is likely to be "steady as she goes» and "better the devil you know".
Jettisoning past claims to core values, his premiership will be low on propaganda -a technocratic government that fine tunes.
One exception seems to be greater use of the word "equality". But this was already a New Labour promise. And it wasn't delivered. The notion that
Cleaners • need a Living wage Brown's will be a weak government, lacking enthusiastic backing from the Blairite vanguardists or an increasingly disillusioned labour movement. The question is: can the left take advantage? Brown - as the one man most responsible for it - has only just woken up to raging inequality is a joke.
We are being promised "reviews" on Iraq and housing. The former amusingly to be co-sponsored by the same Channel Four that brought Big Brother into our lives.
Far from leading from the front with bold policy initiatives, Brown will find his comfort zone in the new transatlantic dispensation, with a Sarkozy-US Democrat realignment searching for a new post-raq pax Americana
The housing crisis, precipitated by a virtual halt to the building of "social housing" combined with house price inflation that is the highest in the developed world has been fuelled by a decade of Brown's economic stewardship.
Only the most radical Uturn could tackle this in the short to medium term.
Brown grabs the reins without as much as a parliamentary vote, let alone a general election (George Bush eat your heart out). It will be a weak government, lacking enthusiastic backing from either the Blairite vanguardists or an increasingly disillusioned labour movement. The question is: can the left take advantage of the opening this offers, in building an alternative? Following Michael Meacher's agreement to stand down in his favour, left wing hopes ride on John McDonnell's campaign for the Labour leadership against front-runner Gordon Brown.
Unlike Meacher, who spent 20 years on Labour's front bench and was in Blair's government until 2003, voting for many of the government's most divisive and reactionary policies including the Iraq war, McDonnell has been consistent over many years in taking on the hard issues, and has been hard at work laying the basis for his challenge since last summer, with an appeal based on six key planks of principle:
• Withdrawal of British troops from Iraq
• End to privatisation
• Abolition of student tuition fees and full support for comprehensive education
• Restoration of civil liberties and trade union rights
• A green energy policy based on renewable power sources
• Increase in Basic State Pension and immediate restoration of the earnings link.
Mr McDonnell, launching his bid last year, said:
"We worked hard for 18 years to get a Labour Government. I did not work for 18 years to elect a Labour Government that's privatised more jobs in nine years than the Tories did in nearly 20."
His CD sized manifesto "Another World is Possible" is explicitly socialist in its aspirations. McDonnell's challenge opens up a new political debate in the labour movement and offers a chance to put many union leaders on the spot.
Cruddas has cultivated the image of left wing rebel but
is backed by
far from left union leaders