The way that Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith have clung to their plan for extended detention (now reduced to 42 days from 90 in a kind of political closing down sale) is perversely admirable. Like those mad inventors who just will not be told that their combined fridge and tumble dryer will not sell, Brown has ploughed ahead in spite of almost limitless opposition from everyone but his most loyal Cabinet acolytes and a few Police Chiefs. They're hardly going to mention that they've never yet needed these powers, are they?
Well, he has blundered through the first hurdle in his bid to move UK law to the top of the draconian measures league table. But in truth it is a pyrrhic victory. So misbegotten is the concept that he has been forced to bully and bribe his Parliamentary colleagues to get it through. Following the £2.7 billion compensation package for the abolition of the 10p Tax Rate, he has been open to charges of bribing the electorate. To add the charge of bribing the DUP with £1.2billion in order to push this legislation forward to its inevitable failure in the second chamber is mind-bogglingly incompetent.
Brown was faced with a choice: back down and say you have listened to advice and are acting upon it, or press ahead at any cost. He chose to win the battle and lose the war. Whatever the qualms about his time as Chancellor (and I happen to prefer splashing out in an attempt to improve the lives of the vast majority to squirrelling away money to boost Corporate giants faced with a profit reduction when the wheel turns) no-one can be in any doubt now that he was far better suited to that than to strategic political leadership.
Doing just enough to avoid losing your job as you limp along toward an inevitable electoral massacre isn't in the interests of the Labour Party Gordon. But it's clear that the interests of the Labour Party or the people that they purport to represent stopped being a concern for you quite some time ago.
