IN THE mid-Nineties, after Gordon Brown had been beaten to the Labour leadership by Tony Blair, he was often to be found, licking his wounds and nursing his grievances, in the penthouse apartment of Geoffrey Robinson, a fellow Labour MP who had made a fortune in business.

Around himself Brown gathered a close-knit clan of supporters. The two foremost members were Ed Balls, his bumptious chief economic adviser, and Charlie Whelan, his fearsome press secretary.

As they ate pizza, drank beer and watched football in Robinson’s splendid eyrie, the Brown-ites set down a series of strategic objectives. The first was to ensure that Blair won the looming 1997 general election so Brown became Chancellor.

The second was to get rid of Blair so that Brown would become prime minister. The third was to implement a socialist economy once the Tories had been beaten. Some 15 years later the very same Brown gang has completed its first two objectives and believes it could be on the verge of implementing the third. And the key personnel are unchanged.

Balls, now Schools Secretary, is being lined up to become the tax-raising Chancellor in a fourth Labour term. Whelan, mean- while, has reinvented himself as the most politically influential trade unionist since Jack Jones. As political director of the “super union” Unite, he has helped direct £11million into Labour coffers in the past four years, money that kept the party out of bankruptcy.

The Brownites achieved their first objective quickly and with ease – working together with such equally ruthless Blairites as Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, to obliterate John Major’s Tories. But the second objective took far longer.

Despite arranging the political assassination of Mandelson, keeping Blair in the dark over public spending and tax plans, generally humiliating him, blocking reforms to public services and appealing to the Labour left, it took the Brownites until 2007 to get him out of Downing Street. But it is a tribute to their sheer hunger for power that they got him out in the end.

When Blair announced in autumn 2004 that he would after all fight a third general election but not a fourth, it was taken by some commentators as a final blow to Brown’s hopes of the succession. The Brown gang knew otherwise – realising that the moment the 2005 election was won Blair would become a lame duck. They simply had to ensure that no other leadership contender emerged in the interim. Such a task proved easily within their grasp with the Cabinet careers of prominent Blairites such as David Blunkett, Alan Milburn and Charles Clarke all being brought to a premature end.

Now the Brownites feel their most audacious objective of all is up for grabs: entrenching a socialist economy where the public sector is responsible for almost half of all economic activity and redistributes huge sums of money from those who have worked for it to those who have not via very high taxes that command the support of an electorate increasingly dependent on the state.

Balls was a key player in forcing the current Chancellor, Alistair Darling, to unveil a new 50p in the pound top rate of tax in direct contravention of the party’s 2005 election manifesto. Along with his wife, Work and Pensions Secretary Yvette Cooper, he argued for the punitive rate to apply to all incomes above £100,000 rather than the £150,000 threshold that was eventually settled upon.

But Whitehall sources say Balls intends to bring down the threshold drastically once he is in charge at the Treasury, not just to £100,000 but possibly to £50,000. That would catch many middle-class professionals. A host of other tax measures – many aimed at motorists – will make sure that anyone earning a decent living is forced to fund the rolling forward of the frontiers of the state.

The big spending ideas of Balls were a key reason for Britain entering the recession in a weakened condition. He advised Brown to run huge public spending deficits when the world economy was booming and the Government should have been paying off debt.

More than £120billion was added to the national debt in a six-year period as Balls decided that increasing the power of the state and presenting Brown as the protector of “old Labour” were more important objectives than keeping the public finances in good order.

If Labour wins the election, the future belongs to him. Come May 7, if Brown is still in Downing Street and his co-conspirator Balls takes charge of the Treasury, Whelan will begin calling in Labour’s IOUs to Unite. The union expects to have more than 100 Labour MPs directly affiliated to it, including scores of its former officials. Among their number will be its deputy general secretary Jack Drome (aka Mr Harriet Harman).

The union is currently demonstrating its immense industrial muscle via the British Airways dispute. Dromey, Whelan and co are using a demoralised workforce as a pawn in a larger political game. Do not be surprised if Brown is seen to miraculously broker a compromise that leads to the strike being suspended. With Whelan directing operations there will be no prospect whatever of Labour reducing public sector running costs.

A future of strikes and inflationary pay awards beckons. As for pensions reform in the public sector – forget it. Some of the more sane Labour ministers are in despair about the hoodlum nature of this Government.“Brown cannot overcome his original gang mentality. In fact he is not remotely interested in doing so. He still thinks he is leading a faction rather than leading a nation,” says one. If Britain is not careful, come May 7 he will be doing both.

Source: Express.co.uk
By Patrick O'Flynn