PENNY DROPS FOR POLLY

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and today Polly Toynbee sticks the boot into Gordon Brown good and proper. This, remember, is the woman who gets paid shedloads to bang on about how great New Labour is . The one who (rightly) told us to hold our noses and elect a labour Government in 2005. It's only a matter of months since she was extolling the virtues of GB week after mind-numbingly boring week .Well, now, the penny has finally dropped. We've been sold a right-wing pup.
Polly's chagrin was echoed this week by Mr Compass Neal Lawson, who seems similarly dismayed that his man has not turned out to be the closet social democrat he thought he was. I didn't see This Week, but I understand Dianne Abbott, another erstwhile flag-waver for Brown ( despite her membership of the Campaign Group) , was being similarly lukewarm.
What was there not to get ? Brown made it quite clear BEFORE he became prime Minister where he stood on the economy, as an "evangelist for globalisation" believer in "flexible" workforces, no time for the "old politics" . In short, New Labour to the very core of his Presbyterian soul. Yet now, like spurned lovers, these apparently expert political pundits stand back in horror and realise they got it wrong. As Toynbee says:
"We now have a centrist government in Europe's most unequal country. Our government stands somewhat to the right of Angela Merkel's coalition in Germany, to the right of economic policy in France, where Nicolas Sarkozy has absorbed social democrats. Fusion politics, like fusion music and food, is one description of this strange death of the centre-left. At least in Europe there are leftwing parties still to make the public arguments: in England, due to our malfunctioning electoral system, a political generation has barely heard the case for social justice. " Too late, Polly, too late.....