The Brown Stuff?

For more than 30 years, I have done more than anyone else who was still alive to publicise the scandal of Harriet Harman and the Paedophile Information Exchange. But no, Gordon Brown did not deprive the Exchequer of £44.05 billion in revenue were it to have sold its gold reserves now. A sovereign state with its own free-floating fiat currency has no need of such reserves, no one objected at the time, none of this could have been predicted then, Labour won the next two General Elections, Brown became Prime Minister in that third term, and he might have remained so if he had been properly supported by those on his own side who instead refused to accept the legitimacy of any Leadership or Premiership except that of Tony Blair, but who would settle provisionally for David Cameron.

Brown, though, can become mired in a certain sentimental idea of Scottishness. There is also such an idea of Welshness, and comparable forms of sentimentality in several parts of England, including this one, where the electoral reality, insofar as it ever did bear them out, either no longer did, or very soon will not. Reform UK has become the Official Opposition in Wales while tying with Labour for that status in Scotland. So much for everything that the English Nationalist Right, hitherto Reform’s electoral and media base, had always said about Scotland and Wales. And so much for everything that the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish Labour Party and the Welsh Labour Party had always said about Scotland and Wales, too.