Last night’s and today’s national media are full of comment on Gordon Brown’s failure to bow after laying his wreath at the Cenotaph at yesterday’s Remembrance Day ceremony.
We noticed it at once, have reviewed videos from several sources and there can be no doubt that he did not bow. The slight sideways duck of his head as he moves away is clearly only part of his movement to turn to go back to his position. His head has gone from direct address to the monument and his eyes are elsewhere.
How could he do this? This entire event distils to the simple gesture of the bow. It is a universal expression of respect for those who paid a price for us that we can only dumbly acknowledge. How is it possible to forget the one thing that the ceremony is all about?
Even a casual study of the Prime Minister these days provides the answer. This is not a man living in the moment, This is a man living deep in his head, perpetually obsessed with his own political condition.
He let Blair take us to Iraq. He carries responsibility for the many deaths on both sides caused in that conflict. He has presided over a regime which has knowingly under-resourced solders sent to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is there too responsible for many avoidable deaths.
All of those lives lost were being remembered, among those of all the fallen, yesterday, in a national expression of gratitude and respect echoed in local ceremonies across Britain.
Yet the Prime Minister could not put aside his preoccupation with himself for a brief moment to make physical that single required gesture of a debt acknowledged in humility.
This country, its dead and its living, deserve much better than this.
Update 22.05 9th November: We’ve just seen Gordon Brown speaking in Berlin at the ceremony to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago on 9th November 2009.
With no sense of irony, he thanked the people of Berlin for ‘sending a signal to the world that no injury, no crime, no abuse need endure for ever’.
Indeed. Only until the General Election.
compare the dignity of gordon brown with the smug conceit of alex salmond
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Which dignity is that?
This is man who said, when asked to pay for the illegal invasion of Iraq, “as much as it takes” and helped to initiate a course of action which has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them innocent, many of them woman and children which has set the whole world on fire with religious hate. It will be generation if not a century before the damage that Blair and Brown inflicted on Britain’s already soiled reputation is removed.
He is party to the huge lies that we were asked to swallow on this and history will remember that as vividly as it remembers the destruction of the UK’s public finances at Brown’s hands.
We were given so many different reason to justify the illegal invasion that I know that the only reason they didn’t give – oil – was the only one that was true.
For the record, the desire to remove Saddam Hussein (which, of course was properly the exclusive prerogative of the Iraqi people) did not justify the death of one innocent Iraqi child.
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Willie
Very eloquent and very accurate.
It is estimated that the two invasions of Iraq by US/UK have been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis, most of them civilian.
That’s the equivalent of killing everybody in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen and then some.
In these evil actions we provided the fuel to light the terrorism bonfire.
I was one of the 100,000 who marched from Glasgow Green to SECC against the proposed invasion and I doubt that any of those who marched is likely to ever forget it.
More than any other factor this has contributed to the death of the Labour Party in Scotland. All its principled adherents have walked away from it and it is an electoral shell of a diminishing number of elected representatives relying on the “Scottish” press and its placemen which with vested interest still populate most Scottish public and civic bodies.
Like Gordon Brown it is politically defunct.
I wonder who will be first to cross the floor.
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I have been aware of Gordon Brown for most of my political life. I can remember him as an extremely radical student leader who became the first Student Rector at Edinburgh University; full of fire and promise.
When he became a Scottish Labour MP he seemed, like so many of his predeccessors,to lose that impetus and fervour and his climb up the ladder at Westminster, his complicity and partnership with Blair indicated a willingness to unquestionably embrace the Westminster establishment. As Winnie Ewing once observed, “Labour politicians go to Westminster to settle down: we go to settle up.”
The promise of Brown’s youth has certainly not been fulfilled.The chalice of leadership that he so desperately coveted was already poisoned when it was passed to him but a more principled person would have anticipated that years ago.
He looks to me to be a man who is not “at ease with himself” and he will surely be replaced immediately after the General Election if not before.
Incidentally, why is kintyre1 so unpleasant? Never a constructive remark or any sort of positive policy to promote? He makes clear what he dislikes but I can find no indication of what he believes in.
Did he lose a pound and find a penny?
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I don’t contibute often but I’ve been reading kintyre1s stuff but I thought it had thankjfully stopped. But no -up he pops again with a lot of unpleasant negativity.
Some of us are wondering who he is. He seems to be very familair with the SNP but not from Kintyre. He reads stuff like Alyn Smiths MEP website and knows a lot about Mike MacKenzie. He appears like somebody close to the SNP or in it and damaging it secretly. Is this the fact? Who do we think this might be?
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That of course should be “Eddie”. I waschanging my name for this site but it would need another email address which is beyond me and I changed it back again I thouight
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Same comment however. Have we got a mole?
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Some of us were beginning to think along the same lines, Eddie. Might be somebody that comes into your shop for the chat. I would be very surprised indeed if the SNP wasn’t penetrated.
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a resounding victory for labour in glasgow north east . nationalists humiliated
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So resounding indeed that over two thirds of the voters stayed at home.
At Glenrothes it was “What happened to the voting records?”
At Glasgow North East it is “What happened to the missing 45,000 voters?”
With this sort of endorsement the only thing that can stop Labour’s future success at elections is people actually coming out to vote.
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In Glasgow North East nothing much has changed and, sadly, nothing much will change.
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