Electioneering

"I will stop, I will stop at nothing
Say the right things, when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote
When I go forwards you go backwards and somewhere we will meet
Riot shields, voodoo economics
It's just business, cattle prods and the IMF
I trust I can rely on your vote
When I go forwards you go backwards and somewhere we will meet"

Radiohead penned 'Electioneering' back in 1997, shortly after Tony Blair's New Labour government came to power. Despite the cynicism of Oxford's favourite miserablists, there was a sense of general optimism in the air. How things have changed. Their lyrics seem more prescient than ever given Gordon Brown's desperate attempt to rally the troops yesterday in Brighton. Although his speech was certainly defiant, the whiff of electioneering was overpowering.

Brown slammed the City as "ideologically bankrupt" in a speech strewn with rhetoric designed to appeal to Middle England and mobilise core support. His assertion that the credit crisis was a failure of rightwing Conservative ideology certainly left a bitter taste in the mouth. He claimed that "what let the world down" was "the Conservative idea that markets always self-correct but never self-destruct". He then blamed the "right-wing fundamentalism that says you just leave everything to the market and says that free markets should not just be free but values-free".

This element of his speech was, at best, what Hollywood might term a 're-imagining' of the current financial predicament and, at worst, a distortion of the truth. It takes a unique kind of amnesia to completely neglect "his own 10-year record as chancellor – when he championed City interests". After all, Brown is a man who had previously spent years advocating and championing a 'light touch' regulatory system and the notion that the market is a more efficient allocator of capital than the state. Robert Peston snappily articulated this state of affairs in his blog today – "Brown snubs Brown". He outlined that whilst the PM's comments were intended as an attack on the Tories, they really just "put the boot into the Brown years at Number 11".

To be fair, lots of people felt exactly the same way about the City during the economic boom, but for a PM who has demanded financial accountability, previously called for an end of the "age of irresponsibility", and even written a book looking at courage, he has probably emerged from this in a less than heroic light. That said, Sarah Brown felt otherwise as she exclaimed "My husband. My hero!"

A more profitable line of argument for the PM, and one which he developed in yesterday's speech, may be to attack the Conservatives over their lack of economic credibility. As today's Independent points out, "the Prime Minister did have a strong case to make about the hesitant and confused manner in which the Tories reacted to last year's global financial meltdown". In pursuing this line, he would, at least, put the onus back on David Cameron to explain how the Conservatives' calls over recent years for even-lighter-touch financial regulation would have helped to avert the crisis.

JS