Is Mr Brown a Fascist?

That’s a slight paraphrasing of a leader of a back copy of the Times that I was perusing whilst doing my coursework on Saturday.  Dated 2nd December 1975, it came the day after three workers had been fired on the demand of the trade union that maintained a closed shop.  Michael Foot, Labour’s Leader of the House of Commons and future author of the ‘Longest Suicide Note in History’, supported the union’s action and said that it was the workers’ fault they were fired.  Norman Tebbit stuck his head above the parapet and accused Foot of “undiluted fascism” and being “a bitter opponent of freedom and liberty”.

Nowadays, if you were to accuse another politician, particularly a Labour politician, of fascism, you’d have your arse handed to you.  Not Mr Tebbit.  The Times’ leader headline read:

And finished off with:

If only our newspapers spoke like that today.  Or our politicians, for that matter (except Dan Hannan, who did, of course).  The question we have to ask ourselves, after eleven years of draconian legislation and eleven years of tax rises, with an unelected Prime Minister and an unaccountable lame-duck government, is: “is Mr Brown a fascist?”  I think we’d all find it hard to give a charitable answer to that one.

* As an aside, this wasn’t some slow news day when the editor decided to go home after a few martinis at lunch.  This story pushed the emergence of a democratic Portugal to second leader.  Go figure.