IF YOU are under the age of 369 you will have missed the bracing Scottish experience that was the Solemn League and Covenant, or its even more robust predecessor the National Covenant, when everything that was most drab, philistine and narrow-minded
in Scotland mustered in Greyfriars Kirkyard to inaugurate the Rule of the Saints. The most fanatical signed in their blood and, having consequently contracted septicaemia, played no further part in the diminishment of Scotland.
It was a scene for every sanctimonious Scottish radical to envy. The malice, the hatred of art, music, laughter and, above all, Popery and its baroque splendour – here was the pure leaven of that 'progressive' Scottish philosophy that revels in the "dingin' doon" of all things gracious and elegant. It was, in many respects, a rehearsal for the Wee Scotch Senate that ornaments Holyrood today. If Covenanting was about anything, it was about banning everything that moves: ditto the WSS.
Today, on the threshold of the 370th anniversary of the Covenant, there is good news for all whey-faced Whigs, in their modern incarnation as socialists, leftists and politically correct witchfinders: the Rule of the Saints is back. Nor is its jurisdiction confined to north of the border. Gordon Brown, the Johnston of Warriston de nos jours, rules from Downing Street. Pity untutored English commentators, struggling to analyse the Brown phenomenon. They do not share our Scottish insight. We have been here before.
Crown that scowling countenance with a funereal black hat, garland the squat neck with a puritan collar and substitute a bible for the even thicker tome of tax regulations in his hand and Gordon assumes his innate identity: this is one of nature's Covenanters. Every political platform from which he spouts his wooden oratory is transformed into a pulpit. The moral high ground is his wash-pot, over sanctimony has he cast his shoe. To hear Gordon bleating about his "values" is not fare for weak stomachs.
Brown (how apt the name) really should stop dishing up his son-of-the-manse guff about having his personal formation in the feeding of the five thousand out of his father's back door. History already records that he served for 10 years as Number Two in the most aggressively anti-Christian Government Britain has ever seen.
He was complicit in the regime that refused to amend an abortion law which has sent seven million British babies to the incinerator since 1967, that introduced adoption by homosexuals and put Catholic adoption agencies out of business. So spare us the born-again hypocrisy, Gordon.
Most nauseating was the attempt to reinvent this weirdo and obsessive number-cruncher as an England football supporter, Arctic Monkeys fan and – most disturbing of all – the cultivation of the Boris Karloff smile. Fortunately, events have removed any plausible occasion for the display of that chilling rictus, which is a considerable relief.
Then there was Superbrown, the hero who single-handedly won the war on terror. What was he supposed to have done? The London bomb plot failed and the effort at Glasgow airport wrought no worse havoc than a yummy mummy in a four-wheel-drive on a bad hair day, yet it was instantly promoted to parity with New York on September 11, while Gordon chaired a Cobra meeting with appropriate solemnity. For a month or so, a public mesmerised by the welcome departure of Tony Blair bought into all the Brownite mythology his spinners could concoct. Then came reality.
Brown has not changed. He is the same unpleasant creature, gifted with effortless anti-charisma, he has always been. Peter Lilley's observation that Gordon can brighten a room just by leaving it is as accurate as ever. The aim of his life is to intrude upon and control everybody else's. He has blighted many people's retirement with his fiscal banditry in raiding pension funds, initially of £5bn a year, then increasing this to £7.3bn; he has cost British investors £270bn in lost equity values.
His competence is a myth. When he broke his own 'golden rule' that public expenditure, over the course of the economic cycle, must not exceed tax revenues, he moved the start of the cycle back from 1999 to 1997, thus helping himself to an additional £13bn of credit. He similarly and repeatedly revised his growth rate forecasts downwards, inspired by hindsight. Gordon has an uncanny psychic gift of foretelling what will happen last year.
The great guru of neo-classical endogenous growth theory likes to dazzle with his fiscal genius. A classic Brown coup was his selling off of 60% of the UK's gold reserves when the price was at a 20-year low of $275 an ounce in 1999-2002; it rose to $700 an ounce last year. That cost the taxpayer £4bn, but – hey! – who's counting? Taxpayers, in Gordon's view, exist to fork out. In his decade as Chancellor, taxation rose from 39.3% of GDP to 42.4%. In seven years' time, the average family will pay £1m in tax over a lifetime. It is called redistribution and Brown loves it.
The prospects for Gordon Brown and his marionettes (he does not have ministers in the normal constitutional sense of the term) in 2008 and beyond are delightfully bleak. The electorate has turned against them as the economic chickens come home to roost. Chicken Gordon will go to the wire, all the way to 2010, before he faces his electoral nemesis. The eerie resemblance between the atmosphere surrounding his regime and the Tories in 1992-97 speaks volumes. Never glad, confident morning again for Gordon and his creatures. It will be less an election than a cull. Lovely.
