Gordon Brown may have a plan, but even if it does work, why should we praise him for it. He should not be now acting as a cure; he should have foreseen this crisis and acted immediately for prevention.

Even some of the cures he is proposing is not being adopted for another six months. To help the housing market and lower the number of repossessions, Gordon Brown wishes to allow unemployed people to claim housing benefit to cover their mortgages after three months of claiming unemployment benefit, this is currently nine months. But this plan will not be implemented until April.

As we hit the hard times now, such plans need to be adopted much sooner, and people will Blame Gordon Brown for this.

Despite Gordon Brown’s credentials, Labour have made too many mistakes in their eleven year reign. The Iraq war is the main one, but we have also seen poor spending in the NHS leading to the spread of the MRSA bug and still scams are coming to light from decisions made years ago. People will hold all of this in mind when deciding who to vote for in the next election.

Regardless of any decisions Gordon Brown now makes, people feel labour has had its day and it is time for a change. People are fed up of Labour, they want something new. As the possibility of a black American President is looming, people will want to emulate that change and vote in a new government, and not necessarily the ones we would expect.

Once the drama of the credit crunch is over, there will be years of reparations that will need to be made. Unemployment is set to hit 2 million this Christmas and it will continue to rise for the foreseeable future as Britain tries to build itself up again. Gordon Brown may have the ideas to solve the short term problems, but it is the long term problems which will interest people when voting.

It is often commented that some leaders only work in certain periods of time. It is often quoted that Winston Churchill would not have been such a great and renownded leader were it not for the war. The war brought out his greatness.

“Big-picture politicians relish crisis. Great events enthuse rather than crush them”(1). The same is being said about Gordon Brown(1). He was stumbling but now seems to be coming into his own in this modern day crisis. But when this crisis is over, we do not need someone who works well only in a crisis, we need a sustainable leader.

Gordon Brown has not proved himself under these circumstances and so the public will revert their voting elsewhere.

(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/13/gordonbrown-labour