Marching on together: how Gordon Brown, just like Leeds, can still pull off a shock

Richard Robinson‘s Speech Bubble

Aged eight in 1970, I fell in love with both Leeds United and the Labour Party. We’ve been together through thick and thin ever since. As Leeds fans we recite our anthem at every match that despite our “ups and downs, we’re marching on together”.

When Gordon Brown delivered his New Year message on 30 December 2009, little did he know that merely days later he would be upstaged by Leeds United. Just after 3pm on Sunday, January 3rd, both Twitter & Facebook were full to bursting of adulation for a giantkilling of David & Goliath proportions. The press duly obliged with their congratulations to the “mighty whites” the following day on their famous victory, against all the odds, over bitter rivals Manchester United.

Yet Leeds United & Gordon Brown really do share some very common themes: no one expected Leeds to beat Man Utd, and you’d be hard pressed to find any political pundits predicting a Labour victory in May; Leeds have had a pretty torrid time over the past 10 years, and so in many respects has Gordon Brown; Leeds possessed a Chairman in Peter Ridsdale who at first injected millions into the club, promising a team to surpass that of the glory days in the 70s, only to subsequently bankrupt them, while Labour had a PM in Tony Blair who won an historic victory in 1997 yet left the Party in June 2007 tarnished as a “war monger”. His successor’s fortunes, like Leeds’, have since plumeted catastrophically.

So when Gordon Brown delivered his 2010 New Year’s speech, against the backdrop of an unprecedented confluence of economic downturn, financial instability and Parliamentary crisis, yes, he was somewhat up against it.

Yet Brown remained upbeat and signalled that he was confident of a brighter tomorrow. “We are a nation that looks to the future” he proclaimed, “combining responsibility with fairness, compassion with aspiration – always reaching higher, dreaming bigger, aiming for even greater things”. He continued on a personal note outlining how “my whole life in politics has been about trying to provide a ladder of opportunity, so that what matters is not where you come from but what you have to contribute”.

To get an idea of what that ladder might look like in 2010, Brown outlined four main areas of recovery and “stepping up”: securing the economic recovery, a radical improvement and reform of public services, a cleaned up politics and maintenance of Britain’s global strength and responsibility.

Brown’s message, “don’t wreck the recovery”, a jibe aimed at the Tories, supplemented his desire to draw a dividing line between the two parties, contrasting a fairly shared prosperity with Labour to the wicked decade of austerity and unfairness being planned by the Opposition.

Brown didn’t actually name the Tories or indeed Cameron in his speech, yet you really have to be as naive as Alex Ferguson not to work out the inferences.

Ferguson expects to win every match, Cameron expects to win the imminent election. But it’s the electorate that must decide the latter – and now endure another five months of claim and counter claim, cuts against “not cuts”.

Leeds are very much Marching on Together having slayed their demons of the last decade. Gordon Brown must hope that, against all the odds, he and the Labour Party – who, like Leeds have been loved, hated, misrepresented, put their fans through agony and suffered woeful injustices – can similarly recover and produce the victory no one is predicting.