Spanish Support for Brown

by RAY FLEMING
THE Guardian got a lot of attention yesterday for its long leading article on “Labour's dilemma” and its advice that it is time for the party “to cut Gordon Brown loose”. On a preceding page, however, there was an article entitled “Brown has led the way” by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The Spanish prime minister presumably did not know that the newspaper was going to say in the same edition that, to the contrary, Mr Brown has lost his way. Sr Zapatero begins his article with this: “Globalisation's first great crisis necessitated a co-ordinated international response; a decisive exercise of collective action on a world and European scale. Gordon Brown saw this, and led from the outset. It is thanks to that vision and leadership that we were able to lay the basis for a new global economic governance at the April G20 summit in London.” Most of the article is devoted to the importance of the European dimension in meeting the challenge of global recession and it broadly endorses Mr Brown's EU policies. It also reminds us that Spain will take over the presidency of the EU in the first six months of 2010 when “it will spare no effort to continue to foster, in conjunction with the UK and other leading European countries, the values we share.” Always assuming, Sr Zapatero, that Britain still has a pro-European government by then.