Is the Iron Chancellor still a democrat?

A YEAR or two from now Gordon Brown will look like a seer - the man who battened down the economic hatches in anticipation, as he puts it, of "the tough choices ahead". Or maybe not. He could look like King Canute - the Iron Chancellor who set in place a three-year spending plan and commanded the waves rolling in from global financial markets to part before him.

The trick is deciding which it will be. Everything Mr Brown announced in Parliament on Thursday made sense and was consistent with everything else he has said since achieving power. You can only stand back and admire the man's fierce determination, intellectual independence in working out his own diagnosis of the nation's ills, and the remorselessness with which he ploughs ahead to rectify those ills.

And yet you have to wonder. Is there something anti-democratic in the way in which he has come to dominate economic life?

When John Humphries interviewed Mr Brown on Radio Four's Today programme Friday morning, there was one telling moment. Mr Brown has got his interview technique down pat. No more endogenous growth theories for him. The Chancellor, instead, was all modulation as he repeated and repeated his theme of "prudence" - with just an intimidating touch of the patriarchal I-shall-brook-no- nonsense toughness of a Scottish pit boss.

Mr Brown would, he said, "spend but spend wisely to modernise the nation's infrastructure". He was, he said, abolishing the yearly spending review - the annual dickering between the Treasury and spending ministries - and replacing it with a three-year plan that would guarantee prudence. Within this financial straitjacket, however, he was increasing spending on health and education more than people had expected.

Beautiful spin, this. Damp down expectations. Get people fighting mad over health and education spending. Then come in with higher-than-expected sums. Use the surprise as sugarcoating to the iron framework for government spending overall.

Mr Brown went on to explain on Radio Four that he was splitting government spending. Current spending would be paid for with taxes. Capital spending, to modernise the country's infrastructure, would come, in part, from the sale of state assets like the air traffic control system and the Tote.

More nice spin, this. Unlike Foreign Secretary Cook, who got bogged down earlier in the Today programme in a semantic dispute over the definition of privatisation - was it the same as public-private financial partnerships or not? - Mr Brown sped past the privatisation pothole with nary a bump.

Mr Humphries did his best. He nipped at Mr Brown's ankles. He badgered. He tried to get the Chancellor to be specific as he laid out his framework for economic activity over the next three years.

THEN the moment came. "There are all kinds of depends in what you're saying," Mr Humphries objected. The success of your three-year spending plan depends on this. It depends on that. The economy at home. It depends, Mr Humphries muttered (daunted for once by the complexity of his subject) on what happens in the rest of the world.

Mr Brown did not blink. Did not pause. Like Mrs Thatcher, he has learned to rise to the bait only when the moment is right. Where Mrs Thatcher could be shrill, Mr Brown can come on like a jackhammer. With Mr Humphries, however, the Chancellor dipped his voice and spoke as if he wanted to help out his interviewer.

Mr Humphries question was right on the mark. Pursued relentlessly, it might even have knocked Mr Brown off his stride. What happens to your three-year spending plan, Chancellor, if world events throw the forecasts underpinning it out the window? Japan faces meltdown. China is now publicly threatening Japan about the fall of the yen against the yuan. America looks like a bubble economy. Given this uncertain state of affairs, would there not be merit in keeping government spending plans as flexible as possible - not making three- year commitments? If you are making this commitment knowing that events might turn it upside down, are you not being cynical?

But Mr Brown sped past this moment, too. He talked a little more about "wise spending"and "prudence". About "too much stop-go", "too little investment". Then the interview was over.

THE man is a force of nature. His analytical capacities and his execution are magnificent. But you still have to ask: How far can a Treasury chief demonstrating distinctly anti-democratic tendencies get without critics calling him to account? How far can the Treasury get without countervailing centres of power in Parliament and Whitehall? How far can the government get without an effective opposition or a business community offering its own critique of New Labour policies?

Mr Brown's pre-eminence in the economic sphere is not entirely of his own making. The Tories are pitiful. Shadow Chancellor Francis Maude was pathetic in parliament on Thursday - whinnying about Labour's U-turn over privatisation, rounding off with a schoolboy pun: "May the Iron Chancellor rust in peace."

Anyone who has any doubts about the poor quality of criticism coming from the business community should have dropped in on the press conference of a new group called Business for Sterling in London on Thursday.

What was meant to be the launch of a new non-political voice raised against the single currency turned into a minor farce. Few reporters showed up. The government, it turned out, had scheduled a press conference to announce Honda's latest inward investment in Britain at the same time. The head of steam Business for Sterling had built up by getting a front-page curtain raiser for its campaign in the Times the day before went phut.

Nor did the chairman of Business for Sterling, Lord Marsh, even get the joke Peter Mandleson was playing on him until it was pointed out to him by the smattering of reporters present.

Lord Marsh eventually led a panel of five other business leaders to the podium. He then proceeded to hog the limelight. No one else on the podium spoke one word.Afterwards reporters gravitated to Dixon's chief Sir Stanley Kalms as the biggest business celebrity present. Sir Stanley opposes the single currency because of the damage he believes it would do to our interest rates, labour costs, and pension system, not to mention our economic independence. Mainly, how- ever, Sir Stanley said, he opposes the single currency because he has concluded that Brussels is anti-democratic. "I have always believed it was my duty as a businessman to make my views known," he said.

Under Tory rule such a statement might have sounded flatulent or smug. Under Labour, however, Sir Stanley is beginning to sound like a breath of fresh air.