Why Should We Believe Brown's Promises After Years Of Failure To Deliver?

I’m reading an excellent book at the moment by Giles Radice, the former MP for North Durham, about Clement Attlee’s Government, called ‘The Tortoise and The Hares’. Clearly, Gordon Brown was trying to take a bit of the magic of that great reforming 1945 Government, with the front cover of the Labour Manifesto harking back to the imagery of 1945 and some pre-war Labour posters. Well, Gordon, it takes more than a picture. One of the worst post war Governments has a bit of cheek in trying to compare itself with one of the best.

Where Attlee, Bevin, Cripps and Bevan presided over lasting and necessary social reform, Brown, Balls and Harman have presided over economic collapse and widening inequality. Under Gordon Brown’s stewardship, manufacturing industry has shed almost a million jobs while the highly paid gamblers in the City of London were given total licence to carry on with irresponsible folly and bring the economy to its knees. At the same time, the North-South divide has worsened, social mobility has stalled and unemployment has increased.

Brown may have promised radical reform today, but why should we believe it any more than the promises made in 1997 (anybody remember the promise of a referendum on PR in 1997 - repeated this year or the promise of House of Lords reform) or the promise of full employment made in the 2005 manifesto. Why should we trust Gordon Brown to be a reformer of public services when he constantly blocked Tony Blair's attempts at reform?

To put it another way, why should we trust Labour to undertake radical reforms when Gordon Brown has failed to deliver that reform in the past 13 years?