- Mark Wickham-Jones is an expert on the history of Labour over the last twenty-five years. His particular area of interest is the evolution of the party’s policy commitments since 1983, the changes to its organisational structure and the nature of its electoral outlook. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Labour’s failure to get rid of Gordon Brown is indicative of one of the taboos governing the politics of the party. This week’s decision to stick with Brown does not reflect the preferences of Labour MPs, most of whom clearly regard the prime minister as a massive electoral liability.

Far from it, the outcome is indicative of the extent to which choices within the Labour Party are determined by traditions, norms, and established practices, ones that are made regardless of what might be desirable in the prevailing circumstances.

Throughout its hundred year history, Labour has demonstrated an overwhelming loyalty to whoever has held the post of party leader, no matter how unpopular the incumbent might be either among members or voters. Such unswerving devotion is an indication of how Labour is governed by informal traditions as opposed to the formal procedures laid out in its complex rulebook.

It represents an example of what the late Henry Drucker termed Labour’s ethos: the idea that Labour politics have been dominated by established practices rather than by more rational calculations or efficient decisions.

The Conservatives, by contrast, have been far more ruthless in their attitude to the leader. Incumbents, no longer serving the best interests of the party, have been unceremoniously ejected from the post. In the Labour party, the notion that a sitting leader might actually be removed against his or her will, has been utterly taboo.

Only in the 1920s did Labour appoint a leader in the sense the term is conventionally used. Even then, the post still included the title of chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party as well as leader and only in the late 1970s did the party formally have a leader at all.

If Margaret Beckett’s brief interregnum following John Smith’s death is included, Gordon Brown is Labour’s thirteenth leader. Only once – George Lansbury in 1935 - has a sitting Labour leader stood down abruptly under pressure to go. Like Gordon Brown, Lansbury had initially been elected to the job without a contest, succeeding Arthur Henderson when the latter lost his parliamentary seat in the debacle of the 1931 general election and was unable to find a constituency thereafter.

The sole member of the Cabinet to survive that eletoral rout, Lansbury found himself in the post by default. A veteran left-winger and profound pacifist, he was spectacularly ill-suited to the post of leading a political party competing for office and making the necessary compromises. His removal was result of the machinations neither of the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party nor of its backbench members.

Indeed, Labour MPs tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to stay when he finally went following a withering assault by Ernest Bevin, then leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union at the party’s 1935 conference.

Labour has been remarkably indulgent of its leaders’ failures. Clement Attlee lost seats at three general elections in a row before finally retiring. Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 and Neil Kinnock in 1987 suffered landslide defeats at the polls. Both continued in office. To be sure, both were challenged subsequently. But until the 1980s, the Labour rulebook made such challenges easy to organise: the leader was re-elected annually and any contender needed few nominations.

Neither of the challenges to Gaitskell (in 1960 and 1961) nor that to Kinnock (in 1988) came close to unseating the leader. Indeed, the incumbent won crushing victories as many of those participating took the opportunity to demonstrate their overpowering and quite likely unthinking support for the existing leadership. Such occasions were much more about raising policy issues and stirring up debate than serious attempts to force a change at the top.

The most obvious example of the loyalty and deference that Labour tradition demands be extended to the leader is Michael Foot, incumbent in the post for nearly three years between 1980 and 1983. Like Lansbury, a veteran of left-wing causes including unilateralism, few saw Foot as a potential prime minister. Elected during the civil war that had engulfed Labour, he attempted to hold the party together with limited success as his authority steadily diminished.

As the party suffered disastrous by-election results, Foot’s opinion poll rating fell steadily such that a mere 15 per cent of voters thought he was doing a good job. Yet, extraordinarily the party took no steps to replace him with a more credible figure though there was some public debate about the possibility. At around the same time, the Australian Labour party replaced its leader with Bob Hawke, reaping immediate electoral success. The British party could not contemplate such a move.

Tony Blair, too, benefited from the respect that Labour offers to its leaders as of right. As his premiership continued and as the euphoria of the 1997 general election landslide wore off so his ratings fell while his policy initiatives at home and abroad generated massive discontent within the party.

Despite such clear dissatisfaction within Labour concerning his leadership at critical junctures after 2001, no significant plots to unseat him ever materialised. Far from it, those who desperately wanted to remove him from the party leadership, including his greatest rival, Gordon Brown, found themselves inhibited by the informal practices of the party. So constrained, in fact that no one proved able to wield the fatal blow.

Consider by contrast the Conservative party: Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher were successively removed as leader following challenges (something that has never happened in Labour). In 1995 John Major faced a contest that was not easily brushed aside. More recently the tenure of the party leadership has proved a short-lived affair for William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

Brown’s survival in the extraordinary circumstances of the last week does not signify a genuine degree of support amongst MPs: it represents the importance of tradition within the Labour party. To be sure since 1994 New Labour has recast the party in dramatic terms with regard to programmatic commitments and ideological outlook. In terms of changing the norms that determine behaviour towards the party leadership, it appears to have had no impact at all.

-- Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

Thursday's G20 summit may not mark the end or even the beginning of the end of the global recession. It did mark the end of the ascendancy of the unfettered, Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism.

What comes next is far from sure, but it will be different from the headlong dash for individual enrichment, short-term profit and financial acrobatics that began with the dominance of U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The widespread acceptance of increased regulation would have been anathema for U.S. President Barack Obama's predecessors.

"The old Washington consensus is over," British Prime Minister Gordon Brown declared after chairing the London summit. It was a clear acknowledgement that the deregulation that allowed casino capitalism to flourish on Wall Street and in the City of London, the world's two biggest financial centers, had failed and will be fundamentally overhauled.

Brown's role in brokering a bigger-than-expected G20 deal on refinancing and reforming the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, extending the scope of regulation and providing new finance for trade and the poorest countries was a personal success. But it may not help him much at home, where many recall his 1997-2007 decade as a "light-touch" finance minister who claimed to have ended the cycle of "boom and bust."

The $1.1 trillion in funds for the IMF, the World Bank, trade finance and development which he announced, even if it is not all new money, may begin to restore market confidence that countries will not default, and to revive trade flows.

But Brown and Obama did not achieve their initial declared objective of persuading countries with balance of payments surpluses such as Germany and China to give a bigger fiscal stimulus to the world economy.

Nor did they come up with a solution for disposing of banks' toxic assets, which continue to impede a recovery.

Indeed, they were upstaged by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who appeared in lockstep on the summit's eve to hammer home demands for tougher regulation of all markets and financial institutions, and for the naming of shaming of tax havens.

"We have taken an important step toward creating order in an area of the world where there was previously no order," Merkel told a news conference. Sarkozy said the world had turned the page on "the Anglo-Saxon model."

The Franco-German couple, so strained since the hyperactive Sarkozy's election in 2007, achieved almost all its objectives. The French leader's pre-summit theatrics of threatening to leave an empty chair may have been an empty threat, but it played well back home and may have put his host on the defensive.

Obama, who was more of a listener than a leader at his first global summit, made clear that while he believed in the free market, executive pay and rewards would have to be changed to encourage long-term performance instead of quick profits.

Other winners at the table included Chinese President Hu Jintao, who was courted by Obama and Sarkozy and magnanimously contributed $40 billion toward the IMF war chest to help countries in financial trouble. In return, Hu was promised a reform of IMF seats and votes in 2011 that will give his emerging economic colossus, which now has no more say than Belgium or Switzerland, far greater power.

That redistribution will also benefit India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia, and should reduce the traditional U.S. and European dominance over international financial institutions, symbolized by their carve-up of the top jobs.

Agreement to publish a list of tax havens that use banking secrecy to deny cooperation with other countries about suspected tax cheats and money launderers came only after countries such as China and Brazil had been assuaged about the fact that it was compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a largely Western, rich countries' body.

Russian President Dimitry Medvedev was also among the winners, enjoying a fresh start in relations with the United States despite his country's continued military presence in breakaway regions of Georgia following last year's war.