Gordon Brown’s speech

Gordon Brown knew that he was fighting for his future as Prime Minister when he spoke in Manchester at the Labour party conference yesterday. His speech was inevitably warmly received by Labour activists, but what about those outside the party?

David Osler, writing for Liberal Conspiracy, took a sceptical view of Brown's constant repetition of the word 'fair', which struck him as meaningless rhetoric. "How fair can it be that 22 per cent of

the population live in poverty... how fair is it that British workers still have the poorest employment rights of any industrialised countries?" he asked. Osler also questioned Brown's insistence that he was on the side of hard-working families.

Writing on the Telegraph website, Alex Singleton was equally critical. "His endless, tedious use of the word 'fairness' may play well to the Left-wing ideologues in the Labour auditorium, but we have had a decade of his sort of fairness - a decade of taking money of Middle England and wasting it on Labour's pet projects," Singleton said.

On the Spectator blog, James Forsyth pointed out Labour's continuing internal divisions. "Team Brown are making