Gordon Brown's standing is as low as it was during the crisis days of last summer. Now one of the symbols of correct-thinking on the Left has given up hope on him. In today's Guardian Podcast, Polly Toynbee (who has in the past been willing to see the current prime minister as "good in a crash") adds substance to her call on Brown to quit.  While she has never been an uncritical cheerleader for all things Brown - her calls for radical redistribution, no matter how politically and fiscally unrealistic, place her far to the left of him -her standing is such that a defection to Alan Johnson's camp must constitute a serious blow to the PM.

Though I see the bookies' prices on his leaving in June have not budged - if you agree with her, you can get 10x your money. 

But in her diatribe I think Polly is slightly unfair about Brown's record. She compains of "the revelation . ..  that all those years of boom turned out to be a delusion . . . one in which the poor got poorer, people on average earnings made virtually no advance, all of the growth he boasted about happened at the very very top".  How can they make a convincing case of being the party of fairness and social justice?

Maybe inequality has not fallen as much as PT and others would have liked.  But given the headwinds - an enormous house price boom, for starters - it would have been difficult to see serious reductions in the earnings of the very wealthy.  Like those who criticise the bank rescue for "not working" because bank lending is still weak,  she fails to consider the counterfactual: what would inequality have been like had Brown's redistributive Budgets not been in place?  We have a fair idea from the USA.  And there the evidence is stark: in America,

"real median annual household income had not yet returned to its 1999 peak, making this decade one of the longest downturns ever for this widely-accepted measure of the middle-class standard of living"

Read that sentence and ponder. 7 years of growth for the whole US economy, and the median income stands stilll?

Moreover, as the IFS repeatedly show, she is simply wrong about average incomes.   Incomes have grown across the scale.

What bothers me is that I think Polly is usually a source of interesting truths that go against the grain of populist opinion.  For example, did you know this about single parents: "So who are the single parents? Most have been married: 55% are divorced, separated or widowed. Most of the other 45% were cohabiting when their children were born. Seventy-four per cent are over the age of 30 and only 12% are under 25, so we are not talking about teen pregnancy (which has fallen). Nor is it a permanent state: on average people stay single parents for only five and a half years."  Unfortunately, she now seems more comfortable with the miserabilist position beloved of both Right and Left: everything since (name time 10-30 years ago) has been sh1t.  She is wrong.  Read Michael Skapinker for an antidote to this. 

"As I write, crowds promenade along the river bank, taking in the attractions built since we arrived: the London Eye Ferris wheel, the Tate Modern art gallery, the Globe Theatre. They throng through the food stalls of Borough Market, past vats of olives, loaves of walnut bread, trays of oysters. The locals on their lunch break mix with tourists speaking a swirl of languages. If Britain is washed up, no one has told them.

How much of this was built on the back of financial instruments dreamt up in the City – and on the bloated bonuses and unsustainable tax receipts they generated? Quite a bit. Much of it came from the National Lottery too. But most of it came from individuals who found, in the past few decades, room for their initiative."

It may (almost certainly) be right for Brown to go: he is a busted flush.  But it is crazy and unfair to accuse him of having done nothing for inequality, or imply that he has left the country as miserable as he is.