Gordon Brown

5 Key excerpts on "Gordon Brown"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Brown Government

  A Policy Evaluation

  • Matt Beech, Simon Lee(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  A puzzle of ideas and policy: Gordon Brown as prime minister1 Matt Beech    

  I don't recall all the sermons my father preached Sunday after Sunday. But I will never forget these words he left me with: ‘we must be givers as well as getters’. Put something back. And by doing so make a difference. And this is my moral compass. This is who I am. I am a conviction politician. I stand for a Britain where everyone should rise as far as their talents can take them and then the talents of each of us should contribute to the well being of all. (Brown 2007b, p. 4)

  And just as those who supported the dogma of big government were proved wrong, so to those who argue for the dogma of unbridled free market forces have been proved wrong. (Brown 2008, p. 2)

  Introduction

  Gordon Brown as prime minister is a puzzle. Within his generation of Labour politicians he has arguably the keenest mind. He is an academic by training, and has written and edited a selection of books and essays on various aspects of Labour politics and history.2 This prime minister is by far the most intellectually literate of Labour leaders. However, since becoming prime minister Brown has failed to produce and expound a statement of his ideas and values. Moreover, he has not fully given a restatement of New Labour principles. Why is this the case? His tenure in office has been one of enormous pressure and is generally regarded as a poor start. Are these two factors in any way connected? This article argues that the connection between Brown's unconvincing leadership in the office of prime minister and the absence of a declaration of ideological intent is both real and of significant import, especially for a leader of the Labour Party.

  The problem

  Tony Blair was the most electorally successful Labour prime minister but he was not renowned for his grasp of, or desire for, a robust understanding of Labour ideology. Yet in the following extract Blair appears to be making a statement of intent based upon certain ideas and describing a political mission for his government, something that Brown has strangely not provided:

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  The Prime Ministers

  Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson

  • Steve Richards(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Atlantic Books

    (Publisher)

  At the other end of the scale, Gordon Brown was deeply unlucky in terms of the background against which he made his moves. Indeed, he faced profoundly challenging dilemmas throughout his career. There was no junction where he, or an objective observer, could look up at the wider political scenery and fully enjoy the view. Instead the view tended to be dark, with immense, complex political or economic challenges, even when he inherited a partially benevolent economy as chancellor in 1997. Part of the darkness was formed by Brown’s internal critics, who tended to ignore the challenging background in which he made his cautious, calculating and sometimes daring moves. His angry Labour opponents often surfaced to comment anonymously on how useless Brown was, without suggesting how they would apply their apparently masterful skills to the intimidating tasks at hand. This pattern applied when Brown was shadow chancellor, chancellor and then prime minister.

  The fate of leaders is determined partly by how they rose to the top: Wilson bringing together a Labour Party deeply divided in the vote-losing 1950s; Heath’s successful ministerial career giving him a misplaced confidence; Callaghan’s close relationship with the trade unions; Thatcher’s speedy ascent as she pledged to abolish the local property tax; Major’s equivocal positioning in the Conservative Party; Blair’s conviction that Labour wins only by being ‘new’. Both Blair and Brown were defined by their early years as MPs in the party’s vote-losing years of the 1980s and early 1990s. All leaders are also shaped by their less overtly political early years, from Thatcher’s upbringing in Grantham, to Major’s in Brixton. Of all the modern prime ministers, Brown surfaced from his early years most fully formed, with his qualities and deep flaws. His father was a minister in the Church of Scotland, a figure that Brown cited as often as Thatcher referred to Alderman Roberts. Brown suggested that his father gave him his moral compass. His father sought to do good in the Church. Brown saw politics as the vocation in which he could make a difference to people’s lives. At the same time, he became a youthful star in the Scottish Labour Party, once described by another sparkling figure from Scotland, Robin Cook, as a ‘nest of vipers’. Cook, who became Foreign Secretary in the New Labour era, was one of several figures Brown fell out with. Brown learned that politics could be brutal, and sometimes should be brutal. For Brown, the ends justified the means, whether the end was his own ascent to the top of the Labour Party or prevailing with colleagues in order to pursue causes related to his interpretation of social justice.

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  The imperial premiership

  The role of the modern Prime Minister in foreign policy making, 1964–2015

  • Sam Goodman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  8 Gordon Brown, 2007–10 On 27 June 2007 Gordon Brown fulfilled his lifelong ambition and ascended to the premiership. After ten years of coveting the job and at least five spent actively pursuing his predecessor to step down, he had reached the threshold of No. 10. Effectively elected unopposed as Labour Party leader he was at the height of power. As Andrew Rawnsley in his book The End of the Party: the Rise and Fall of New Labour 1 rightly points out, on paper no Prime Minister in modern times entered No. 10 better qualified or prepared for the role. Brown had had a decade to think about what he wanted to do as Prime Minister, nearly a year's notice that there would be a vacancy with Tony Blair's departure, and six weeks of a formal transition to plan for his arrival. He would be the first person since Anthony Eden to become prime minister without any competition. 2 This was ultimately down to the belief amongst many backbenchers, who were strong supporters of Brown, and even Blair himself, that Brown was somehow owed the premiership. Blair still held a level of guilt over the perception that in 1994 when he ran for the leadership he supplanted Brown, his senior partner. This belief among supporters of Brown's claim was matched by a sense of inevitability about a Brown premiership. Many of those floated as potential rivals ruled themselves out, fearing that to run against Brown would surely end in failure and be political suicide. Brown's new dominance was not confined to the Labour Party. As Prime Minister he quickly set about culling the Cabinet he inherited from his predecessor. No less than nine members of Blair's final Cabinet resigned or were sacked or demoted. 3 In their place he promoted loyalists with relatively little Cabinet experience. Jack Straw and Alistair Darling were the only 1997 veterans, who like Brown, had served in Cabinet for ten years

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  Britain Since 1707

  • Hamish Fraser, Callum G. Brown(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Despite huge majorities, Blair’s governments had shown themselves to be remarkably cautious. Increased government expenditure was accompanied by endless administrative changes, which seemed often to lack a clear outcome. Blair’s excessively close relationship with an unpopular United States’ President lost him influence in Europe. The constitutional changes were largely unfinished and social inequality widened to an extent that it had not done in half a century. The Labour Party was much weakened, haemorrhaging members. As so often with political leaders, Blair’s departure was too long delayed.

  Brown quickly faced difficulties from Blairites who believed that he had conspired to oust Blair and from a right-wing press that disliked his Scottishness and resented his failure to call an election in the autumn of 2007 or to agree to a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty for reform of the European Union. A worldwide financial crisis led to the near-collapse of a number of banks and their part-nationalisation. Brown was attacked both as indecisive and as leaning towards the attitudes of ‘old Labour’. His reputation as an efficient manager of the economy as Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1997 was undermined by the growing financial crisis, rising unemployment, and the threat of recession moving into economic depression. All parties were searching for a response to an unprecedented crisis and trying to find alternative policies to those that had dominated over the previous three decades. This, however, was overtaken in 2009 by revelations in the press of how Members of Parliament were using parliamentary expenses for furnishings, for gardening and, most notoriously, to provide a floating duck house. Public faith in the parliamentary system was undoubtedly badly undermined.

  Further reading

  • Boyce, D.G., The Irish Question and British Politics 1868–1996 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996)
  • Charmley, J., A History of Conservative Politics 1900–1996 (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996)
  • Coopey, R., Fielding, S. and Tiratsoo, N. (eds), The Wilson Governments 1964–1970 (London, Pinter, 1993)
  • Hattersley, R., Fifty Years On: A Prejudiced History of Britain since the War (London, Little Brown and Company, 1997)
  • Hennessy, P., The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945 (London, Penguin, 2000)
  • Leese, P., Britain since 1945: Aspects of Identity (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
  • O'Hara, G. and Parr, H. (eds), The Wilson Governments 1964–1970 Reconsidered (London, Routledge, 2006)
  • Seldon, A. (ed.), Blair’s Britain 1997–2007

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  Europe and America

  The End of the Transatlantic Relationship?

  • Bindi(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  45

  Soon the global economic and financial crisis came to preoccupy the Brown government. Although Brown succeeded in keeping the crisis under control and preventing a worst-case scenario, his personal standing and his fortunes as prime minister never recovered from the onslaught of the crisis. After all, as Tony Blair’s chancellor of the exchequer for the previous ten years, Brown had overseen the creation of the excesses of the housing market, Britain’s economic bubble, and the City of London’s profligate behavior, all of which greatly contributed to the Great Recession in the United Kingdom. In the general election of 2010, Brown was voted out of office.46 After more than twelve years in power, the Labour Party was replaced by David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, the first coalition in Britain since the collapse of Winston Churchill’s national government in 1945.

  Outlook: The Road to Brexit

  Owing to the global economic and financial crisis—the Great Recession of 2008–12—the new U.K. government that came to office in May 2010 pursued a policy of restraint. Austerity and retrenchment was the approach of the new ministers to cope with the crisis. The members of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, led by Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, had little taste for attempting to creatively shape the post–Cold War world. Regarding Britain’s foreign policy, the coalition government also looked backward, resorting to London’s traditional approaches. Not least, the new government was keen on once again emphasizing the “special relationship” with the United States. Relations with the EU, however, deteriorated further. The prime minister’s own Euroskeptical attitude and pressure from his backbenchers led him to refer frequently to the possibility of a British exit from the EU. Then, in a January 2013 speech, he announced that a referendum on continued British membership in the EU would take place if his party managed to win the next election. One of the questions the British would be asked to address was whether Britain should exit the twenty-eight-member organization it had joined forty years ago.47 It made sense when the Cameron government soon began to further intensify Britain’s bilateral relationships, and not just those with Washington.48

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