by Gordon Brown
Today’s battle for Britain is not being fought out on the old terrain of empire, the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, or a country that once confidently felt it was sufficient unto itself. Instead Britain has been, and is being, reshaped by three great forces: wave after wave of globalisation; the neoliberalism with which our economy was managed, or more accurately mismanaged; and the struggle of progressive politics to offer an alternative. These forces drive and explain the day-to-day comings and goings. They conditioned the decisions we made in government – and they will impact the quality of life for generations to come.
This account of my time in public life tracks how we were influenced by, and how we sought to influence, globalisation; how we tried to swim against the neoliberal tide; how we developed and advanced a progressive view of Britain and sought to make the Labour Party a credible and radical instrument of change.
Time and again, in each generation, we see power accumulate, vested interests entrench and seize too much control – and the historic task of political leadership is to stand up and tackle selfish concentrations of power, whether business elites forming cartels or monopolies; pressure groups adopting restrictive practices; and – especially – in this age of mega-wealth, individuals who abuse their financial might to manipulate government to their own narrow advantage. The task of leadership is to discover where power lies, to ask how justified it is and, where it is unjustified, rein it in.
In our time, overhanging all else has been the most dramatic global economic transformation the world has ever seen – an economic revolution that has been 1,000 times faster and deeper than the Industrial Revolution. Globalisation triggered a decades-long transition to a predominantly knowledge and financial-services economy, in which the pace of change constantly accelerates. It is now well understood that globalisation – the opening up of global capital flows and the global sourcing of goods and services previously manufactured here – has created millions of winners who have better-paid jobs, higher standards of living and more material possessions than ever before. But it has also created millions of losers whose skills and wage expectations cannot compete with cheaper labour economies. We have seen occupations that employed millions – from secretaries, clerks and typists to miners, ironworkers and shipwrights – virtually disappear. Traditional jobs like boilermakers, draughtsmen and electricians – and some of the newest, such as radiologists, computer operators and financial analysts – are repeatedly being reconfigured by technology. Since the 1980s, this has destroyed one third of our manufacturing jobs, challenged us to adapt to modern technology, opened a wider gulf between rich and poor than society should tolerate, and sown seeds of insecurity even among professional workers in well-paid jobs.
It is hardly surprising that in the old industrial communities, people complain, indeed cry out, that the country is not what it was, that it no longer belongs to them, that it is no longer theirs. Understandably, they want someone, somehow to protect them from what they see as akin to a runaway train.
Taming globalisation – and redirecting it to meet the interests of working people – has been and is the defining political challenge of our era. But for progressives the task has been doubly difficult: year after year, we have had to confront what is best described as neoliberalism. Even now, many of the public have never heard of the term; but, starting out from attempts to control the money supply in the 1980s, versions of it gained credence when Keynesian economics and the corporatism it spawned appeared exhausted and unable to cope with inflation. When neoliberalism was dishonestly cast as analogous to prudent family budgeting, celebrated as an economic expression of what it is to be free and packaged in a public form as ‘popular’ share-owning capitalism, it had a more compelling appeal than it deserved – at least for a time. Over four decades, versions of it – from the failed monetarist experiment to austerity – were often dressed up in communitarian clothes, whether it be John Major’s Citizen’s Charter, David Cameron’s Big Society or Theresa May’s civic conservatism.
Throughout my years in Parliament, we were up against what it really meant – to liberalise, privatise, deregulate and tolerate high levels of unemployment as the price for keeping inflation down. Not only did privatisation replace nationalisation – as in telecommunications and railways – but the radius of market influence expanded into areas like education, healthcare and even defence, often sweeping all before it. In its unbridled form this state-shrinking, tax-cutting, free-market fundamentalism meant, for many people, the pain of unemployment, poverty and being left behind.
Markets may be a good servant – but, in my view, they are not such a good master. They can and must be made accountable. The progressive measures Labour introduced – from our New Deal funded by a windfall tax on utilities to restoring recession-hit Britain by stemming business bankruptcies, mortgage repossessions and job losses – were our alternative to that neoliberal ideology and an attempt to make globalisation work in the interests of the British people. We were determined to show in practice that, in mastering the challenges and opportunities of an open global marketplace, we could deliver both a strong economy and a fair society; that prosperity and social justice were not at odds with each other but inextricably bound together. In these pages, I recount what we did, in good times and bad, to try and promote a high-employment economy and a more equal country. I also tell why, in a world where a country’s freedom of manoeuvre is constrained by global trends, events and pressures – where, in effect, our independence is now limited by our interdependence – there is a ceiling to what can be achieved without cross-border cooperation and coordination.
This book is also a lesson in how the fortunes of a progressive party can rise and fall. All throughout my thirty-two years in Parliament, and in the years since, the question the Labour Party has had to answer has been: can it be trusted with the economy? During the post-war years, every economic expedient in sight was tried in turn – tariffs, wage controls, national plans and social contracts, as well as full-blooded monetarism – but none prevented us falling down the international league table as other countries moved up. Neoliberalism held sway for a time because it offered a simple framework within which to understand the bewildering changes summed up in the word ‘globalisation’. I write here of how we set out new approaches and how they succeeded or failed.
And from the vantage point of the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century, we see that Britain’s fundamental challenges are closely linked: the struggle to manage globalisation in Britain’s interests is also the struggle to define Britain and its place in the world – and, indeed, hold Britain together. Economic pressures wrought by globalisation not only make people worry about what they have, but also about who they are and what might become of them.
Certainly we celebrated and continue to celebrate great triumphs in our recent history: from Churchill’s wartime indomitability and our gallant VC and GC heroes to all the great British post-war medical breakthroughs – from being the first country to produce a test-tube baby to transforming X-ray technology with magnetic resonance imaging. And no one growing up in my generation can forget that Britain gave the world the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, years of pop-music dominance and great British Oscar-winning films from Chariots of Fire to The King’s Speech. We rightly boast of our leadership in art, classical music and literature. Britons have won ninety-five Nobel Prizes since 1945. So much of the new world we live in has been created by great Britons I have had the privilege to know such as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Jony Ive, designer of many iconic Apple products such as the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, and the world-famous writer and philanthropist J. K. Rowling. We are equally right to have celebrated days of triumph from the Falklands conflict to the Queen’s Jubilee and then London’s Olympic Games. We can take pride in how empire became Commonwealth; how British ideals of tolerance, democracy and respect for human rights became a guiding light around the world; how Britain has led
international development for the poorest countries; and how British institutions, like the BBC and its World Service, reach and are respected on every continent.
Our post-war history is adorned with glittering achievements, but throughout my life, I have been aware of a gnawing sense within our country that we have fallen from a great height. With typical hyperbole, Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary at the time of writing, described the scale of our influence as a country in a way that foreshadows the extent of our decline: ‘Of the 193 present members of the UN, we have conquered or at least invaded 90 per cent of them – 171,’ he said. A country that oversaw an empire that held in its hand the destiny of one quarter of the human race now seems in retreat even from its nearest geographical neighbours in Europe.
During the first half of my life a whole industry developed around explaining and lamenting our perceived decline. ‘Declinology’ – the search for what and who was to blame – led us to focus, in a painfully self-conscious and often self-defeating way, on allegations of ‘poor’ productivity, ‘amateurism’ in management, ‘rampant’ trade union power, ‘suffocating’ corporatism, and ‘restrictive’ entanglements with Europe. An objective view would remind us that, as the rest of the world converged, a first mover – the Britain that had led the Industrial Revolution – was bound to see others catch up. As America is now finding, the hegemony of one state can be temporary and transient. David Frost, the late journalist and television host, once joked that the newspaper banner ‘England collapses before lunch’ was not just the familiar headline reporting another batting failure of the England cricket team, but a caption that would not have been out of place when the pound crashed, the stock market tumbled, or our ‘stop-go’-prone economy succumbed again to recession.
We, in Labour, took a different view which did not dwell on the reality of relative decline but looked to building a New Britain fit for a new age. We would change Labour so that Labour could change Britain. Persuading the party to change was often a daunting and wearing task, but as an American writer put it, ‘If you are not willing to spill blood between elections, you’ll spill it on election day, and it’ll be yours.’
We were not the first to talk of a New Britain and we will not be the last. It was a theme of turning-point elections in 1964, 1979 and then for us in 1997. The sense of decline was not our theme but it was the backdrop: we would not have needed a New Britain if the old Britain had not faltered. The modern politics of America is also replete with the word ‘new’ – from the 1930s ‘New Deal’ to John F. Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ and Bill Clinton’s ‘New Covenant’. Obama was presented as new both in relation to the Republicans and his Democratic opponents. But the ‘new’ in America is quite different from the ‘new’ in Britain. ‘New’ for America means moving on from one successful but passing era to another. ‘New’ in Britain means breaking out from a troubled past.
The contrast between Britain and America is even more apposite when we consider not just the different implications of the word ‘new’ but what each country has understood by the word ‘change’. Growing up, I like others witnessed the power of the idea of change with John F. Kennedy – ‘the torch has passed to a new generation’ – and, as an MP, with Bill Clinton’s summons to ‘make change our friend and not our enemy’. This is a time-honoured political appeal that Barack Obama took to a new height with ‘change we can believe in’. In America, changing from the old to the new is about a self-confident nation leading the world in adapting to new times. But in Britain change was required not just because we, like America and every nation, needed to rise to meet the challenge of new realities. Our country needed to change not because we wanted to abandon tradition, but because we had to stop falling behind.
By 1997, Britain was tired of, and ready to move on from, the neoliberal experiment. In the 1970s and 80s, it was fashionable to talk of the evils of collectivism – to lament the ever-increasing power of the trade unions and the state – and to salt criticism with horror stories about red tape, bureaucracy, corporatism and the public sector crowding out the private sector. By the 1990s, Britain was suffering – according to any opinion poll – from an inflation-prone economy, a shrinking industrial base, run-down public services and an outdated twentieth-century infrastructure that left us ill-equipped for the twenty-first century.
If the Tory view had been that we had too much state and too little market, the Labour view was we had too little investment, too little fairness, too little social cohesion and too little community. But we were not posing the old collectivism against Tory individualism; we were calling for a new kind of common purpose. We felt we were in that part of the cycle described by the American historian Arthur Schlesinger, when the pendulum swings towards progressive politics. And on the global stage, we countered the Conservatives’ turn from Europe towards isolationism with a vision of international cooperation. This made sense of a post-Cold War world where Russia was throwing off Communism, a post-analogue world where the digital revolution was sweeping all before it, and a post-insular world where globalisation seemed to bring more opportunities than risks. Not surprisingly, Tony Blair’s eloquent summons to ‘a new dawn’ captured people’s imagination. At our best, we in Labour viewed ourselves as applying enduring ideals to a new world.
But Britain did not want change for its own sake or merely as a symbol: ‘Cool Britannia’, one of the slogans of the day, is now best remembered for a raucous party of celebrities at No. 10. And after £1 billion spent on the Millennium Dome to welcome in the year 2000, the night is best remembered not for some new affirmation of Britishness but for a queue of newspaper editors unable to get to their plastic chairs in time to hear the clock strike midnight.
Things like this stood in sharp contrast with the authenticity of Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics. It was a shining display of a Britain that honoured liberty, fair play and social responsibility. While the Conservative culture minister – now the health minister – complained that there was ‘too much NHS, too little armed forces’, the tribute to nurses, doctors and a health service free to all captivated the world.
Britishness is not a simple idea because ours is a multinational state where four distinctive nations, with their own distinct cultures, have to find a way of living together. But it cannot be grounded just in institutions, no matter how ancient and prestigious. I used to recite a joke about our institutions when they were accused of underperforming: ‘Don’t worry, the first 500 years of any British institution’s history are always the most difficult.’ Even our pride in the longevity of our institutions is not enough to bind us closely together if the values that shape them are not widely shared.
For all the time I was in government, I was also acutely aware that we could not base our Britishness on ethnicity either: we are not only a multinational country, but a diverse one. Nor could we be a united country if some claimed to be more British than others or claimed that patriotism was their preserve and theirs alone. If we fell back on ethnicity as the foundation of national identity we would quickly be divided up into English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish. So I tried to root our sense of Britishness in the values we – all four nations – shared in common. This I believed was the only way to win the battle for Britain against nationalist pressures that have risen not only in Scotland and Wales but, more recently, in England as well, where the ‘take back control’ movement was undoubtedly central to us leaving the European Union. In this book, I chart the battle for Britain – the outcome of which is still in doubt.
In writing, I am conscious that we approach history on three levels. The nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle, who for a brief time taught in my old school, then Kirkcaldy Burgh School, saw history only as the story of the lives of great men – the ambitions, calculations and manoeuvres of those at centres of power. But I cast my net beyond the usual tales of who said what to whom and try to explain our driving ideas and the deeper forces which shaped our actions in gov
ernment. History – even a memoir – will be incomplete without an understanding that there are economic, social and cultural tides flowing across society which decision-makers have to take into account. Then there are competing ideas that sculpt the contours of our society which both open up and limit what leaders can do. Only then can we set out an account of what a political leader did and attempted to do. My hope is always to place the account of my experiences within this much broader context and so shed light not just on what happened during my time in politics, but also what happened during that time in our country and is still happening at this pivotal moment in our history.
In the years after 1997 the speed of change intensified with enormous, previously unheard-of, and once unimaginable social progress – the advance of women’s equality, the enfranchisement of the young, the vindication of gay and lesbian rights and the reduction of sectarian divisions with a long-elusive peace in Northern Ireland – all within the context of a revolution in communication and social media which has changed the way we interact with each other. This has also been accompanied by the growth of protectionist appeals, anti-immigrant sentiment and identity politics, the weakening of the centre and the strengthening of the extremes. And all of this has happened on a canvas coloured by one phenomenon that historians, years from now, may view as perhaps the most important shift affecting our country – the decline of religion.
In our social-media age, judgements are instantaneous and often brutal – and then people quickly move on. It will take a generation before events and people are put into perspective. If journalists have given us the first draft of history, the most I can offer is a second draft. It is, however, a truism that all political careers ultimately end in failure. Harold Macmillan did not rebound from his failed efforts to take Britain into Europe. Having achieved what Macmillan could not, Edward Heath was humiliated when he called an election on ‘Who governs Britain?’ and the people responded, ‘Not you.’ Economic crises undid the premierships of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. Margaret Thatcher was summarily rejected by her own party after a decade in power. Support for John Major collapsed when his party’s reputation for economic competence evaporated over Britain’s departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Despite all his other considerable achievements, Tony Blair is remembered above all else for a war that few now think should have been fought. David Cameron will be remembered for Britain leaving Europe and may yet also be blamed for setting the stage for Scotland leaving Britain. Theresa May will go down in history for gambling on a snap but ill-thought-out general election and enfeebling herself and her party by losing a parliamentary majority in the process.
