My Life, Our Times

by Gordon Brown

  The Labour leadership wanted to exploit what they saw as the personal popularity of the prime minister. It was even decided that our main poster of the campaign should be a picture of Jim Callaghan urging people to vote ‘yes’, a move that made Scottish devolution appear like a diktat from a prime minister based in London with a parliamentary seat in Cardiff. It might have worked in his adopted Wales but it could not work in Scotland – and it didn’t. Voters’ decisions in a referendum tend to deliver a verdict on the government of the day. With the Labour government more unpopular than at any time in its tenure, a Lib-Lab pact had done little to enhance the party’s reputation.

  During the passage of the Scotland Bill through Parliament, Labour had accepted an amendment that required the approval of 40 per cent of Scotland’s electorate to pass the referendum, rather than a simple majority of votes cast. So, while the final result showed a narrow majority in favour – with 51.6 per cent supporting an Assembly, a majority of about 77,400 – only 32.9 per cent of the total electorate actually voted Yes. Afterwards, the SNP joined the Tories in a motion of ‘no confidence’ that brought down the Labour government.

  Could events have worked out differently? Absolutely. Approached after the 1979 devolution debacle to co-write a book – eventually entitled The Politics of Nationalism and Devolution – with my one-time politics lecturer Henry Drucker, we were in no doubt that, despite the recent defeat, devolution was ultimately inevitable. We argued that the Scotland Act had been deficient and in a section of the book written by Henry he proposed a more radical settlement: reducing the number of Scottish MPs, introducing proportional representation for a Scottish Assembly and devolving tax powers, all of which later came to pass.

  A divided party entered a difficult election campaign in 1979. When the chancellor, Denis Healey, came to Scotland to meet the Scottish Labour Executive, he came under attack. I was one of the few to defend his economic record. And when in a later meeting Jim Callaghan was criticised by a prospective Labour candidate from an unwinnable seat, he told her to come back to challenge him when – and if – she was elected. ‘Sunny Jim’ was how he was portrayed, but in private meetings he could be tough and uncompromising – and unsmiling.

  My Conservative opponent in Edinburgh South at the election was a young ex-MP and Tory aristocrat, the Earl of Ancram, who contrived a popular touch by always insisting: ‘Call me Michael.’ He was also known in local circles as ‘Norman Crum’ having been announced as such at one formal occasion by a deaf official who hadn’t quite got ‘Lord Ancram’. I tried to fight on local issues. But as is often the case in politics, there is one point in the campaign when you just know you have lost. For me, it was a Friday-night candidates’ debate in a Morningside school. I had been speaking to small public meetings of fifty or so people, three times a night. On this occasion, when the earl, myself and the other candidates took questions and answers from a church-group forum in the most prosperous part of the constituency, an audience of several hundred turned up. After we drew lots, I stood up to deliver what was, on reflection, a fairly bog-standard speech – from the table behind which our chairs were placed. I sat down and Ancram was called. He walked beyond the table right to the front of the stage, clasped his hands and began by reciting the words Robert Kennedy had quoted from George Bernard Shaw, words I knew and suddenly wished I had used: ‘Some see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?’ The one word he never used was ‘Conservative’.

  With more students than ever living in the constituency, I had hoped we could win with the help of undergraduate voters. We did increase the Labour vote by 4,000, at a time when Labour support was falling nearly everywhere. I still lost by 2,460 votes. I had tried everything. Late into the night of election day, just before the polls closed, we had been rounding up those who had not yet voted. Alistair Moffat, a close friend who was director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, spent hours on the campaign trail with me alongside his wife Lindsay. After we knocked on the door of a very elderly constituent who needed persuading to come out to vote, Alistair said to her, in utter frustration, ‘But this may be the last time you will ever vote …’ She got her coat on and joined us. It was not enough. Edinburgh South had never been anything other than a Conservative seat for seventy years, and it would take until 1997 – and a brilliant campaign by Nigel Griffiths – for it to be won. Only in 2017, thanks to the hard work and popularity of his successor Ian Murray, has this once Tory seat become a safe Labour seat, the safest in Scotland.

  For a while I took a new route. I was still a lecturer but did some television work to gain experience in an area I knew little about – broadcast media. Scottish Television, prompted by ever-generous friends Russell Galbraith, Bob Cuddihy and Ken Vass, offered me the chance to produce programmes. Although this was never a long-term prospect for me, I remain proud of some of the shows we did. We were the first to expose how little revenue was flowing from North Sea oil and how little tax had been paid on land deals around Glasgow. And we led the way in consumers’ rights television producing a series, What’s Your Problem?, which uncovered malpractice and championed viewers getting by on tight family budgets. I learned a lot about TV – but given my experiences later on, clearly not enough. I suspect my work at STV was more helpful to me than to them.

  At that time, independent TV was pretty much a licence to print money, but even so, it would be fair to say that it was a licence to save as much money as they were printing. For instance, STV broadcast live golf, as you would in Scotland. But their version of live golf was not tournaments involving Sam Torrance, Tony Jacklin or Sandy Lyle. STV thought they could save money by broadcasting live amateur – seven-handicap – golf. This sounds fine in principle, but the problem was that the cameras had to follow people into fields, in and out of ponds, out of bounds into people’s gardens and beyond. It was taken off air by popular demand.

  I worked too on the Edinburgh Festival programmes, which again saved money by bringing in amateur acts. One night the programme ended not with the ordinary news headlines of the day but with a satirical alternative. When the news that was broadcast was ‘The world will end in three minutes’ and then ‘The Queen’s corgi has rabies’, there was understandably a mountain of complaints. Elderly viewers were fainting in old people’s homes. However, when we analysed the calls, the biggest concern seemed to have been for the Queen’s corgis, not that the world was ending. By that time the channel had a technique for dealing with complaints. We asked viewers who phoned in for their details, starting with their television licence number. Many hung up.

  In 1982, near the end of my time in television, I covered Scotland’s World Cup journey to Spain under the great manager Jock Stein. I was present at the Estadio Benito Villamarin stadium in Seville when Scotland faced off against Brazil. I was standing right behind the Brazilian goal when, after eighteen minutes, David Narey, who played for Dundee United and later joined my local team, Raith Rovers, put Scotland into the lead with his famous ‘toe poke’ from outside the penalty box. There was a moment of hope. Then, and to the ever-present drumbeat of Brazilian supporters, Brazil scored four goals, including a free kick from the majestic Zico. After Scotland’s exit from the World Cup, I flew back with the dejected team on their plane. It was the only time I met Jock Stein – who led Celtic to their European Cup victory in 1967, making them the first British team to win the trophy. Even though he had a reputation for being dour, I found him affable and full of humour, despite his obvious disappointment.

  Just before the World Cup, I had submitted the final work for my PhD and was awarded my doctorate while volunteering for an education project in Fife involving union members at Rosyth Dockyard, which employed 15,000. Our aim was to explore an alternative economic strategy to the Conservatives’ monetarist economics. Our classes aroused the ire of Norman Tebbit and the Department of Employment. The department wondered why so many trade unionists had signed up to education classes and start
ed to investigate the curriculum we were using. Fife was instantly considered to be the most dangerous place in Britain and Mr Tebbit’s department monitored us all the time.

  I was still, however, living in the Edinburgh student flat that I had occupied since 1976 – with all the untidiness associated with an undergraduate existence. After being away in London doing some PhD research at the London School of Economics, I arrived back at my flat to find the police looking round following a burglary. When they came to my study, they said to me: ‘Totally ransacked, sir.’ I had to tell them that the study had been undisturbed by any burglar; it was in exactly the same chaotic state it had been when I left for London.

  I became vice chair of the Scottish Labour Party in 1982 and chair the following year. The Labour Party was sharply split between the Bennite left and the mainstream. Denis Healey had won an acrimonious contest for deputy leader in the autumn of 1981 by the narrowest of margins; the bitterness spilled over into Scotland. When Callaghan’s successor as leader, Michael Foot, made a courtesy visit to the Scottish Labour Executive just two months later, the Bennites, led by the then chair George Galloway, castigated Foot for excluding Benn from the shadow Cabinet and assailed Healey for refusing to support the recently adopted party policy on unilateral nuclear disarmament. I disagreed with George and said that we needed to reach the middle ground to win the support of voters: ‘Anything which prevents this is not only needless but harmful,’ I said. I proposed that a draft manifesto be issued immediately and that we campaign on it in what would be an eighteen-month run-up to the general election. Years later, we would adopt a plan similar to this in advance of the 1997 general election with Road to the Manifesto, a document that was voted on by the party membership.

  The Bennite group on the Scottish Executive persistently tried to thwart any initiatives I took. In 1982, matters had got so bad that they voted to prevent me, even though I was vice chairman of the party, from addressing the Scottish Labour conference. But they could not stop me from becoming chair in 1983 because I had the support of all the major unions in Scotland.

  Friends in Fife were pushing for my selection as parliamentary candidate for the newly created constituency of Dunfermline East. Luck played its part. My selection as a candidate had nothing to do with me being a lecturer or working in television – it was about local connections, local people, local trade unions and local Labour Party supporters. I was friends with a great trade union official, Jim McIntyre, who understood the need for on-the-ground organisation and not only endorsed my candidacy but helped me greatly with wise advice.

  Jim had surrounded himself with a group of young shop stewards from Rosyth Dockyard and the surrounding open-cast mines of Fife. They included Charlie Boyle, Helen Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer, who later moved from trade-union shop steward to the European Parliament. It was, however, Jim who had told them that, while in time they might find their own parliamentary candidate from the shop floor, at this point I was the person best suited to represent them at Westminster.

  There were two remaining barriers. After a boundary review, the county of Fife, which previously had four constituencies, now had a fifth. The sitting MP, Dick Douglas, wanted the safer seat of Dunfermline East but his roots were in the other constituency of Dunfermline West. He had underestimated resistance to the idea that he could simply move east. Such was the independence of the new Dunfermline East party that, at their very first meeting, they voted against his automatic endorsement and for a selection conference.

  Second, although my family had been in the area for 300 years, some insisted that I was not the local candidate. One headline in a newspaper published a week before the selection conference read: ‘Local Man Challenged by Brown.’ The selection conference was chaired by David Stoddart, a retired miner. Of the fifty-two votes cast, I won thirty-four in the first round. With polling day only twenty-four days away, I needed an agent and I asked David. When he said he had not even voted for me, I replied that was an even better reason to pick him – if he was my agent, I told him, we could reunite the local party quickly. David was to be my agent over three general elections, and he became a close friend and invaluable adviser as we clocked up thousands of miles driving to and from the many towns and villages in the constituency.

  Over the remaining three weeks of the 1983 campaign, I never stopped addressing public meetings, then still an important feature of election campaigns. Audiences ranged from a handful in sheltered accommodation to hundreds at the dockyard, where I was allowed to speak only in the presence of the rear admiral. It was faintly possible, I joked with my team, that he was a floating voter. Others came to canvass on my behalf, including the long-serving general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, Lawrence Daly, and Jimmy Reid, who led the internationally renowned Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in. Only once did I venture outside my constituency. This was to claim at a Scottish Labour Party press conference that there was a secret National Coal Board plan to shed 10,000 Scottish mining jobs. Sadly that leak turned out to be right. In my first successful count as a candidate, I tallied 18,515 votes, an overall majority of 11,300. But I would be a member of an even smaller Labour Party in Parliament; around the country we had lost fifty-two seats.

  I was known in Scotland, if only slightly. But outside of Scotland I was completely unknown. When I arrived in Westminster, my anonymity was rammed home to me when The Times wrote about new MPs. According to the article, I was born in 1926: it reported that I was fifty-six years old and described me as a veteran. It was bizarre; while they had mistaken me for an elderly colleague also named Brown, the article was accompanied by a photo of me aged nineteen with my hair spilling over my shoulders. Showing the power not so much of the press as of the press cutting, another newspaper labelled me an old Labour stalwart. A few days later, a letter arrived from a private pension company, saying I had entered a new job late in life and should make provision for impending retirement. I was thirty-two.

  CHAPTER 3

  PERMANENT OPPOSITION?

  Early on in our parliamentary careers, I told Tony Blair that, from my reading of history, no great friendship among the senior ranks of politicians had ever lasted. I said this not because I believed a break-up of our friendship was inevitable; on the contrary, I said it to convince him that, if we had the chance, we should do things differently from our predecessors. The wars between Harold Wilson and his deputy George Brown in the 1960s; the rivalries in the wake of Wilson’s resignation between Roy Jenkins, Anthony Crosland and Denis Healey all vying to replace him, allowing Jim Callaghan to slip in as his successor; and the recent debacle in which Tony Benn had attempted a coup against Michael Foot’s deputy, Denis Healey: these recurring internecine conflicts were counterproductive and damaging. I thought Labour could do better.

  I now feel that Tony drew the opposite conclusion: that because past political friendships had not endured, no political friendship could ever endure; that friendships in politics, even if they start out real, become instrumental, a means to an end. I don’t accept the stereotype that people at the top of politics fall into two types: those who use and those who are used. Nonetheless, while there is always talk of the team, the tendency to rivalry is often inevitable.

  I had met Tony only once, before the 1983 election, when John Smith, then a member of the shadow Cabinet, introduced us in the bar of the House of Commons. We did not have a chance to talk. I was actually familiar with only a few MPs outside Scotland. I had, however, met Michael Foot, who at one stage considered asking me to work for him in the run-up to the 1983 election. I also knew Neil Kinnock, having met him on his regular visits to Scotland. That was about it.

  I couldn’t help but notice that the Parliamentary Labour Party was anything but young. Even among the new intake only a few of us – Tony, Nick Brown, Sean Hughes, Tony Lloyd, Clare Short, Jeremy Corbyn and Ron Davies (together with Harriet
Harman, who had arrived in 1982) – were in our early thirties.

  I also arrived to what was for many a familiar story in the life of a new MP: no office, no telephone and no facilities – just nothing. Within a few months I might be able to get a desk and then later share an office. For the moment, I would have to make do with the House of Commons Library or tables around the corridors near the Chamber where there were also some phones. That was one of the reasons why I did not deliver my maiden speech to the House until July, two months after the election.

  I was very aware of Aneurin Bevan’s view of the Houses of Parliament as set out in his book In Place of Fear. The building – erected before there was a right to vote in this country – had housed for most of its life either an unelected elite or one elected by the narrowest of constituencies. For that reason, I was never much attracted to the argument that Westminster as an ancient institution was entitled to resist change in the name of our great traditions and noble heritage.

  Some of these traditions were ludicrous. It took me some time to adjust to naming my opponents and colleagues in the third person, or to speak from a standing position without a desk or rostrum on which to rest notes. It is said that when called to give his maiden speech, Dennis Canavan, a fellow Fifer who was a Scottish Labour MP for over twenty years, walked to the front of the House towards the Dispatch Box, thinking that was what everyone did. It is, of course, reserved only for frontbenchers. As Dennis walked towards it, the shadow Scottish Secretary Willie Ross waved him back to his seat. ‘Not yet, son, not yet,’ he said.