by Gordon Brown
The Scottish Parliament should now, I suggest, have new guarantees that powers over agriculture, fisheries, regional policy and the environment – not held in Brussels – will be transferred directly to it; guarantees that the £800 million or so of money now spent by Europe on Scotland’s behalf will be for the Scottish Parliament to control and spend; guarantees of consultation and co-decision-making in areas where it matters; guarantees about the Scottish Parliament’s power to sign treaties with Europe on devolved matters; and guarantees of powers to top up benefits and decide on taxation that will never allow it to say it cannot pursue an agenda for social justice.
Shared sentiment, unwritten conventions and wishful thinking will not now be enough to hold the Union together. What is needed is a Guarantee of Right – one step on from the Claim of Right with which the Scots began the process of devolution in 1989 – which enshrines in law all of these guarantees in a new Scottish covenant with the UK.
As for Britain, a game-changing offer by those of us who support Remain is also needed if we are to stay in the European Union. ‘Leave’ seems unable to deliver its promise of British control of our borders, laws, money and trade. But if any alternative is to succeed we have to persuade millions of Leave voters that there is an alternative that offers something new which justifies a change of mind. It will have to answer the questions that the Conservative leadership failed to address in the referendum: specifically, concerns expressed by the British people about how we can manage migration, respect the authority of British courts, secure value for money for our budget contributions and demonstrate that Britain’s desire to build better trading relationships with the rest of the world need not be incompatible with membership of the EU Customs Union. Above all, such an offer has to make the patriotic case for a Britain proud to be outward-looking and, through maintaining close links with Europe, fully engaged with the world beyond our shores. Such an offer has to secure the right balance for the modern world between the national autonomy nations desire and the international cooperation they need for both security and prosperity.
My proposals suggest that the old answers will no longer hold water and that we need new approaches for new times. But forging new relationships between the north and the south, between England and Scotland, and between Britain and the EU will only take us so far. To tackle the two fundamental issues, economic and cultural, raised by these two referendums, we must find a way to talk meaningfully about the values that unite us and we must find a programme for managing the global economy in a way that maximises life chances and minimises insecurities. It is to these challenges that I will turn in the final two chapters.
CHAPTER 20
FAITH IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE?
From the outside, No. 10 Downing Street appears both imposing and forbidding. But while life behind the famous black door can be both exhilarating and daunting, the place itself offers the prime minister of the day practical benefits. You have quite spacious living accommodation, dedicated and hard-working secretaries, clerks, messengers, custodians, porters, IT specialists and telephonists, and a support system on hand that helps you get through a busy day, as well as an advantage that few, especially in London, enjoy: you can walk to work.
For a parent of young children it offers the greatest advantage of all: it allowed Sarah and me to see our children between meetings and, in fact, at any time we had a spare minute during the working day. Even while doing one of the busiest jobs around, you need not miss out on seeing your child take their first steps or speak their first words or prepare for their first day at school.
There are, of course, the predictable downsides from living above the shop: you are always on duty. What’s more, with over a hundred staff working behind that black door from desks or sometimes just chairs in corridors, basements and lofts, the building is full up – literally to the rafters. Ministers, civil servants and advisers are falling over each other. And after a century of neglect, what is now a run-down building is in desperate need of top-to-bottom renovation – something that no PM will contemplate despite each of us being presented on appointment with detailed information of its parlous condition. For the few years that you hold the office no prime minister wants to be holed up in Admiralty House or to be greeting foreign dignitaries at the door of some anonymous office block.
Living in Downing Street has one other downside: you are never out of the public eye and, although the chancellor has a Downing Street flat that comes with the job, I did not initially warm to living there when chancellor. I felt Downing Street was Tony’s home and place of work and it was right that the best and biggest flat in the building – the chancellor’s flat at No. 11 – was available to Tony and Cherie’s growing family. So for the first eight of my ten years as chancellor I lived in the small flat of my own in the shadow of the House of Commons. Only in 2005, when John was two and just before Fraser was born, did Sarah and I move into the No. 10 flat. We were advised to do so in the wake of a security review after 2005’s 7/7 attacks, but the timing was right too: I could spend more time with the children as they grew up.
Naturally, things can go awry when a toddler is at loose in the corridors of the main decision-making centre in the country. Intrigued by the controls of the intercom system, Fraser seized them one day and in his first act of Downing Street defiance broadcast to the staff that they could now all leave for home. It was 3 p.m. On another occasion, John surprised one of America’s top military commanders General David Petraeus by asking him to teach him how to march. And he astounded Rev. Ian Paisley when on a later date he blurted out: ‘Show me your marching.’
But if Downing Street is an office and a home it is, rightly, also something else: a small but vital and globally recognised centre of Britain’s public square. Downing Street is a public building – but with little public access. Sadly, its unwelcoming gates and tight security make it look more like a walled private compound. And so just as Tony and Cherie had done – and their predecessors before them – and with the help of an amazingly public-spirited staff who wanted to let the public see in, we opened up Downing Street for public events as often as possible – sometimes half a dozen in a week at lunchtimes and in the evenings. We held receptions to celebrate Diwali, Eid, Chanukah, Christmas and other special religious seasons, even including the Humanists for good measure; commemorations of special days that give pause for thought – like Armistice Day – and adding Holocaust Memorial Day, International Women’s Day, World Aids Day and World Autism Day; celebrations for the emergency services, the military and, in particular, the NHS on its sixtieth anniversary, when Lesley Garrett delighted the assembled doctors, nurses, midwives and catering and cleaning staff with ‘The Impossible Dream’, her tribute – as an NHS user but also as a GP’s wife – to a service achieving what was once thought unattainable.
Sarah and I had an idea of what the twenty-first-century public square could look like and how Downing Street could play a part in shining a spotlight on our modern, diverse and creative Britain. We wanted to encourage and help build a far more inclusive public square filled with men, women and children from all our nations and regions and our ethnic and religious communities – giving proper place to people who devoted their lives to public service. In particular, we invited in and encouraged people who were championing innovative community projects and who had hitherto enjoyed little of the recognition they deserved.
No. 11’s main room was probably the best place for receptions – with its small outdoor balcony overlooking the gardens and Horse Guards Parade. (It would perhaps have been better known as the ‘smoking gallery’: when I first arrived I found it full of ashtrays and cigarette ends left behind by my predecessor Ken Clarke.) This room was also ideal for the children’s Christmas party which each year highlighted the work of a children’s charity. Traditionally the chancellor had played Santa Claus, but I knew I would not be very good at swapping my navy-blue suit for a red and white one, so I recruited Lord Richard Attenborough, who repri
sed his role as the ‘real’ Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street, and later Robbie Coltrane, then at the height of his fame as Hagrid in the Harry Potter films. At another children’s party, my team hauled me back from a photo with Basil Brush, the famous fox puppet, worried that his ‘Boom Boom’ repertoire would make for an embarrassing media story.
The Downing Street events cycle allowed me to pursue my interest in the environment – many green charities came to Downing Street for the first time – and my passion for all sports, with receptions for our Olympic heroes and, of course, for national successes in cricket, rugby and football – including the Scotland football team. At one of them I introduced the then Liverpool player Michael Owen to Sir Alex Ferguson, who later signed him for Manchester United. And I remember arranging for Rebecca Adlington, our top Olympic swimmer, to be driven at speed from an Olympic reception at Downing Street to King’s Cross station so she could make the last train back to Yorkshire for her training session at dawn the next day. No. 10 also hosted the London Fashion Week reception, with Sarah heading off – successfully, as it happened – an unwelcome bid by New York to steal London’s annual slot. I recall Ozwald Boateng adjusting my tie to smarten me up before I entered the room to speak.
Most of all we promoted new and often unsung charities – breaking new ground, for example, to launch a children’s bedtime storybook to raise money for St George’s Hospital’s baby unit with a pyjama party, and hosting one party with just four days’ notice to give the new Hibbs Lupus Trust a chance to launch in style when a last-minute slot came up. While No. 10 does not have its own cinema, unlike the White House, we hosted two British film premieres, one – on religious repression – smuggled out of Burma, and another on the perils of overfishing and emptying our oceans.
And we celebrated each National Poetry Day, and usually World Book Day and Children’s Reading Day, with events featuring our best authors and illustrators. Poets, it is often said, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and writers and artists are an under-acknowledged part of our public square – despite the fact that out of the diversity of their work, which provides such a sharp and welcome contrast to the often mechanical and introverted world of politics, comes our common culture. I am proud that our government did more to fund the arts – including free entry to galleries – than any in living memory. Many of our leading authors did events. I remember in particular supporting Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry-reading fundraiser that she organised at short notice for the Haiti floods disaster appeal of 2009. I said then that if politicians understood poetry the world would be a better place, and that 200 years from now our age will be remembered more for its works of art than for the work of any politician.
Our public outreach had a much wider purpose than supporting charity or campaign work. Just as I became prime minister, inspired by the work of three very innovative charity campaigners – M. T. Rainey, Jane Tewson and David Robinson – I had published a book called Britain’s Everyday Heroes. Its purpose was to honour community campaigners and philanthropic citizens who showed us how everyday acts of generosity and kindness turn desolation into hope and build strong communities. I had wanted to follow this up as prime minister by focusing one of the 2008 Queen’s honours lists exclusively on community service at home and abroad. Of course, for very good reasons, such a list is no longer decided by politicians; the compromise reached – which sadly did not survive long – was that in all future lists, often in preference to celebrities or government officials, around half the recipients would be local heroes who had improved their communities. Behind all of these initiatives was an attempt to summon a new generation to a new season of service. I learned a lot when Sarah and I used one week of our 2009 summer – our last summer in government – to volunteer in the local hospice in Kirkcaldy. I found men and women facing death were grateful for very small acts of kindness. It was a humbling experience.
One of the great questions that I faced as prime minister and that we face as a society is: what role should ethics and moral values play in day-to-day discussions of policymaking and the larger task of setting a vision before the nation? If you start from the view eloquently expressed by Rowan Williams in his book Faith in the Public Square, that they are an inescapable part of public life, then one of the great challenges is how to involve ethics and morality in public discourse at a time when the common framework and language for doing so – the one previously provided by religion – is no longer universally shared and when some argue that we should banish religious arguments from the public square altogether. To lose the moral energy that comes from the motivation of people with strong religious convictions would, in his and my view, diminish our civic life. But our contention that there are shared principles which create mutual obligations for each other’s welfare was soon to be tested.
For our public discourse could never be the same again after the dramatic events of 2008, which raised in my mind important ethical questions and also alerted me to the problems associated with attempts to answer them. Right from its start, I had no doubt that the financial crisis was also a moral crisis – and not just for our country but for the entire western world. Its roots lay in risk-laden, speculative and often dubious financial transactions in what was an unsupervised and shadow banking system. Put in more biblical language, the world had worshipped at the altar of wealth and greed, and forgotten that a successful economy needed to be built on trust and fairness. Bankers and boardrooms had awarded themselves bonuses they did not need for work they had not done and for risks they had taken at the expense of those who went without. The phrases ‘globalisation’, ‘free-market economics’ and ‘efficient markets’ had been invoked as a heedless mantra to justify these activities, with no account given to the pain and loss of those who suffered the consequences.
Led by Wall Street, the world had stopped listening to the lesson Adam Smith had taught when he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a book that he said was far more significant than his more famous The Wealth of Nations. There he had argued that the market economy had to be underpinned by the right ethics. The helping hand of compassion was to him more vital than the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.
On the eve of the G20 in London at the beginning of April 2009, I tried to inject an ethical dimension into the debate about the causes and consequences of the crisis, asking St Paul’s Cathedral to host a day of debate led by speeches from Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, and me. In a note he had kindly prepared for me, the chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks cautioned against the outsourcing of morals to markets. People, he said, were buying things they did not need with money they didn’t have for a happiness that would not last. The chief rabbi reminded me that the word credit comes from the Latin credere, which means ‘to believe’, and that confidence, that prerequisite of growth, was derived from the Latin confidere meaning ‘to have full trust’. A good economy is based not just on balancing supply and demand but on honouring contracts and showing respect. A country that elevates its material comforts over and above its principles can end up sacrificing both.
The aim of the debate at St Paul’s was to underpin the resolutions of the next day’s summit with a call for more ethical behaviour from our financial institutions and a fairer distribution of wealth across society. At the same time, I was aware of the dangers of appearing sanctimonious or moralising. In the words of the trade union leader and post-war Labour minister Ernest Bevin, there was a risk of ‘hawking your conscience round the country’. Mrs Thatcher had been praised and blamed in equal measure for lecturing the people of Scotland on the morality of wealth creation in a speech to the Church of Scotland General Assembly, and was widely criticised when she said that the Good Samaritan behaved virtuously not just because he had compassionate intentions but also because he had the money to do so.
Perhaps I should not have worried so much. Try as I did, I failed to alter the terms of the debate, not because I lost the argument but because we never really had it. Of c
ourse the bankers were under fire, but in the public’s mind protecting their own savings and jobs understandably took precedence over any dissection of the roots of the crisis or any search for meaning from it.
Spring 2009 was not the first and certainly not the only time that I tried to engage the faith communities in a national debate. For over ten years their representatives had regularly joined me at No. 11 Downing Street, often monthly, for meetings as we were planning debt forgiveness and increased aid for the world’s poorest countries. Later in 2005 I persuaded all the faith leaders to come together in support of a nationwide effort to reduce child poverty. And after a year as prime minister, I had decided to make a bold proposal to our faith leaders: one by one I invited them to join a non-partisan debate about British values, and as part of this to discuss our core identity as a country and where we were heading.
I hoped to start this dialogue outside London and suggested Liverpool because I knew of the ecumenism there which had been led by a hero of mine, Bishop David Sheppard. I thought we needed to talk about what we meant by community and how we could strengthen it. Could we revitalise and bring into the public square and expose to rational debate the beliefs and values that are common to all religions and many secular ideologies too? I had in mind the values referred to in the preceding chapter: our commitment to liberty and tolerance, to civic duty and strong communities, and to fairness or, as Churchill put it, ‘fair play’ – in other words, a civic humanism that had originated from religious beliefs but was justified on ethical and rational grounds.
