Peter Oborne reviews: Best for Britain?: The Politics and Legacy of Gordon Brown by Simon Lee.
This book brilliantly dissects Brown the intellectual and exposes the cynicism and dishonesty behind the Prime Minister's “British Way”.
EVEN THOUGH Gordon Brown has been a dominant figure in British public life for nearly two decades he has yet to attract the definitive biography. Tom Bower produced a very troubling portrait of Brown’s working methods. Robert Peston wrote well about Gordon Brown and high politics. William Keegan engaged with Brown the economist. Paul Routledge gave a cheerful description of the prime minister’s early life.
Simon Lee’s new book does not try to supplant any of these books. But he is the first author to attempt an intellectual biography of the prime minister. The result is an extremely valuable book which fills a gaping hole.
Lee shows that Gordon Brown has been through several distinct phases. In the 1970s he was a socialist who supported a planned economy and ‘a massive and irreversible shift of power to working people.’ This early version of Brown contemptuously rejected all the devices and schemes which would later become his stock in trade as Chancellor as ‘the familiar tried formulas of wider incentives [and] tax reliefs.’ The future prime minister was bitterly hostile to private industry, international capital flows, and the City of London.
This red-blooded socialism was moderated after Brown’s entry to the Commons at the 1983 general election. For the next decade Brown fitted himself naturally into the values and aims of the traditional Labour Party. He passionately believed in the primacy of manufacturing industry over financial interests, and retained his faith in the ability of the state to influence the economy through regional funds, a nationalised investment bank, and other interventionist mechanisms.
Gordon Brown dropped this kind of supply-side socialism like a stone after Labour’s general election defeat of 1992. Lee shows that Gordon Brown has since repudiated pretty well all the Labour Party traditions in which he was reared. Instead he has embraced a body of thought which can be traced to Adam Smith and his successors like Milton Friedman: the very same thinkers who inspired Margaret Thatcher.
This has involved a fundamental recalibration of Brown’s political economy. Its focus has moved right away from manufacturing industry and towards the City of London and the liberalisation of international trade flows. Brown as chancellor embraced those very causes which he most viciously denounced in opposition. Lee tellingly notes the relative absence of references to Labour Party politicians and thinkers in the prime minister’s recent speeches, compared to those from the rival liberal and conservative traditions.
A version of this narrative has been told before (and was touched on by Michael Gove in his Bow Group speech in October) though never in such compelling detail. The most original section of Lee’s extremely useful book deals with Gordon Brown’s concept of Britishness. This very ugly word has become as central to the Brown premiership as the Third Way (a phrase which, says Simon Lee, Brown only ever uttered once) was to Tony Blair
Brown first began to develop the theory of Britishness in his 1997 Spectator/Allied Dunbar lecture. The idea had certain core characteristics of which the most important were arguably the British commitment to liberty against arbitrary interference; and the empowerment of a ‘pluralist and decentralised democracy’ against a uniform state. Lee cleverly demonstrates that Gordon Brown’s Idea of a decentralised Britain only truly applies to his native Scotland. He expects England to continue under a centralised, statist, Treasury administered regime.
This is not the only contradiction. Even though Gordon Brown’s idea of Britishness is applicable only to the Scots (and to a lesser extent Wales and Northern Ireland), the English are the most subjected to its rhetoric. The Scots, indeed, are allowed their separate national institutions and national identity.
For instance there is nothing ‘pluralist and decentralised’ about the English National Health Service, which is nevertheless endlessly being held up by Gordon Brown as a great British institution. But the Scots have been given local control over their own national health service.
This basic double standard is demonstrated even more clearly still by the case of the British youth national community service, modelled on the United States AmeriCorps, and set up by Gordon Brown in 2004. According to Gordon Brown this is a national body, but in fact is purely English. Once again the Scots have been permitted their own, separate, lavishly funded ‘Scotscorp’ volunteering scheme, designed to display ‘the kind of Scotland that our country will become.’
According to Lee the ‘greatest flaw in Brown’s British Way is the extent to which it can only be sustained by drawing on examples of English history or writings specifically about England and the English and reinventing them as if they were about Britain and the British.’ Thus for Gordon Brown Magna Carta, the Peasants Revolt and the civil war are all moments in the ‘British’ struggle for fairness and liberty, even though they all took place before the Act of Union.
Lee shows how Brown has misquoted and misrepresented scores of England writers in order to make them fit into his ‘Britishness’ paradigm. Orwell’s phrase, ‘the English genius’, is converted by Brown into ‘the British genius’. Lee exposes how Brown places utterances in the mouth of Churchill that he never made, and Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt etc are quoted out of context.
Simon Lee has exposed the embarrassing emptiness and dishonesty of Gordon Brown’s vision of Britain, and in so doing produced an explosive political tract.
Best for Britain?: The Politics and Legacy of Gordon Brown, by Simon Lee, 304pp, OneWorld Publications
