Gordon Brown: son of the manse
Anger and apathy, Bankers and BREXIT, Corruption and COVID, the ABC of Britain’s decline has determined our recent history. The Venerable Bede wrote in the 8th century that history should record the “evil of wicked men”, to avoid sin, while describing the “good things of good men” to encourage virtue. James Macintyre’s insightful and balanced Gordon Brown: Power with Purpose (Bloomsbury, £25), falls into Bede’s “good men” category, encouraging virtue even though as the work of a journalist this biography is a “first rough draft of history”.
In the 2008-2010 global economic crisis nobody knew what to do. Obama spoke up: “Gordon has a plan.” The plan rallied the G7 and G20 who committed to a $1.1 trillion recovery package taken from national budgets – so taxpayers: ‘quantitative easing’ to recapitalise the banks, boost demand and counter recession. It turned Gordon Brown into an international figure. He admitted responsibility for too light regulation of financial services, failure to spot the dangers in the market for sub-prime mortgages and the banks’ casino culture. The Conservative Party had wanted even less regulation.
Enter a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010. Liam Byrne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, left his successor – a Scottish Liberal Democrat banker Danny Alexander — a four-year plan to reduce the debt overhang. But he also left him a jokey note: “I’m afraid there is no money – and good luck.” This notorious sentence has been persistently used by Conservatives ever since to blame Labour, downplaying the bankers’ responsibility for global indebtedness. Debt rose in the vast majority of developed countries accruing from the response to the banking crisis. But the alleged profligacy of Labour’s economic policies over the last decade was blamed instead. It was a highly successful piece of political disinformation.
Brown’s fall from grace in the public eye and resultant electoral failure illustrates a number of perennial features of British politics. In particular the influence of the right-wing press, such as the Daily Mail and the Murdoch empire, on a public tired and suspicious of politicians, giving no second chances to political leaders it turns against.
Like Angela Merkel and Theresa May, Brown had a Protestant clergyman for a father. Rev. Dr. John Brown served as Church of Scotland Minister, notably in Kirkcaldy for 13 years, a parent revered enough for Gordon Brown to present a volume of his sermons to Pope Benedict XVI in September 2010.
Whoever is Prime Minister needs somehow to balance the moral and the expedient. Gordon Brown’s political misfortunes arose partly from tipping the balance towards morality and social justice.
Labour leaders have always faced headwinds. Clement Attlee sustained for six years a radical socio-economic programme, despite post-war bankruptcy, and was defeated only in 1951. Later Labour Governments walked a tightrope: policies promoting a more just society on one side, the imperative of winning general elections to implement such policies on the other. Brown had a good moral compass, combined with merely a modest ability to connect with a fractious public. Change “moral” to “legal” above and this could be said of Sir Keir Starmer.
Reviewers have been positive about Power with Purpose, focusing on issues of interest to themselves. Thus tensions between Brown and Blair over the years feature prominently, but the chapter “Joy in the Morning: Gordon Brown’s quiet faith” does not. There is only a passing mention even in the Church Times. Yet few doubt Brown’s upbringing in the Church of Scotland was influential on his politics.
Brown became known for phoning NGOs to coordinate their public advocacy for overseas aid and debt reduction with his diplomacy and government action. He was also quite open in his relationship with the Churches and religion. If there is one speech, given as Chancellor of the Exchequer — Macintyre misses it — which illustrates the Christian influence on his thinking and its significance for government policy, it is “The Economics of Hope”, his address to the Church of Scotland’s 1999 General Assembly. It was dedicated to his recently deceased father: a passionate call for debt relief to the poorest nations, increased aid, and achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs). “For it is our Christian teaching — the faith I was brought up in,” Brown declared, “that when some are poor, our whole society is impoverished; that when there is an injustice somewhere it is a threat to justice everywhere; that what – as Dr. [Martin Luther] King said – selfish men tear down, selfless men and women must build anew.”
On 24 July 2008, after the ecumenical “Walk for Witness” in central London, led by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Gordon Brown spoke in the Lambeth Palace courtyard on the moral imperative to reduce global poverty. Some 650 Anglican bishops and politicians attending the 2008 Lambeth Conference, plus heads of NGOs, were present. This was no sudden, manipulative embrace of the Churches and NGOs, but a deeply-held long-term commitment.
Brown has even joked about the wrong sort of religious approach to politics, recounting how his father told a story about a fellow minister’s choice of hymns after local elections. “Sometimes the congregation was asked to sing the hymn, ‘Now Thank We All Our God’. When the other party won he announced the hymn, ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind Forgive our Foolish Ways’. And in the event of ‘no overall control’ he could always perform ‘God Works in Mysterious Ways, His Wonders to Perform’.”
Brown would be the first to say secular values could also have motivated, and been in play, in government policies that prevailed from 1997-2010. And a quiet faith does not eliminate bad mistakes. But faith values truth in the exercise of power and enhances clarity of purpose.
Historians and biographers have to make a serious effort to understand cultural influences and beliefs, even those with which they personally have little sympathy. Their account of the past is weakened by not doing so. James Macintyre should be applauded for a good title, a good read, and the breadth of his empathy with his cast of political heavyweights — above all Gordon Brown.
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