My Life, Our Times Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Preface: My Life

  Introduction

  1 Growing Up

  2 Into Parliament

  3 Permanent Opposition?

  4 The Road to Granita – and Government

  5 Taking Power and Giving it Away

  6 Prudence for a Purpose

  7 Tax and the British – and the Battle Against Poverty

  8 Renewing the NHS

  9 In or Out? The Euro and After

  10 First Days in No. 10

  11 The Best-Laid Plans …

  12 2008: Reform Before the Storm

  13 Iraq: How We Were All Misled

  14 Afghanistan: A War Without End?

  15 The Banking Collapse that Shook the World

  16 Preventing a Great Depression

  17 Fighting Our Way Out of Recession

  18 2010: Losing and Leaving

  19 Battles for Britain

  20 Faith in the Public Square?

  21 My Life With Labour

  Afterword: Our Times

  Picture Section

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  As former Prime Minister and our longest-serving Chancellor, Gordon Brown has been a guiding force for Britain and the world over three decades. This is his candid, poignant and deeply relevant story.

  In describing his upbringing in Scotland as the son of a minister, the near-loss of his eyesight as a student and the death of his daughter within days of her birth, he shares with us the passionately held principles that have shaped and driven him, reminding us that politics can and should be a calling to serve. Reflecting on the personal and ideological tensions within Labour as well as its achievements – the minimum wage, tax credits, Bank of England independence and the refinancing of the National Health Service – he describes how to meet the challenge of pursuing a radical agenda within a credible party of government. He explains how as Chancellor he equipped Britain for a globalised economy while swimming against the neoliberal tide and shows what more must be done to halt rising inequality. In his behind-the-scenes account of the financial crisis and his leading role in saving the world economy from collapse, he addresses the question of who was to blame for the crash and why its causes and consequences still beset us.

  From the invasion of Iraq to the tragedy of Afghanistan, from the coalition negotiations of 2010 to the referendums on Scottish independence and Europe, Gordon Brown draws on his unique experiences to explain Britain’s current fractured condition. And by showing us what progressive politics has achieved in recent decades, he inspires us with a vision of what it might yet achieve today.

  Riveting, expert and highly personal, this historic memoir is an invaluable insight into our times.

  All Gordon Brown’s proceeds from this book will go to the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory and Theirworld children’s charity.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gordon Brown served as Prime Minister of Britain from 2007 to 2010, during which time he is widely credited with having prevented a second Great Depression in the wake of the financial crash. Previously, he was Britain’s longest-serving Chancellor from 1997 to 2007, masterminding many of Labour’s proudest achievements including the minimum wage, debt cancellation for the world’s poorest nations and major reform of Britain’s monetary and fiscal policy. Since leaving office, he has dedicated himself to charitable work and is now United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum Infrastructure Investors Summit and a Distinguished Global Leader in Residence at New York University. He lives with his wife Sarah and two sons, John and Fraser, in Fife, Scotland.

  For John and Fraser

  and in memory of Jennifer

  GORDON BROWN

  My Life, Our Times

  PREFACE: MY LIFE

  Twenty years on from when I became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and ten from when I became prime minister, I feel the time has come now to look back and take stock: of what I was trying to do, and of what I got wrong as well as what I got right.

  I started out in politics as an idealist with a strong, perhaps naïve, conviction of what needed to change in Britain.

  Politics, I thought, was more than the art of the possible; it was about making the desirable possible.

  Of course, there is always a tension between idealism and pragmatism. Over five decades I have learned that leaders need a command of substance, mastery of detail, problem-solving skills and an ability to see the big picture. But that is not enough: above all else, leaders need to communicate a positive vision of the future that can inspire and motivate people and mobilise their enthusiasm for progress and change.

  I was fortunate to meet the greatest leader of our generation, Nelson Mandela, and then to get to know him quite well over his later years. He told me candidly that he himself was no master of detail. But he had developed in his years in prison a clear vision of a democratic, multiracial South Africa – a vision soon realised under his presidency, an achievement that astonished the whole world.

  The night before he left prison in 1990, he assembled African National Congress comrades to tell them that the oppression they had suffered under apartheid and the violence inflicted on their communities, including torture and state-sponsored murder, might be seen as justifying acts of revenge. Then he was measured and blunt: if they retaliated, South Africa would descend into a bloodbath and peace would forever be impossible. Only by showing no bitterness and by championing reconciliation could they avert such a tragedy, and for the rest of his life he exemplified the ideal of peace without recrimination, most memorably in the way he, as South Africa’s president, embraced the nation’s predominantly white World Cup-winning rugby team, the Springboks.

  Ideas as big as Mandela’s are, of course, few and far between, but lesser ideas can still move the dial, shift the pace, often via incremental, unsensational steps, and transform our view of what is possible. Importantly, they can do so to best effect if they create hope for a better future.

  I had long since read Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, before he first came to London as the newly elected president of the United States in April 2009. I was aware that a painting entitled Hope by the British artist George Frederic Watts had inspired the theme of his book, and I was able to offer it to him as an official loan from the Government Art Collection. It shows a lone blindfolded girl sitting on a globe and trying to play a lyre whose strings are broken. That painting reflects something he had written about, and which I deeply believe – that even in the most hopeless of situations we can, and must, seek grounds for hope.

  We often depict hope, or rather its death, in the most dramatic terms – a refugee boat capsized at sea or a food convoy unable to enter a besieged town. But hope can die in very ordinary, and seemingly unspectacular, ways as well: young people denied the opportunities their parents’ generation enjoyed and deciding there is nothing worth striving for; unemployed men and women feeling rejected and losing all sense of self-worth; older people alone, fearful, their health and mobility needs mounting and feeling no one seems to care.

  Progressive political parties exist to deliver a message of hope. For without a foundation built on hope, parties may survive without distinction in the short-term, but are destined to fail with time.

  Perhaps it took me too long to understand fully another essential dimension of leadership: that any idea, big or small, is of little significance until it can be communicated compellingly and in clear terms. I had the privilege of meeting
Anthony Burgess at the Edinburgh Festival in the early 1980s. His novel A Clockwork Orange was released to critical acclaim in the UK in 1962, and his publisher sold the rights to the US. Then the American publisher decided to release the novel without the twenty-first and final chapter, and it was this attenuated version of the text that became the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film. From the moment he agreed to the US deal, Burgess anguished over the deletion of the final chapter. Chapters 1 to 20 told a tale of never-ending violence. But Chapter 21 was about redemption, about a young man who had gone off the rails suddenly finding, as he was about to become a father himself, that there was a better way to live. To his lasting regret, Burgess’s vision of a more optimistic future never reached a wider audience.

  In politics, you not only have to do what is right, but you have to convince the wider audience. In this book, I write of the greatest test that I faced as prime minister: the gravest financial crisis of our lifetime, and one which could have rapidly gone critical in the form of a sweeping global depression. That did not happen – and, through unprecedented cooperation worldwide in a plan for recovery, growth quickly returned, unemployment started to fall and people’s savings were secured. But I wish that in the midst of all that I was doing to forestall a depression, I had been able to do more to lift confidence and to convey hope. And I regret to this day being unable to convince the British people that we had to finish the work of recovery by rebuilding our still unreformed and risk-laden financial system. That crisis and the response to it, in the form of the innovative G20 meeting in London in April 2009, are matters I will deal with in detail in some of the following chapters.

  As I reflect on these events, I realise that leadership is not just about what to do but when to act: to see when history is turning and to know when to move and when to wait on events. Robert Frost’s 1916 poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ is both familiar and haunting:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  Frost later commented that the poem should not be taken as one about destiny; but his close friend the poet Edward Thomas, having read the poem, was inspired to volunteer for service in the British Army. Thomas died in the trenches after only two weeks in France. He had concluded that life brings momentous choices which, once taken, define your whole future.

  In politics, you can never assume that the old ways will do. There are turning points when one course of action has reached its end, and when a new course must be charted. It requires judgement. Sometimes what is reported as good judgement is, in fact, simply good fortune. But, at other times, the opposite is true: it was said of Abraham Lincoln that, with his party sometimes a fragile coalition, and in the rapidly fluctuating political and military complexities as the Civil War raged and moved towards its climax, ‘he never took a step too early or too late’.

  Like most politicians, I cannot claim to have always seen the writing on the wall, good or bad. In my thirteen years in government there were many turning points, some fundamental, others less important. In the chapters that follow I write about times when it was right to act – from making the Bank of England independent in our first days in government in 1997; introducing tax credits to address child and pensioner poverty in 1999; refinancing the NHS with the biggest single tax rise in our history in 2002; and ushering in the biggest peacetime fiscal stimulus in 2009. And I write about times when it was right to step back, as when in 2003 we rejected the euro and in 2007 decided to exit Iraq.

  I will also set out what I have learned about myself, and the kind of challenges that will face anyone on assuming leadership in today’s world. The year 2007 may prove to have been the last year in which a Scot became prime minister of the United Kingdom; but I suspect that beyond that, in one respect at least, I may have been a politician out of season.

  Politics is, in fact, surprisingly physical. A life in politics is one of thousands upon thousands of handshakes, one at a time, with eye contact often more important than words. I love campaigning. I love meeting people. I love not just the big rallies but the face-to-face encounters. I feel drawn to people – hearing their stories, listening to their ideas, putting myself in their shoes and learning from their comments and criticisms. I miss the local advice surgeries I held for constituents in ten different locations in towns and villages across my constituency. And I was as grateful for the kindness shown to me as I was for the occasional extreme frankness of fiercely egalitarian Fifers.

  All this matters, because it is the ability to connect that influences whether or not people decide to believe in what you are trying to do and support you. Getting it wrong can be damaging, and getting it wrong on camera – or on tape – immensely damaging. President George H. W. Bush was caught on camera glancing at his watch in a 1992 town-hall debate with Bill Clinton, just as a citizen was asking how the economic downturn had affected him personally. It conveyed a vivid impression that he could hardly wait to get out of there.

  But in recent years ‘connecting’ seems to increasingly include the public display of emotion, with the latter – authentic or not – seen as evidence of a sincerity required for political success. In a more touchy-feely era, our leaders speak of public issues in intensely personal ways, and assume they can win votes by telling their electors that they ‘feel their pain’. For me, being conspicuously demonstrative is uncomfortable – to the point that it has taken me years, despite the urging of friends, to turn to writing this book.

  I can look back on a time about half a century ago when leaders were deemed self-absorbed and even out of touch if they were constantly self-referential in public. And when I was asked why I was reluctant to talk about myself while other political leaders freely broadcast what they claimed to be their deepest feelings, I was always tempted to reply: why don’t you ask them why they are always speaking about themselves? What mattered, I thought, was how others might benefit from what I did for them as an active politician – not what I claimed to feel. If in my political career I was backward in coming forward, my failure was not so much a resistance to letting the public in – I never shrank from that – it was resisting the pressure to cultivate an image that made the personal constantly public. Reticence was the rule.

  All this came home to me at a time of unspeakable tragedy in our lives, when our daughter Jennifer died just days after her birth, and when, for the first time, my private emotions were thrust front and centre into the public arena. Sarah and I were hit by tragedy and I had never even thought of talking in public about such a private matter. But in that terrible moment, I learned a lot. I reflected on how I had been brought up: to contain, even suppress, my inner feelings in public, and to view the expression of them as self-indulgence.

  That kind of self-restraint may now be a barrier in politics.

  Today there are few leaders – Angela Merkel, notably, is one – whose claim to office is grounded primarily in an undemonstrative command of detail – unlike, say, Donald J. Trump. But while the German chancellor would criticise those who put spin over substance, even she has, perhaps unintentionally, created a nationally appealing image that is about more than hard work and sound decision-making. Her nickname is ‘Mutti’ – German for ‘mummy’.

  I fully understand that in a media-conscious age every politician has to lighten up to get a message across and I accept that, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a sense of personal reserve can limit the appeal and rapport of a leader. Although some politicians thrust their children into the limelight – think of the unfortunate child filmed eating a beefburger to reassure the public at the height of the BSE drama – Sarah and I were determined to let our sons, John and Fraser, grow up so far as possible as normal children, not especially privileged. We agreed to publish only one photograph after each was born, and generally I am grateful to the newspapers for allowing them their privacy. Interestingly, after we left Downing Street some people wrote t
o me saying that they had not known I had any children until they saw the footage of our family leaving together – and the warmth they saw between us revealed something about me of which they had also been unaware.

  I am not, I hope, remote, offhand or uncommunicative. But if I wasn’t an ideal fit for an age when the personal side of politics had come to the fore, I hope people will come to understand from these pages that this was not an aloofness or detachment or, I hope, insensitivity or a lack of emotional intelligence on my part, but an inner sense that what mattered was not what I said about myself, but what our government could do for our country.

  A new age of social media elevates public displays of private emotions even further. We can now see on our phones and laptops – and talk instantaneously with – countless people in all corners of the world whom we will never meet. And communication like this represents a huge advance for free speech and human rights: regimes may censor and even silence opponents, but not for ever – ultimately the truth will get out.

  The three years that I was prime minister were at the cusp of the transition from the TV age to the Internet age. Now no politician can succeed without mastering social media – and yet, in it, the prime minister becomes one among millions of voices competing to be heard.

  The Internet often functions like a shouting match without an umpire. Trying to persuade people through social media seems to matter less than finding an echo chamber that reinforces one’s own point of view. Too often, all we are hearing is the sound of voices like our own. The turnaround is so instantaneous that, for the luxury of sounding off, we often forgo the duty to sit and think. And because differentiation is the name of the political game – showing what divides you from your opponent, not what you have in common – achieving a consensus in a wilderness of silos is difficult, if not impossible.

  As we found, first during the Scottish referendum of 2014 and more recently in the European referendum of 2016, a rational, civil and objective dialogue can give way to a battle of taunts, slogans and ideologies. Worse, objective facts are lost in the escalation of division, culminating in the absurdities of post-truth politics.