My Life, Our Times Page 5

  My own biggest regret was that in the greatest peacetime challenge – a catastrophic global recession that threatened to become a depression – I failed to persuade the British people that the progressive policies I pushed for, nationally and internationally, were the right and fairest way to respond.

  We have now lived through seven years of austerity and face isolation from Europe, and historians will assess these years economically – both for Britain and Europe – as a lost decade. But perhaps the most important lesson I wish to share from my life and our times is that the story need not end this way. We are defined by our times but, at important moments, we can define them too. I write both of how we went about changing Britain and where we fell short. It is a story of victories, defeats and lessons learned. This is my account of that endeavour.

  CHAPTER 1

  GROWING UP

  I was born in 1951 in one era and came of age in 1967 in another. I entered a world with a very particular order – empire, industry and religion. It was a world of pride, confidence and unity. People could still be forgiven for believing that the British Empire was going to last forever. The country of the Industrial Revolution was in the throes of a manufacturing revival: an Indian summer for cities, such as Glasgow, where life began for me, and whose shipbuilding industry was dominant on the world stage. And we, the British, could still think of ourselves as a chosen people: a churchgoing nation with its own special brands of Anglicanism, Methodism, Presbyterianism and British Catholicism. In the early 1950s, Scotland – where my father was a church minister – was described as the most religious country in the world.

  It was fitting that the Govan parish in Glasgow that my father ministered included one of the world’s biggest shipyards, which every day saw an army of highly skilled craftsmen building vessels that were sold to every continent. It seemed a confirmation of the ties that bound industry, empire and religion. So too did my father’s next church, in what became my home town of Kirkcaldy, Fife, a church that stands tall just two streets away from what was, as I grew up, one of the world’s biggest linoleum factories. Between them lay the Adam Smith Halls, a tribute to Kirkcaldy’s most famous citizen, the economist who in the 1770s had first sketched out how the new global marketplace would develop to the benefit of Britain. That I grew up in the shadow of this building – donated and officially opened by Fife’s other renowned global citizen, Andrew Carnegie – made me and my school friends aware, even at a very young age, of a wider world of which Kirkcaldy was but a small part.

  Fife was where my father’s family had lived for three centuries, and the town of Kirkcaldy, to where my family moved in the spring of 1954, had such engrained religious traditions that I could step out my front door and, in a matter of minutes, walk past nine churches that were within only a few hundred yards of each other. They claimed most of the population as adherents. Kirkcaldy was not alone: family life for millions of Scots and English was built around not just churches but religiously inspired organisations – like the Boys’ Brigade and the Life Boys – and the sports teams they spawned.

  In 1951 we were just six years on from the second of two catastrophic world wars whose traumas, carnage and loss of life shaped a whole century. However, while mainland Europe had to be rebuilt again, virtually from scratch, and Britain suffered a long period of austerity, the pillars of our domestic order remained intact.

  The 1945–51 Labour government, still in power when I was born, had momentous measures to its credit, creating a welfare state and a free National Health Service that was unique in the world, and nationalising coal, steel and the Bank of England. Simultaneously, the post-war period saw a restoration of traditional social values, so much so that when the new Queen was crowned in 1953, an event televised for the first time, the ceremony was a pageant of ancient regal and religious forms reflecting coronations centuries before. The empire still loomed large. We were post-war but not post-imperial. In retrospect, the 1950s seem like an old world waiting to be lost – one far away from where we are now.

  America is enthralled with the idea that anyone can grow up to be president. Britain is different. As I grew up it never occurred to me that I could or would become prime minister. Some colleagues can point to diaries, letters or essays that reveal such an ambition or have school friends who would later testify that they had been in on the secret all along. Not even when I became a Member of Parliament in 1983 did I think I would ever live in Downing Street.

  I had visited London only half a dozen times in the thirty-two years before I became an MP. In fact, before I went to university, I had been there only once. My father’s cousin Jack and his wife Maureen invited my brother and me to spend Christmas in 1963 in London. They entertained us with visits to the theatre, football grounds and to the Tottenham Court Road, where I remember buying my first transistor radio by selling off my stamp collection to Stanley Gibbons, the famous philately dealer. We did not tour any of the centres of power. We went to the Tower of London but not to the Houses of Parliament. There is no photograph of me as a boy standing outside No. 10 – like the young Harold Wilson. Before I became an MP, I had never been near it.

  My childhood was focused more on sport than on studies, with more leisure time spent outdoors than indoors, and for every half hour doing homework there was an hour kicking my football against the wall in our garden. My earliest memories, in fact, are all of one thing: running. Running to play football in the park that was within minutes of our home; running to play with friends on Kirkcaldy’s many other green spaces, including the famous Volunteers’ Green – named so in the nineteenth century when people were asked to volunteer to thwart a feared invasion by Napoleon III; running to the High Street, an area where we loved to play street football, though we were often chased away and on one occasion gently booked by the police; and, of course, running to and from school as we could do in those days unsupervised.

  Normal and commonplace, but parts clearly were not so ordinary. I did not quite understand why but I was sent to primary school at four and secondary school at ten. I remember sitting my eleven-plus exam just after my tenth birthday. As a result, I did my O-Grade exams at fourteen, my Highers – the Scottish near-equivalent of A levels – at fifteen, and went to university at sixteen.

  My great-grandfather on my father’s side was a local councillor, and an uncle on my mother’s side was the provost – the equivalent of an English mayor – of his home village. Other than that, no one in my family had ever been involved in politics. For a time, I dreamed not of politics but of professional football. When I found I had none of the skills to go that far, I had to think of something else. And so, brought up on the stories of Roy of the Rovers, the famous fictional football star who went on to become a manager, I dreamed a new dream of managing my local football team, Raith Rovers. Then, when that looked difficult, I moved on to aspiring to be a football-club owner – a dream that has now faded but does not die.

  I think I was seven when I pressed my father to take me to the Raith Rovers New Year’s derby match. I was so keen to support Raith Rovers that I could not understand why my father was applauding good play on both sides; I thought he should be as partisan as I was in supporting our local team. By the time I went to secondary school, I was earning pocket money by selling match-day programmes at Raith Rovers – one shilling and sixpence for every hundred sold, plus free admission to the match. It was my first introduction to economics.

  Adam Smith was so attached to Kirkcaldy that he regularly came home to Fife from his European travels, from a stint at Oxford and from a professorship at Glasgow University. It was at his home, just yards from my father’s church, where he wrote The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In them he explained how the new economy of the eighteenth century worked – trade as the engine of growth, a global division of labour and comparative advantage for countries that produced the goods the world wanted.

  If Smith had grown up in a landlocked community, we might neve
r have heard of him. But he was the son of a customs officer, and his mother’s home overlooked a mile-long seafront with an expansive view of the North Sea. He saw ships coming in and out of the port of Kirkcaldy every week, bringing new goods to the town – both staples and luxuries – and then exporting locally manufactured products like nails, leather and tiles on to the Netherlands and the rest of the continent. What he observed in the port of Kirkcaldy was the basis of his argument that nations would prosper if merchants were allowed to sell freely, unburdened by government-imposed mercantilist restrictions. This was a radical not conservative view, one that called for an end to monopolies and protectionism.

  Two hundred years on, the fate of the Kirkcaldy of my youth was still being determined by its economic position. The town was one of the very special close-knit industrial communities at the heart of our coal-mining industry. We literally walked on top of aeons of coal. Once there had been sixty-six pits in the county of Fife, employing nearly a quarter of all adult men, and as recently as the 1950s there were more than thirty pits. A super-mine was sunk not far from where we lived to exploit the vast reserves of coal lying underneath the sea. But then as cheaper energy sources were becoming increasingly available, Fife – and all of Britain – started to experience a catastrophic fall in mining employment. Hundreds of families were suddenly leaving Fife to find a new life in the diminishing number of minefields that were still thriving – in Yorkshire and the Midlands. Their migration foreshadowed the fight for jobs that would become the central economic issue in the area for the next fifty years and for all the time I was a Member of Parliament.

  Not only was the mining industry in decline but so too was the town’s other mainstay, textiles. Built from the late nineteenth century around linoleum, a Kirkcaldy invention that became a world-leading product, the industry was about to give way to the products of a new age, like fitted carpets. It was still too early for entrepreneurs and health experts to appreciate the value of linoleum as an easily cleaned floor covering which helped in the prevention of hospital infections like MRSA.

  I remember to this day the announcement in 1963 – I was twelve years old – of the closure of Barry, Ostlere and Shepherd, the nearby linoleum factory where the use of linseed oil sent out an aroma that permeated the town centre. That huge factory, just beside Kirkcaldy’s main rail station and another set of linoleum factories to the north and east of the town, employed thousands whose jobs were about to vanish. Some of the friends I made at school had to leave with their families for England so their fathers could find new work.

  Because of its exposure to the North Sea, Kirkcaldy was regularly battered by storms and floods. In 1958, thirty-foot waves broke through the sea walls and poured into houses which had to be evacuated. I went with my father to see some of the families who had to be moved out of their homes and watched him give each of them money to help them through. For decades afterwards, despite large investment in building stronger coastal defences, there were sandbags stored on the esplanade as a precaution.

  In my memory my father still towers before me like a mountain. I am sure I always thought of him as far taller than the six feet he was. I seldom saw him in anything other than a suit – a trait he clearly passed on to me. His bespectacled face was normally smiling and gentle, but he did not need to say anything when he disapproved of my behaviour; his frown told me everything. Looking back, I marvel at his sense of contentment with life. Coming from a modest background – his father was a shepherd who had gone without full-time work in the 1930s – he often said: ‘Be grateful for what you have.’ And then he would add: ‘It’s remarkable what you can do without.’ My father was in constant motion, visiting parishioners at home, ministering in hospital and organising local events, often well into the evenings. Sunday especially was a time for work not rest. He was on duty almost all the time. He taught me to treat everyone equally – subservient to no one, and condescending to no one. Remarkably, he went through his life without an enemy, something I cannot say of myself or anyone in politics.

  His ministry was woven into my life and the lives of my older brother John and my younger brother Andrew. We often answered the doorbell to find homeless beggars to whom he always gave money – which is why they returned again and again. I sometimes took his call for charity towards the poor too far. I remember being at home on my own when a ‘beggar’ arrived. Not only did I offer him a few coins, but I invited him in to help himself to the food in our kitchen. When my parents returned, they found me entertaining the town’s best-known burglar.

  Any photograph of my mother in her youth is still striking: she was a very tall, black-haired and shy woman. She went grey in her early forties in an era when it was thought self-indulgent to dye your hair. As a young woman, she had been caught up in the war effort; she would someday joke that she was the first in our family to work in Whitehall. She described how, barely out of school, she helped in a very small way with the codebreaking operation at the rank of sergeant and recalled being part of the enormous throng that gathered outside Buckingham Palace when the war in Europe ended.

  Her father had run a very successful family business and she was one of three children who became directors, a position she held for at least forty years. But she was self-deprecating and always regretted to her life’s end that because of the war she had not gone to university. Even when she was in her sixties we were discussing whether she would do an Open University degree. It was the stereotype of the time that my brothers and I always thought of her as there at home and assumed she would be there whenever we needed her. I was fortunate to have had parents insistent on good behaviour, founded on what I now consider the best of values, but who also saw the benefit of letting their children find a path for themselves.

  Mine was a middle-class upbringing in middle Scotland in the middle of the century. Our family was never well off enough to afford luxuries, but we never worried about being without anything we really needed. I remember my disappointment when my father did not get me the famous Subbuteo football game for Christmas. I remember, too, my yearning to own my first pair of Adidas trainers, unfulfilled until I left secondary school and earned my first week’s pay in a summer job as a labourer. Our summer holidays were with relatives in Scotland, not visits to hotels or travels abroad. Our first car showed up in 1958 – a gift to my father from my grandfather – and our first TV arrived in 1959 as a gift from our uncle. The TV was supposed to be there in time for the Sports Personality of the Year programme in 1959 – but it had been damaged in transit. We had anticipated the night for months. Luckily, someone lent us a temporary replacement and we watched the world motorcycling champion John Surtees claim the prize.

  At the age of four, when I was enrolled at nursery school and then at the West Primary School, I first met Murray Elder, a classmate who was to become a friend for life. Lord Elder, as he now is, was himself a central figure in Labour’s period of success in Scotland from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Over the years he was to give me very good advice and he has often reminded me of something I had forgotten: that we were taught to write not with pencils and notebooks but on slate with slate pens and given rags to wipe the slates clean. No matter how long you live you never forget the names of your first schoolteachers: Miss Mason, Miss Donaldson and Mrs Munro.

  My brother John was almost two and a half years older than me and much more dynamic and entrepreneurial than anyone I then knew. He went to the front of any meeting while, shy and thought of as shy, I always occupied the back row. But he brought me into his youthful charity work and media projects. In the spring of 1960, inspired by one of my father’s sermons, John set up a charity shop in the family garage and soon started a newspaper. The first article, in the unoriginally entitled Local News, covered the annual Ravenscraig Park sports festival. I became the sports editor and, in an early edition, I wrote about Scotland’s 3–3 draw with Hungary. All the editions were produced on a Gestetner machine, where we hand-turned the drum to duplicat
e the stencils we pecked out on my father’s typewriter. My two-finger typing was as bad then as it is now – living proof, as I would be told years later by a university lecturer, that typing could be as illegible as handwriting. So my brother and I had to buy a lot of correction fluid. I remember that the paper was sold for threepence with all money not spent on correction fluid going in aid of the Freedom from Hunger campaign.

  Two years later, the Daily Record and Scottish Daily Mail featured a story about my brother’s next venture, the Gazette. We sold 500 copies, and raised six pounds, three shillings and ninepence for African charities. Significantly, the first story in the Gazette was on threatened pit closures. A second edition carried a leader criticising the Tory Budget of the chancellor Selwyn Lloyd who had just introduced a tax on children’s sweets. In April 1963, the fourth edition of the Gazette appeared under a new and bold strapline: ‘Scotland’s only newspaper in aid of the Freedom from Hunger campaign’. It was in this edition that a school friend Stephen Salmond and I wrote about the loss of those 1,500 linoleum jobs.