My Life, Our Times Read online

  As Tony and I talked, we discovered we shared a fierce passion to see the party reform and recover. He had first been given an office with Dave Nellist, the Militant MP for Coventry South East, who was in effect running a separate party. Tony wanted out and I needed an office, having not yet been offered anything at all. So we linked up to get one – a room without windows, with erratic heat and air conditioning, hidden away off the first floor of the committee-room corridor. I was there more than Tony, who because of the rather spartan circumstances understandably preferred working from home in London.

  My first few months in Parliament were a strange time: no fixed abode, often staying with friends, living out of a suitcase. Partly because of this, I came up with my own version of Tony’s solution. I spent a lot of time in Scotland, coming to London on Monday or Tuesday, and then leaving on Thursday. This was a blessing in disguise. I got to know my constituency inside and out. I built up enduring friendships. And away from Westminster I learned more about what we needed to do as a party to win back the country’s trust.

  London was still an awayday for me. I cannot remember a full weekend between 1983 and 1997 that I spent in the capital. Even when my brother later joined me in London, almost all of my friendships were in Scotland. My early interventions at this time were often hit and miss. Perhaps one of my most embarrassing moments with the media came not long after becoming an MP. Gerald Kaufman was shadow Foreign Secretary and he was always getting requests for interviews from radio and TV around the world, but he liked going to the theatre in the evenings. I was just along the corridor from Gerald and one evening he asked me to stand in for him on an interview for a radio station ‘down under’. They wanted to hear about the new Labour Party. I was told by Gerald to await a call, which duly came, and the technician patched me through to the programme. ‘Do you not think you’re making great changes to your Labour Party? When we’re stuck here?’ I said this was simply not true, as the Australian Labor Party was also making great reforms at the time. ‘I’ve just met your prime minister Bob Hawke and we have talked about the reforms we have in common.’ The interviewer responded: ‘Mr Brown … this is Radio Auckland … Our prime minister is David Lange … and you’re talking to the people of New Zealand.’ I was not invited back.

  The 1983 election had been a watershed for Labour. With the SDP–Liberal Alliance splitting the progressive vote, not only had the Conservatives increased their majority to 144 seats, despite a slight decrease in their popular share, but Labour had come within an inch of falling to third place in votes cast. Michael Foot’s parliamentary party was down to 209, the lowest number of Labour MPs since 1935. The campaign, as I remarked at the time, had started badly – and then fallen away. The manifesto – a prolix 22,000-word document described by Gerald Kaufman as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – was read only to seek out the nuggets of political disaster. The manifesto slogan ‘Think Positively’ elicited a negative response. The message was reminiscent of the Latin American finance minister who is said to have told his Cabinet that ‘past policies have brought us to the edge of the abyss, and now it is time for a bold step forward’.

  When I attended my first meeting of the defeated Parliamentary Labour Party, Michael Foot, who had announced he would be standing down, gave a speech that was magnanimous and witty. He summed up Labour’s performance by quoting George Bernard Shaw’s remark about the first night of a play he had written that had gone down badly: ‘The show was excellent, but the audience was poor.’ Some months before in Glasgow, I had heard him make a similar joke: ‘In 1945, the good people of Plymouth Devonport elected me as their MP. In 1955, the bastards threw me out.’ Finally, pointing out what had to be done under new leadership, Michael echoed the words of Bertolt Brecht: you could not re-elect the electorate; you had to live with their judgement.

  The race for the new Labour leader was already on. The two main contenders were Neil Kinnock, representing the so-called ‘soft left’ of the party, and Roy Hattersley, a former member of Jim Callaghan’s Cabinet, who was on the party’s right. Some of my Scottish colleagues – John Smith, Donald Dewar and George Robertson – were supporting Roy. I was for Neil. While I liked and admired Roy, Neil was one of the few MPs I knew well before I arrived in Westminster and I felt he had the eloquence, charisma and pragmatism to inspire our recovery. Neil asked me to join his leadership campaign team. He had a wide range of supporters from Robin Cook, who ran the campaign, to the later UKIP MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk. I was the only new MP to be part of this team.

  The contest was the first to be decided by an electoral college made up of MPs, constituency parties and trade unions – a scheme agreed at a special conference at Wembley in 1981 – rather than by MPs alone. But any candidate had to be an MP. The fact that Tony Benn, who had lost his seat at the election, was unable to stand was a boost to Kinnock. Neil steered a course between the old establishment and the hard left. It was an appealing strategy for a party yearning to be reborn and win again. With majority support among MPs, constituencies and the unions, he won an overwhelming 71 per cent of the vote. Roy became deputy leader. I joined the Tribune Group of MPs that supported Kinnock and progressive centre-left policies, and persuaded others – like Tony, who had also voted for Neil – to do so.

  As I prepared for my maiden speech, Robin Cook, who had entered Parliament some ten years earlier, advised me that one speech a month was about right: to do many more would make you a Commons bore; to do any fewer would make you irrelevant. It was sage advice.

  Maiden speeches are set-piece events. As such, they can be stressful. In his 1869 novel Phineas Finn, Anthony Trollope’s eponymous hero worried so much about his maiden speech that, after overpreparing, he lost his nerve and did not deliver it. Finn’s second attempt was equally unsuccessful. He delivered an off-the-cuff and incoherent speech to a stunned and rapidly emptying Chamber. Later in the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli made a disastrous maiden speech in which he assailed the Irish leader, Daniel O’Connell, and sat down to hisses, boos and the drumming of feet.

  I represented a constituency in which there were more people out of work than there were people employed in manufacturing industries. One in seven of my constituents were dependent on means-tested benefits. So I felt it imperative that I make my maiden speech in a debate on social security. I said I would raise in the House the full scale of unemployment every month that it remained as high as it was. Norman Tebbit had previously advised the unemployed to ‘get on their bikes’. That day, the minister on duty was the ultra-right-wing former headmaster, Rhodes Boyson, who had infamously attempted to blame the poverty and unemployment of the poor on their laziness. He claimed there were plenty of jobs for them as window cleaners. I now realised, I said, what the Conservatives meant when they talked about ladders of opportunity. I finished my relatively short speech with a simple question: ‘In 1948 … the welfare state was created to take the shame out of need. Is that principle to be overthrown by an ever-increasing set of government assaults on the poor that are devoid of all logic, bereft of all morality and vindictive even beyond monetarism?’ As is usual practice in the House of Commons, the response was to praise the speech and fail to answer the question.

  The Conservatives’ rightward drift was to be a major theme of mine all throughout that parliament, and I started to write regular articles in national newspapers about jobs, social security and the NHS. In February 1984, I exposed a government plan to pilot a scheme in Cowdenbeath forcing eighteen- to twenty-five-year olds to accept any low-paid job on offer or lose their benefits. The following year, in July 1985, I highlighted so-called ‘snooper squads’ who were making early-morning calls to the homes of young single mothers to check for the ‘presence of male items’. A friendly civil servant later passed on to me the details of the Tory government’s 1985 welfare reforms. I used the computer printout to show that 7 million people would lose out. While we could not reverse the policy in the face of an overwhelming Conservati
ve majority, we did manage to water it down.

  I loved my constituency work – most of the time. In my last pre-election meeting in Cowdenbeath, I was asked by a voter to confirm I would live in the constituency when elected. I said I was planning to move home and open an office. On the first day after the election, I was phoned by a man who said he had to see me urgently but that I had to visit in person. I duly arrived at his home to discover he was the voter who had asked that question. I exchanged pleasantries, sat down and then he enquired: ‘How do you like it?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. He answered: ‘It’s worth £55,000, but I’ll give it to you for £50,000.’ I made my excuses and left.

  Later, after I moved into what is now my home in Fife – I have only lived in two Scottish houses over the last forty years – I was burgled, perhaps not surprisingly because the house was empty for days on end when I was away in Westminster. All electronic items of any value – TV, video and stereo – had been stolen. A few days later the burglar was arrested. When he came to court his father wrote me a letter apologising; if his son had only known it was the Labour MP’s house, he wrote, he would never have broken into it.

  While I mostly found my work on behalf of constituents both interesting and enjoyable, I did once come close to a major embarrassment when I took up the case of a widow in her mid-seventies who had gone for a private hip operation on the advice of her NHS surgeon. He then performed the operation at the nearest private hospital in Edinburgh. The woman showed me a stream of bills she had received doubling the original estimate for the hospital stay. I remember the items included several pounds each for an aspirin and a cup of tea. I took her case up with the BBC and ITV. I said the widow was a hard-up pensioner who had been conned into draining her life savings to pay for this operation. The cameras gathered at her home in a cul-de-sac in Crossgates, a village a few miles east of Dunfermline. Just before they started to film, I casually encountered the neighbour next door, who had come out to watch and suddenly asked: ‘What’s this about? Has she won the football pools again?’ I played up her age and played down her wealth, and no one was any wiser. But more serious – and indeed in some cases tragic – issues took up more of my time, including securing justice for a constituent whose husband had been murdered in Spain as he tried to fend off thieves. I demanded the Spanish authorities prosecute the guilty assailants.

  In October 1984, when Neil reshuffled his front bench, he invited me to join as Scottish spokesman under Donald Dewar. I was pleased to be asked but declined the offer. Still a new MP, I told Neil that for now I thought I could learn more – and make more of a difference – from the back benches. Neil replied that if he was in my position he would have done exactly the same.

  There were local campaigns to be fought for those losing out from the second Conservative term. In addition to raising social security issues, I opposed the downgrading of Fife’s regional development status and stood by mining families trying to survive the terrible deprivations of the year-long miners’ strike.

  During these difficult times, it is often said, the miners under Arthur Scargill were ‘lions led by donkeys’. Indeed, Scargill turned the dispute into a political strike personalised around himself. I had spoken with him once or twice at meetings in Fife before the crisis. I noticed that when he was before an audience he talked only about himself. A settlement was possible in the summer of 1984. But because of Scargill, the strike dragged on for a further nine months through a bitter and cold winter.

  The Conservative government were well prepared for this confrontation. In 1981, they had rejected the National Coal Board’s recommendation to close uneconomic pits, while the Energy Secretary, Nigel Lawson, set in train a plan to build up coal stocks by converting power stations to oil. By refusing to ballot his members, Scargill made a fatal mistake. Deprived of legitimacy, the miners lost the battle for public opinion.

  In my own constituency, we now had no pits, but a high number of people living there worked elsewhere in mines across the rest of Fife, Clackmannanshire and the Lothians. There were ten strike centres locally and most Fridays I visited them to give whatever financial help I could. There was grinding hardship such as I had never seen before. The Department for Social Security even slashed the only benefit payment for miners’ children and their mothers by £15 a week.

  Under Section 12 of the Social Work (Scotland) Act, a local authority could give loans to families facing destitution. This is exactly what Fife did. In retaliation, social security officials cut benefits even more for those receiving small loans from the council. Later the government surcharged Fife Council for daring to prop up mining families.

  I spoke to the miners in Cowdenbeath in March 1985, on the day the strike ended, pledging that we would continue to fight in Parliament for justice. And the struggle was far from over. Within a few days, nearly 300 Scottish miners were dismissed by the Coal Board, many of them for being arrested picketing a company moving coal through my constituency during the strike.

  I resolved to lead a campaign against this cruel ideology of kicking people when they were down. It gained the support not only of all the Scottish churches but also of police chiefs who had overseen the arrest of the miners in the first place. They understood the need for reconciliation more than the Coal Board did.

  As a member of the Select Committee on Employment, I persuaded the chairman, Ron Leighton, to organise hearings into the dismissals. By the time the head of the Coal Board, Ian MacGregor, was called in, I had assembled all the evidence I needed. At the hearing, I asked him why he had not given the dismissed miners a right of appeal as was laid down in their terms of employment. MacGregor replied that the chaos and unusual circumstances of the strike prevented proper procedures being followed. I then asked how many miners had been dismissed during the strike and how many since the end of the strike; most had been fired afterwards. MacGregor then had to admit there was no reason why they could not have been allowed their right of appeal. The Coal Board was forced to back down. All of the miners, with the exception of one, got their jobs back. I tried hard to persuade the odd man out to accept the deal. But he had expected a big cash settlement for unfair dismissal and not even his union could convince him to return. Though I disagreed with Scargill, I stood with the miners. I am proud of their decision to make me an honorary member of the Scottish Mineworkers’ Union. To this day, I proudly display in my home the plaques and lamps that were given to me after that harrowing time.

  Mrs Thatcher offered up a gift by promising she would meet any MP who complained about redundancies in their constituency. I met her every six months over two or three years and every time I went in to see her she said: ‘This is your meeting, Mr Brown, to talk about the concerns you have.’ Yet within a few seconds of me starting to speak she would cut across my speech with a soliloquy citing her favourite theme of the moment. It was more difficult to accept when she tried to rename the towns in my constituency. ‘You have come to see me about the problems of Rosyth and Cowdenbeth.’ she said. ‘Cowdenbeath,’ I replied gently. She said, ‘You call it Cowdenbeath. We have always referred to it as Cowdenbeth.’

  The cold winter of 1984 was not just a catastrophe for the miners and their families, it was also a harsh season for millions of poorer pensioners. Money that should have been given to pensioners in ‘exceptionally severe weather payments’ was being denied because the government had arbitrarily changed the qualifying temperature for payments to just a few degrees above freezing. In place of a flawed formula, depriving old people of help, I proposed that low-income households be awarded an automatic payment to defray crippling fuel bills. Years later, I would be mindful of this when as chancellor I introduced the Winter Fuel Allowance and then as prime minister was able to triple cold-weather payments from £8.50 to £25 a week.

  Around this time, I had been leaked an internal government document showing that the Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, was planning to close the Rosyth Naval Base and to privatise the dockyard t
hat refitted many of Britain’s submarines and warships. Now far from the brevity of my maiden speech, I set a record three-hour speech in the committee stage as we attempted to delay the bill from going back to the House of Commons for its third reading. During that mini-filibuster, I read out every statistic I could get hold of about ship-repair protocols around the world – even in landlocked states.

  An ideological government – with a big Commons majority – ploughed ahead despite the fact there was some public support for the concerns about privatising key elements of our national defences and security. Having lost that battle, I had a modicum of success in pressing for financial incentives for companies replacing the lost Rosyth jobs and investing in a Fife that had persistently higher unemployment than the rest of the country.

  By now, I had the good fortune that my younger brother was working with me in the Commons. Taking three years off from his work in television, Andrew was an invaluable adviser and we worked to expose the Conservatives’ indifference to the fate of the industrial regions. We had discovered that, to secure regional funding from the European Community, the government had to submit honest accounts of the state of each area, and by publishing extracts from what were massive documents we demonstrated the need for more support for the depressed areas.

  In November 1985 John Smith asked me to join his shadow trade and industry team. The new post demanded that I make regular trips to the north-east, north-west, the Midlands and Wales as we took our campaign – ‘jobs and the economy first’ – around the country. Breaking with the past, we reached beyond traditional Labour supporters and drew in members of the business community, and I was fortunate then and over the following years that my work had the support of the Labour Finance and Industry Group and, in particular, three industrialists – Simon Haskel, John Gregson and Swraj Paul – without whose backing for the group I could not have researched and published the reports I did. During that time I also began working with John Prescott – who proved to be the most energetic and consistent advocate of economic devolution – in making the case for Regional Development Agencies, which to his great credit he would later establish in government. The Confederation of British Industry was initially sceptical but our message on industrial policy increasingly gained traction.