What Should Gordon Brown Do Now?
What Should Gordon Brown Do Now?
Bryan Gould Writes The PM’s Next Speech
“The local election results and the opinion polls convey a pointed message _ that my government and I have for the time being lost the confidence of our supporters. We cannot deny the reality that the next election may be a step too far for a government completing its third term.
To accept this is oddly liberating. It means that, instead of focusing exclusively on trying to win an election, I can now concentrate on delivering _ for the two years that remain of this term _ the best government this country can have. History may judge that I failed as an election-winner; my term as Prime Minister might yet deliver the verdict that I did the job well.
To achieve this, I must first clear away the baggage that I inherited. I will, for example, lance the boil of the Iraq invasion by setting up an independent commission to establish how and why that came about. This will signal a return to the ethical foreign policy advocated by Robin Cook; we will, for example, finance the return to their homeland of those displaced when the US military base on Diego Garcia was established.
I will cut by half the number of media advisers employed by the government, with the intention of showing that our message is about real issues, rather than spin. And I have learnt and will apply the lesson that a government that ignores its supporters for the sake of pleasing its opponents will end up being disliked by everyone.
I will ensure that my government maintains unity and cohesion by taking careful account of what my MPs and those who elected them are telling me. I will recognise in advance those issues – such as the removal of the 10p tax band or the 42-day detention period – where a broad consensus looks impossible to achieve. Where there is a consensus, my colleagues will be expected to abide by it.
I will review those policies – even the sacred cows – that have failed to deliver. I am not convinced, for example, that academy schools have succeeded or that we have even applied the right criteria for evaluating them.
Because I believe that my government should be accountable for its own economic policy, I will reconsider whether it is right to contract that policy out to an “independent” central bank, and re-evaluate the advantages of restoring the main elements of economic policy to the arena of public debate and democratic process. My goal is a sustainable economy that delivers better standards of living, employment and public services to ordinary people, rather than inflated bonuses to those who create no new wealth but manipulate existing assets to their own advantage.
I will return to my basic political instincts – those that brought me into Labour politics in the first place. I regard as unacceptable the rapid growth in inequality in this country. We cannot expect people to take pride in their country and to work hard for its success if they do not share in the benefits that success will bring.
While I believe that a properly functioning market is irreplaceable, I do not accept that the market is infallible. It must be regulated and supplemented if it is to deliver acceptable outcomes to everyone. There is, in other words, an important role for public services in a modern economy. My government will give them priority over the next two years.
The next election is in the lap of the gods – or, more prosaically, in the hands of the voters, as it should be. Between now and then, you will see less, not more, of me on your television screens. I will be concentrating instead on leading a competent, caring and effective government.”
This piece was published in the online New Statesman on 18 April 2008
A Brown Study
The following article by Bryan Gould appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 21 September
The first two months must have been very heaven. The long-awaited prize had been grasped. Opposition from both within and without had faded away. A long period at Number Ten seemed assured.
The voters seemed to like the new leader. They liked his plain-speaking and the absence of spin. They liked his re-statement of basic values and his robust defence of the national interest. Most of all, they liked the fact that he was not Tony Blair.
So, one month later, how have we arrived at the 7% Conservative lead in today’s poll? Is Gordon Brown on track to join the ranks of those Prime Ministers who were never granted an electoral mandate because they fell at the first electoral hurdle?
The first and partial answer is that it may be premature to ask these questions. The “Brown bounce” was always going to be short-lived. There was always going to be an audible thud as the polls came back to earth. What matters now is what will happen over the next eighteen months, and the current volatility of the polls (something to which David Cameron is himself no stranger) tells us little that we need to know.
None of this means that Gordon has not compounded his problems by making avoidable errors. He has lacked a sure touch in presenting policy and in Parliament. He has appeared to contradict his declared distaste of spin. And he made a serious mistake in handling the issue of an early election – a mistake that suggests that there is behind the appearance of iron resolve a much less certain political calculator.
A more confident leader might well have gone for the kill in the period leading up to the conference season. He could have argued with some justice that he was unwilling to serve for long without a full mandate for a Brown premiership, and that the voters deserved the chance to say whether they wanted him or not. He could have launched an election campaign from the top of the “Brown bounce”. And he could have denied David Cameron the chance to make a life-saving conference speech.
But to concentrate on these immediate mistakes does not explain the speed and scale of the decline in Gordon Brown’s standing. There are other, deeper factors at work – contextual elements that, unlike those with a short life, such as a conference speech or a mistake in presentation, are likely to influence events for some time to come.
First, there were always going to be elements of the poison chalice about Tony Blair’s legacy to Gordon Brown. We should not forget (and nor should the Blairites) that Tony left office, not because he wanted to, but because his party saw him increasingly as an electoral liability. Glad of a change, intrigued by a new face (or at least a familiar face in a new context), the voters were always going to recall before too long that Gordon had been a centrally important figure in the Blair government. Its failings were his as well.
Gordon knew this, too, but foreknowledge made the problem no easier to resolve. He could go just so far in drawing a line under the Blair legacy, and trying to distance himself from its more unpopular aspects. If he went too far, he would provoke several unwelcome responses.
The first would be the predictable question – if you were at odds with this or that policy, why did you not say so at the time? More damagingly, a break with the Blair record in government would prompt a damaging counter-attack from the still powerful guardians of the New Labour project.
And so it has turned out, and in a much shorter time than even Gordon’s enemies must have planned or hoped for. No sooner had Blairite spokespeople like Peter Mandelson declared that their long-nurtured hostility to a Brown premiership had ended than hostilities were resumed – and with a vengeance.
The all-too familiar off-the-record briefing is suddenly in full swing. Unnamed “insiders” warn darkly that they always knew that Gordon’s personal and political deficiencies meant that he would falter sooner rather than later. For the first time in years, we are now made privy to leaks from around the Cabinet table, designed to show that Gordon’s colleagues are unhappy. Blairite ex-Ministers proclaim their readiness, in effect, to campaign against the new leader. As we know, the voters hate to see division and infighting – and they look like getting it in spades.
Why has this happened? It is partly a matter of personal pay-back. The price is being paid for those brooding years at the Treasury, when the hint of an anti-Blair conspiracy was often in the air. But it may also be that there are issues of real political substance in play. The Blair government drew its strength only reluctantly from its democratic mandate, still less from the Labour party. Its main pillars of support were always Washington and the Murdoch press.
Any change of policy that Gordon Brown may wish to make would cause him real problems if it provoked an adverse reaction from these powerful allies. So, even a phased withdrawal from Iraq may be seen as unacceptable. Even the most careful hint of a slight move to the left, or at least towards traditional Labour values, might ring some alarm bells. The Blairite counter-attack may not be made in the interests of its front-men alone.
As it is, there is no quick victory – just the long haul. But the long haul – like the electoral arithmetic – may work to Gordon Brown’s advantage. He has time to get the balance right between acknowledging and distancing himself from the Blair legacy. He has time to confound his internal enemies by using the power of patronage and reminding his party of the electorate’s intolerance of disunity. He has time for the voters to understand and value his sterling qualities, and to turn his quintessential Britishness and love of his country to political advantage.
Above all, he has time to stop paying so much attention to “advisers” and to trust his own judgment. Today’s poll means that the campaign for the next election is only just beginning.
Bryan Gould
15 October 2007
Bryan Gould on Gordon Brown
The following article was published in the NZ Listener of 14 July.
In the ten years after Gordon Brown and Tony Blair entered the House of Commons together in 1983, Gordon was always regarded as the senior member of the duo – slightly the older, better grounded in the Labour movement, apparently with more substance than his more charming but perhaps more superficial colleague.
Little wonder, then, that Gordon was first bemused and then angry that the Labour Party “fixers” (and principally Peter Mandelson) decided at the last moment – and just in time for the leadership election following John Smith’s untimely death and my own decision to return to New Zealand – to back Tony as the preferred leadership candidate. Gordon was persuaded to wait for his turn – something he was promised in return for not challenging Tony’s candidature.
The result was a ten-year wait – profitably spent, it is true, in a successful term as Chancellor of the Exchequer – but a period of increasing frustration on Gordon’s part and an increasing reluctance from Tony to keep his part of the bargain. It was only when the post-Iraq opinion polls turned sour that Tony bowed to the inevitable and that Gordon had his chance.
What will he make of it? The omens look good. The main thing going for him is that he is not Tony. Despite Blair’s extravagant gifts, as communicator and persuader, the British public has grown tired and cynical at the glibness and the endless spin. They seem ready to embrace someone with perhaps less surface but more substance. They want, at least for the moment, someone who says what he thinks and means what he says.
Brown also has the good fortune to face in David Cameron a Tory leader who has made the Tories electable again but who looks better suited to fighting the last war – against Blair – rather than a new battle against the more solid virtues of the new Prime Minister. There is already a “Brown bounce” in the opinion polls as the British public suddenly see the dour Scot in a new light.
This is not to say that Gordon will find that election success falls into his lap. More than anyone else, he is ineluctably and correctly linked in the public mind with the Blair government and its record. He is as much identified with the government’s failures as is Tony. He will have a difficult task in convincing people that he can free himself of the Blair legacy; nor will there be any shortage of defenders of that legacy if he succeeds.
And the truth is that what is known of him is not without foundation. He does find it difficult to smile and to chat to people. He does demonstrate some of the characteristics of a control freak. He is at times excessively cautious and calculating. And his record is not free from blemish, including most memorably his determined support for British membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism long after its disastrous consequences were becoming apparent.
I remain, however, optimistic about a Brown premiership. Here is someone who is a much more authentically Labour figure than his predecessor, someone whom the voters will easily recognise and therefore trust. Here is someone who has a better grasp of the fact that we would not bother with the messy business of politics if it were not for the need to reconcile competing interests and allocate scarce resources, with the consequent inevitability that some people must be disappointed – something Blair instinctively shied away from. Here is a Prime Minister who will want to use power, as opposed to simply holding on to it, and to use it for purposes that will commend themselves to voters who want a recognisably Labour government.
If he is to make that fresh start, however, he must do some difficult things. He must draw a line under the Iraq disaster; the appointment as Foreign Secretary of the Iraq war sceptic, David Miliband, is a good start but the most effective step would be to establish an independent inquiry into the origins of the war, and set a timetable for the withdrawal of British troops. He must reaffirm the value of public service and the public sector, and not turn always to the private sector for solutions. He must stop hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, something for which his predecessor had a fatal weakness. Above all, if he is to make that essential connection with the British public and to do so without Tony Blair’s exceptional presentational skills, he must re-establish trust in the political process. He can do that best by being his own man.
Bryan Gould
29 June 2007
British Labour in 2007
As we enter the new year, the first task for Labour should be to draw a line under an egregious error made in its name – an error that began with an abuse of power and a breathtaking deception of the British people, and then proceeded to devastate a faraway country, undermine the rule of international law, threaten the fragile integrity and cohesion of British society, increase the burden of religious division – in Britain, the Middle East and around the world, advance the claims of terrorism, and engulf the entire ten-year record of the Blair government in disrepute. It is hard to think of a parallel in modern times to such a tragic catalogue of catastrophe brought about by the blind certainties of an inherently good man.
Tony Blair’s departure will help to draw that line. So will the election of a new leader. That new leader, however, will face a Herculean task if a fresh start is to be made and a renewed mandate obtained.
If the new leader is Gordon Brown (as I – and most others – assume it will be), his first hurdle will be the need to demonstrate that, without the presentational skills of a Tony Blair and faced with a Tory opponent who is at least electable, he can still engage with the British electorate and enlist their support.
His best strategy in approaching this task is to be himself – to demonstrate that, when the voters look at him and the Labour Party, what they see is what they get. So, what is needed is an end to spin, to the short-term preoccupation with electoral advantage and news manipulation at every turn, and a return to recognisable Labour values – values updated and adapted to society’s needs of course, cutting-edge values applied to new and as yet unrecognised issues, but values so true to Labour that voters will feel that they know where they are.
So, let us have an end to hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, to riding shotgun for the Americans however crazy the enterprise, to the indifference with which widening inequalities in our society are tolerated, to the casual assumption that the government is above the law, to the disdain for the Party and the trade unions, to the belief that globalisers like Rupert Murdoch represent the only possible future, to the gut instinct that the private sector will always offer better solutions than the public sector, to the carelessness with which divisions in our already divided society are exacerbated, and to the self-serving belief that what the government wants is, for that reason alone, good and right.
Let us, in other words, have an end to New Labour (or, rather, Not Labour). Let us have instead Labour tout court, Labour unadorned, Labour true to itself. That would free the new leader to use 2007 to begin to build a new trust with the voters, based on a commitment to restoring the cohesion of our society, across social, economic, ethnic and religious divides. It would mean a return to Robin Cook’s ethical foreign policy, so that a relationship of trust is extended to include our international partners. It would mean recognising that the current world order, disfigured as it is by huge and growing imbalances and a dizzying attempt to stop the United States from toppling off the high wire of its unsustainable deficit, must be reformed.
It would mean a return to that central Labour preoccupation with diffusing power and wealth throughout society, rather than aiding and abetting its concentration in fewer and fewer hands. The new leader could give priority to the real economy in which most people live and work rather than the financial economy which disproportionately rewards the few, reassert the value of public service and the public domain, and return the most important decisions about the economy to the democratic process rather than handing them over to self-serving bankers.
If any of this is to be attempted, let alone achieved, there is no time to lose. It is essential that the first part of 2007 should not be wasted on the personal rather than collective project of protecting what remains of the Prime Minister’s reputation. The sooner the new leader is in place, the better.
Bryan Gould
19 December 2006
This article will be published in the first 2007 issue of The Parliamentary Monitor.