Gordon Brown: Prime Minister. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ the citadel, Brown needed a soulmate. His enquiries suggested that Ed Balls, a twenty-five-year-old Oxford graduate employed as a leader writer at the Financial Times, would be ideal. The Nottingham-born Balls, Brown heard, was a loyal Labour supporter but was disillusioned with John Smith. He had studied at Harvard under Larry Summers and Robert Reich, both advisers to Bill Clinton, and was sparkling with ideas about monetarism, how to avoid boom and bust, never rejoining the ERM, giving independence to the Bank of England and revolutionising Britain’s economy. Brown cold-called Balls to arrange a meeting. He was impressed. Balls’s intellect and their mutual admiration of America helped to form an immediate bond. In an exchange of letters, they agreed that Labour’s future success depended on winning the electorate’s trust in the party’s economic competence. Most importantly, Balls was prepared to undertake the grind to produce the fine economic detail that was beyond Brown’s experience. The association with Balls and his future wife, Yvette Cooper, would change Brown’s life.

      In January 1993 Brown and Blair flew to Washington. Ed Balls had reinforced Brown’s attraction to Bill Clinton’s ideas, especially after Clinton’s election victory the previous November. With Balls and Jonathan Powell, a diplomat at the British embassy, they listened to Larry Summers and Robert Reich explain Clinton’s seduction of the American middle classes away from the Republicans, and his welfare-to-work programme. In a newspaper article after their return, Blair wrote enthusiastically about the exciting change in Washington. He praised the new vitality in the United States, and hailed the thousands of young people coming to Washington to build a new era. ‘The Democrats’ campaign was brilliantly planned,’ Blair wrote. Labour, he suggested, should copy Clinton’s policy, stressing ‘the importance of individual opportunity; of community strengths’.

      Brown also returned inspired to seize the middle ground from the Tories. He was attracted to Clinton’s core proposition that governments had responsibilities to the whole community. That was not a new idea. Since 1988, Brown and others had discussed it with Clinton’s staff. The Democrats’ genius was their packaging. Labour, Brown felt, should avoid outrightly campaigning for egalitarianism. Rather than preaching ‘total equality’, the party should pledge ‘equality of opportunity for all’, with the assurance that ‘everyone can fulfil his or her potential’. The new slogans would offer choice and social change. The critical promise would be to reduce unemployment in a ‘partnership economy’ without increasing taxes.

      To position Labour as the party of low taxation, Brown developed new catchphrases despite the protests of the left: ‘We do not tax for its own sake’; ‘We do not spend for its own sake’; and ‘We are not against wealth’. Simultaneously, he began to harp on the government’s tax increases – albeit only 1 per cent since 1979 – which contradicted the Conservative election pledge to lower taxation. The Tories were crudely classified as liars: ‘Either these ministers were incompetent on a scale which beggars belief, or … they set out to deceive the people of Britain on a massive and unprecedented scale.’ The gauntlet was thrown down: ‘There is no one left for this government to betray. They have no credibility. The electorate will never trust them again.’ Endless repetition, Brown hoped, would produce rewards.

      A journey to the Far East in 1993 reinforced his conviction to discard other Labour sacred cows. Britain, he realised, could not compete with China on the cost of production, but only on the quality of the products. To beat the Pacific Rim required a skilled British workforce. ‘Capital’, demonised over the previous century by socialists, was a worthless target, he decided. The buzz words of his new Labour creed were ‘human capital’ and ‘knowledge corporations’. ‘Their lessons must be applied here,’ he wrote in countless newspaper articles about innovation in the Far East, developing the idea that ‘the value of labour can be enhanced as the key to economic prosperity’.

      To spread the message from his office in London, or over the weekend from his home in Edinburgh, he sought to dictate the news agenda with interviews and press releases, urging Peter Mandelson to hunt for every possible appearance on radio and television to place him in the spotlight. He preached the homily that ‘in the modern economy we will earn by what we learn’, and recommended that ‘the system of personal taxation and benefits should favour those who upgrade their skills’. To improve those skills he proposed a University for Industry, bringing together universities, industry and broadcasters and using satellite communications to disseminate and constantly upgrade information.

      The powerhouse for this change was to be the Treasury. ‘I see the Treasury,’ Brown wrote, ‘as a department of national economic reconstruction to deal with the short-term problem of unemployment and the long-term national economic decline.’ Revealing his own abandonment of socialism as a figleaf to give false comfort to the middle class, he ridiculed the Tories for relying on the free market and individual opportunity rather than government intervention to finance industry. ‘I see the public sector as the engine of growth out of recession,’ he wrote, re-emphasising his true beliefs. He spoke of levying a windfall tax on the excess profits of the privatised utilities – copying the Tories’ windfall tax on banks – to finance a ‘New Deal’ on employment and, with another reminiscent whiff of Harold Wilson, he attacked the major banks for increasing their dividends.

      This potpourri of socialism and Clintonism irritated John Smith. The leader disliked the modernisers’ policies, and he ostracised Mandelson. Smith was not surprised when John Edmonds, the GMB union leader, called him personally to protest about Brown and Blair’s visit to America. ‘They’re getting too much publicity,’ complained Edmonds. ‘This Project is mischief-making and about personal ambition.’ Although a decade later Edmonds would acknowledge ‘a lack of imagination among the trade unions in the early 1990s’, he was gratified in 1993 by Smith’s rejection of the modernisers’ proposals for the next election campaign. Smith supported large government spending, and disliked Brown’s refusal to commit Labour to use the proceeds from council house sales for more building. In meetings of the shadow cabinet, the leader remained silent when Brown’s proposed windfall tax was criticised for being too small. ‘We cannot meet those expectations,’ Brown told Frank Dobson. Smith overruled Brown for being ‘too conservative’.

      In contrast, during their arguments, while Murray Elder, Smith’s chief of staff, sat silently in the background, Smith growled, ‘You’re going too fast.’ In private, Brown raged about Smith’s unwillingness to support the modernisers while encouraging the traditional left. While in public Brown praised John Smith’s ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘concern for justice’, emphasising Smith’s concern as a Christian socialist for Labour’s moral purpose, he detested Smith’s blinkeredness. Smith ignored the Tories’ private polls which showed that Labour was still regarded as ‘dishonest and incoherent’, and on the side of losers. Relying on the lowest common denominator for electoral appeal, Smith was sure, would prove successful. ‘The Tories are destroying themselves,’ he observed about the government’s bitter battles over Europe. ‘Labour can sleep-walk to victory.’

      Brown found that his frustrating battle with John Smith to change Labour was losing him friends and allies. Visitors to his office reported that his Horatio-on-the-bridge act on the shadow spending ministers was causing him anguish. ‘Gordon is torn and depressed about the irreconcilables,’ John Monks observed. Trade union leaders whom Brown regarded as friends – Rodney Bickerstaffe, Bill Morris and John Monks – were surprised during their private meetings that the man casting himself as the future ‘iron chancellor’ forgot to smile while brusquely refusing to advocate СКАЧАТЬ