My Life, Our Times

by Gordon Brown

  Thanks to the Norwegian government, in 2015 the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity brought together a groundbreaking team – composed of presidents and prime ministers to Nobel Laureates, NGO leaders and young people – to plan the future of global education. I was privileged to chair the commission, which produced an ambitious yet credible road map to make ours the first generation in history where every child is in school and learning. After demonstrating that no ordinary initiative could ever fill the $90 billion a year aid funding gap, we proposed an International Finance Facility for Education – underpinned by guarantees from donor nations – that will raise $10 billion a year for developing countries, virtually doubling annual education aid. With the help of Shakira – a global superstar and champion of girls’ education whom I first met in London in 2005 – the proposed Finance Facility was endorsed by the 2017 G20 in Hamburg. Today, there are still 260 million boys and girls who will never receive any schooling and another 400 million who will exit schooling far too early at the age of ten or eleven and, in turn, miss out on a secondary education. By putting education on the agenda and agreeing to marshal the vital funds necessary to launch the International Finance Facility for Education, the G20 of 2018, to be hosted by Argentina, can mark a turning point for global education in the same way that the G8 of 2005 turned the corner on debt relief.

  But even with these new public responsibilities I had no desire to be back in the limelight. I had been on the public stage only because of the job I did. In the seven years since my time in government, I have re-entered the public square only if I thought I could make a difference. But in 2010 and 2011 I was to find that while I was out of government, I was not out of the Murdoch empire’s range of fire.

  While relations with Murdoch’s editors were never good, nothing had properly prepared me for the treatment meted out to my younger son Fraser, which came to a head in 2011 when I gave evidence to Lord Leveson’s inquiry about the Sun’s intrusion into Fraser’s life. As I explained then, Sarah and I had kept our counsel when in 2006 the Sun had exposed Fraser’s cystic fibrosis. So unconcerned were they about Fraser’s condition that when they first phoned to say they intended to run a story about him, they claimed he had cerebral palsy. At any rate, they had secured the story in an underhand way, paying the husband of an NHS midwife for the information. When in 2011 the Guardian published an article headlined ‘News International papers targeted Gordon Brown’, emails circulating at the Sun at the time admitted: ‘We’re f***ed.’ Another stated: ‘And so it begins …’ – a reference to the revelations that had brought down the News of the World.

  But instead of admitting they had breached the confidentiality of NHS information, they commissioned and paid for a video from the husband of their source accusing me of being a liar. Their stablemate The Times was enlisted to discredit me and later had to apologise for this. Rebekah Brooks, meanwhile, told the Leveson Inquiry that Sarah and I had actually asked her to report my son’s condition. This was completely untrue. In his report, Lord Leveson responded: ‘The claim that the Browns were “absolutely committed to making this public” frankly defies belief … one hardly needs Mr Brown himself to point out that no parent in the land would have wanted information of this nature to be blazoned across the front page of a national newspaper … As a whole, the experience of the Browns provides a fine example of a number of aspects of unsatisfactory and/or unethical press practices.’ It is not clear that since Leveson anything has really changed.

  Leveson aside, however, I remained out of the limelight, busily engaged in my international and constituency work when, in 2013, I found myself drawn reluctantly back into British politics at a national level – by the referendum on Scottish independence.

  One of the threads woven through my forty years in public life, a theme that runs across all my speeches past and present, is my commitment to the unity and integrity of Britain. From the perspective of 2017, I call the effort a modern ‘Battle for Britain’.

  When I was young, no one thought Britain would ever break up. When Churchill died in January 1965 I still vividly remember taking part in a special memorial service in a packed church in Kirkcaldy on a Sunday afternoon. All the uniformed youth organisations – from the Life Boys, the Boys’ Brigade, the Scouts, to the Brownies and the Girl Guides – stood to attention in a display of British patriotism. The Royal British Legion in Scotland was there in uniform displaying their war medals. The Union Jack was unfurled. The national anthem and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ were sung. Churchill’s state funeral, entitled ‘Operation Hope Not’, had been organised years before he died. And while the service itself was one of the most elaborate ever seen, including the voyage of his coffin up the Thames with Dockland cranes lowering to honour him, there was added significance in the countless memorial services held in towns and cities all across the country. This was an all-British commemoration that now feels like something from another age. I cannot imagine a similar outpouring of distinctly British unity for anyone other than Queen Elizabeth II in the foreseeable future.

  In the 1950s, 60s and 70s institutions such as British Steel, British Airways, British Leyland, British Telecom and British Home Stores were part of everyday life and language. Many, of course, still exist, but in modern discourse the word ‘British’ has all but gone, replaced now with initials. Our mid-century years, as the sociologist David McCrone observes, ‘were the high point of Britishness in Scotland as well as being a turning point’. Since then there has been a distinct shift: English people now identify themselves as more English than British, the Scots more as Scots, and the Welsh more as Welsh. In Scotland, the sense of belonging to Britain has declined fastest. While many Scots say they feel equally Scottish and British, there are now far more who feel more Scottish than British or not British at all – two-thirds in total. Indeed, if asked to make a choice between being Scottish and British, only 18 per cent of Scots identify as British first. ‘An emphasis on our Britishness in the years after the war,’ McCrone argues, ‘has given way to a more recent emphasis on Scottishness.’

  Of course, in the global era, identities are likely to be multiple. I myself am at once a Fifer, Scottish, British and European. But if Britain is to survive and flourish in the future we will need something more than simplistic superficialities – like New Britain or Young Britain or Cool Britannia – to hold the country together.

  Historically, countries like America and France have found common ground by consciously affirming shared ideals. Britain, especially England, has never felt the need to do the same. Partly because it has not been invaded, defeated in war or suffered a constitutional breakdown for three and a half centuries, it has never engaged in recent years in the kind of constitutional debates that could define the character of the country and bring people together as one. Unlike the French or Americans, Britain as a whole has shied away from a story we can tell about ourselves, a narrative that draws strength from our past, makes sense of our present and offers hope for the future.

  Over the last fifty years the unity of Britain has frayed for want of such a narrative precisely because we have failed to recognise that what binds us is not our institutions, which change over time, or our ethnicity – after all, we are four nations – but our values and the way they shape our society: a commitment to tolerance, liberty, fair play and social responsibility.

  I saw some of the difficulties of achieving this as chancellor and prime minister. In an effort to strengthen our sense of Britishness, I made speeches, held conferences, wrote articles, proposed an Institute for Britishness and indeed in 2008 encouraged a book, Being British: The Search for the Values That Bind the Nation, edited by the journalist Matthew d’Ancona. For purely partisan reasons, however, the Conservative Party were determined to prevent Labour from being identified with patriotic British values. In 2009, the Conservative MP Michael Gove, himself a Scot now ensconced in a southern English constituency, accepted an invitation to contribute t
o the collection and then penned an extraordinary attack against me, charging that ‘the very political reason for his frequently trumped-up interest in the question of British nationality is that he is acutely aware that his position as an MP from a Scottish constituency places him in a difficult position now Scotland has its own Parliament’. I was, he alleged, making the case for Britishness ‘for reasons of career self-defence’ and attempting to ‘flatten Britain’s past into just one way of looking at the world which is poor history and partisan politics’. A few years later, Gove, as education minister, would himself be talking of ‘British values’ in an attempt to rescue his failing curriculum reforms.

  I faced similar problems – outside the party political arena – when I tried to break the deadlock that prevented full participation of all the home nations in an all-British football team in the London Olympics. I sought to overcome the veto of the Scottish Football Association, which was worried that they would lose their status as a single nation within world footballing bodies. On a number of occasions, I talked to Sebastian Coe, president of the Organising Committee for the 2012 Games, about this. I thought the most famous Scottish manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, should be invited to lead the British team to bring Scotland on board. When I raised this with Alex himself in 2009 and 2010, he was positive, albeit with one caveat: he did not know what post he would be in come 2012. I then persuaded the then president of FIFA Sepp Blatter and in turn the FIFA board to sign a waiver, ensuring that Scottish participation in the Olympics football team would never be used as a pretext for Scotland losing its separate status in international football. But still the Scottish Football Association were reluctant. Eventually, my proposal was kicked into the long grass: we did have a British team but without Scottish participation and, sadly, without Alex Ferguson as manager. The team failed to get beyond the quarter-final. I had found it impossible to bring the four nations together.

  The failure to forge a unifying purpose has been compounded by our failure to recognise and deal with the emergence of Scottish nationalism, Welsh nationalism and now English nationalism through greater local empowerment at every level.

  From the 1970s, before the mainstream of my party came around to it, a few of us put the case for devolution and the creation of what became the Scottish Parliament as part of a new constitutional settlement for the United Kingdom. After 1997, when colleagues argued we had killed nationalism stone dead, I continued to call for further devolution. Even at the height of the financial crisis, I tried to find a way to enable Scotland to feel more comfortable inside the UK.

  All my life I have been a fervent Scottish patriot. Never have I tried to hide my love for Scotland nor my Scottish roots. But I have also never seen any contradiction between my patriotism and my belief in the unity of the United Kingdom. Scotland’s greatest strength has come, in my view, not just from its own devolved Parliament but from the leadership role we can play in the UK. I worked alongside my fellow Scottish Labour politicians John Smith, Donald Dewar and Robin Cook as they tried to forge a modern role for Scotland inside the Union and show the influence Scots could exert in advancing an agenda that favoured social justice. They were well served by Murray Elder, who was at the Bank of England, when I recommended him as an adviser to Denis Healey and John Smith. He soon became John’s chief of staff and then later Donald’s right-hand man. It was because of them that Labour championed a Scottish Constitutional Convention in the late 1980s and early 1990s that was to pave the way for a Scottish Parliament.

  I was delighted when Donald became Scotland’s inaugural First Minister in 1999. But one of my saddest moments was to see him laid low by ill health, coming back to full-time work too soon after heart surgery and falling, suffering a brain haemorrhage and then tragically dying. I spoke at Donald’s funeral: it was one of the most difficult hours I have lived through. But for his commitment to an egalitarian Scotland that tackled poverty he might have stood down after his momentous achievement in delivering devolution. For Donald, though, the work was not yet done: he wanted a Scotland free from unemployment and deprivation. He saw that standing up for the Scottish people and social justice went hand in hand.

  For the first decade of Scottish devolution, the SNP found it impossible to drive a wedge between Labour and Scotland. But in 2007, it found its opportunity to do so. The 2007 Scottish Parliament election came just six weeks before the transfer of prime-ministerial power from Tony to me in late June. For purely Scottish reasons, if I’m honest, I asked Tony to consider the changeover a few weeks earlier, believing that the simple fact of there being a Scottish prime minister would help us win power in Scotland. The contest, as it transpired, went down to the wire. With sixty-two Liberal Democrat and Labour MSPs, as against the SNP’s forty-seven – and with the Conservative Party hardly likely to want to see the SNP run the show – another Labour–Liberal government was possible. I tried to persuade the leader of the Lib Dems, Menzies Campbell, that instead of walking away they join with Labour to re-form our coalition, but the Liberals seemed traumatised – they had lost only one seat yet their vote had collapsed – and would not come to the table. This loss of nerve allowed Alex Salmond to capitalise and opened the door for the SNP to form a minority administration.

  The economic roots of Scottish nationalism lay in the same long-term trends – industrial decline, insecurity and the squeezed middle class – that have bred anti-establishment rebellions across the West. In the 1950s, 40 per cent of our workforce were in manufacturing or mining, but by the second decade of the new century only 7 per cent were. A million skilled jobs had been lost in coal, textiles, steel and shipbuilding, and with them many people’s standard of living, status and prospects. When the British state looked less able to reverse these trends, ‘London mismanagement’ became a constant refrain of the nationalists, and ‘Westminster’ an all-purpose adjective to sustain grudges, both real and imagined.

  The SNP sought to distance Labour from Scotland and identify it with London. I was referred to as a London and Westminster politician, despite the fact my home was in Scotland, my children were born in Scotland and I returned to Scotland weekend after weekend. This angered and saddened me.

  There were cultural forces at work too: traditional Scottish institutions had ceased to be vehicles through which people could express their Scottishness in an apolitical way. The Church of Scotland itself had lost a million members since the 1950s and voluntary organisations no longer exerted the influence they once had. People were looking for new ways to express and assert their identity. With their ‘Scotland first’ slogans – ‘it’s Scotland’s oil’ being the prime example – the SNP were well placed to step into this vacuum.

  In December 2007 the challenge of reviving Labour in Scotland was taken up, enthusiastically and professionally, by a dynamic new leader, Wendy Alexander, part of a remarkable family that included her brother Douglas, MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South. With my support, Wendy secured the Scottish Parliament’s endorsement for a new Commission on Scottish Devolution, under the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Calman, to report to both the UK Parliament and the Scottish Parliament. With the help of a highly experienced and far-sighted civil servant, Jim Gallagher, who served as secretary to the commission and was later to be an influential pro-devolution writer and campaigner, the Calman commission’s final report of June 2009 recommended new tax-raising powers and more economic devolution for Scotland within a UK securely grounded in the pooling and sharing of resources. Overshadowed by the global financial crisis, the report never got the attention or support it deserved.

  Even so, at the 2010 general election, Labour more than held its own in Scotland, regaining the two seats we had lost in by-elections. Overall, Labour won forty-one out of Scotland’s fifty-nine seats, outpacing the SNP in vote share by two to one, an increase of 2.5 per cent. Over the next four years I saw Labour’s fortunes in Scotland wax and wane as Scottish leaders came and went, but despite a disastrous loss to the SNP in 2011, Labour
enjoyed a revival in the local elections in 2012 and then an even bigger swing to it when my election agent, Alex Rowley, was elected to the Scottish Parliament in a by-election in my own constituency.

  And yet, by 2015 the Labour Party had haemorrhaged so much support in Scotland that we won only one Scottish seat in the election of that year, and since the election of 2017 now hold only seven. None of this was, in my view, inevitable; nor is it irreversible. I fear it was political mistakes we made that let the SNP overtake us as Scotland’s most popular political party – and threaten our very existence to this day. The key was what went wrong during the referendum.

  The SNP had been elected in 2011 on a mandate to hold a referendum on Scottish independence. During the course of 2012, negotiations between the SNP and the UK government took place over the nature and timing of the referendum, which was eventually scheduled for 18 September 2014. As the campaign on Scottish independence got under way in 2013, I had no desire to be centre stage. I was happy when Ed Miliband and the Scottish Labour leader, Johann Lamont, nominated Alistair Darling and Blair McDougall to be the lead Labour voices at the heart of the pro-union campaign Better Together. I was also encouraged by the first video issued by that campaign – a plea to patriotic Scots to think of a proud Scotland with both a strong Scottish Parliament and an influential place in the UK. At this point, support for independence was at around 30 per cent; and, even two years after Alex Salmond’s victory in the Scottish Parliament elections of 2011, half of SNP voters were doubtful about independence. How, then, did support for independence move up from 30 per cent to a near majority?

  The Better Together campaign was right to argue that an independent Scotland would be worse off economically but should not have allowed its opponents, Yes Scotlandfn1, to define its entire campaign as ‘Project Fear’. Inadvertently, the No campaign allowed it to be thought that it was talking Scotland down, suggesting it was too poor, too weak, too dependent and too fragile to be independent. The SNP, in turn, portrayed Better Together as speaking not for Scotland but for Britain; and in doing so effectively depicted themselves as the only genuine party of Scotland. Better Together was an umbrella under which Labour cohabited with the Conservatives, but while Labour people did their best, the ‘no’ message that came through was a Tory defence of the status quo.