My Life, Our Times

by Gordon Brown

  A progressive Labour must therefore move forward on two fronts that are inextricably linked: internationally, with an agenda for international cooperation to tame the excesses of globalisation, and domestically, with an agenda that offers economic security and social justice – and with environmental progress integral to both. What unites them is an egalitarian vision: of a Britain fair to all or, to employ a phrase I used for years in opposition and government which is now back in vogue, a Britain for the many and not just the few.

  But when we talk of equality, we must be precise. As my friend the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen asks: equality of what?

  In 1997, in the springtime of the Labour government, Tony Blair wrote to the iconic philosopher Isaiah Berlin, famous for his Two Concepts of Liberty, to ask him why we can only advance what Berlin termed ‘negative’ freedoms – the freedom from coercion – and not ‘positive’ freedoms – the freedom to pursue goals like equality – as well. Because of his experience of Nazism and Soviet Communism, Berlin had spent a whole life attempting to caution against the overexcited passions that led to intolerance and extremism, which flowed, he felt, from demands for positive freedoms. But Tony was right: our generation can do better than the last. Championing negative liberty is not enough if, in the world of 2017 and beyond, we are to uphold the dignity of every individual.

  At its most basic, positive liberty is about ensuring that a child born into poverty will have every chance to fulfil their potential and every obstacle in their way removed. This is what I mean by equality. The neoliberal may call for opportunity for all, but such a demand is insincere rhetoric if we do not address the very injustices that put genuine equality of opportunity beyond reach. This narrow version of equality of opportunity is, in effect, the opportunity to be unequal.

  Anti-globalisation protestors, on the other hand, would erect self-defeating protectionist barriers to the outside world, which in the end would impede growth, diminish our economy and leave us all worse off. By favouring equality of outcome, which cannot be achieved without unacceptable restrictions on individual freedom, they would deny recognition for hard work, initiative and merit. For me, the progressive challenge is to find a modern balance between the competing claims of equality and liberty to ensure we treat every citizen with dignity.

  So, how might this be done?

  I saw at first hand in 2008 during the global financial crisis that we cannot fully succeed in delivering national prosperity without concerted international action. As I have argued at several points in this book, international cooperation is therefore a prerequisite if we are to reform the global financial system and the European Union and ensure that, in a reformed global supply chain, companies do not pollute, syphon money into tax shelters or exploit their workforces. I saw also how difficult it is to persuade the general public that remedies for problems faced at home – job losses and stagnant wages – actually lie abroad and cannot be delivered solely by action within or by Britain. When I talked of global problems and how they needed global solutions, it was mendacious but all too easy for my Conservative opponents to claim that I was simply trying to shift the blame. But if we do not explain that we need international as well as national remedies to the insecurities that are intrinsic to today’s economy, we are failing in our duties as politicians.

  Just as our shared planet makes the need for international coordination on climate change intuitively obvious, so our global economy means that any standards we set for our own financial institutions – to cap and tax bankers’ bonuses, for example – must be globally coordinated. Low-taxed and unregulated financial centres are already well positioned to steal business and deprive Britain of tax revenues. A Labour government can, of course, raise the minimum wage and introduce wage subsidies like tax credits, and trade unions are more necessary than ever to fight for justice in our workplace, but jobs are already being lost to companies and countries that offer the commercial advantages of low environmental, tax and safety standards. If nothing is done to end the exploitation of workers in other parts of the global supply chain, then wages in Britain will continue to stagnate and we too will suffer the fallout from a race to the bottom.

  At a national level, meanwhile, our task is to destroy, systematically and aggressively, all impediments to a fair start in life and a fair share of globalisation’s benefits. Of course it would be naïve not to recognise the reality that children start from different family advantages, will possess different talents and have differing ambitions but, in my view, equality does not ever mean everyone being the same. Rather, equality is about everyone having the best chance to make the most of who they are.

  I often tell the story of the surgeon who saved Ronald Reagan’s life when he was shot just after becoming president in 1981. As he was being wheeled into the operating room Reagan quipped that he hoped the doctors were all Republicans. Shortly after his recovery he made a speech thanking Joseph Giordano, the Italian-American surgeon who had led the medical team, praising him as someone who had started with nothing, worked his way up, paid his own way through university and was a living example of the American dream. In response, the surgeon penned an article for the LA Times that corrected Reagan’s account. Yes, he had worked hard, but he had been given a scholarship for college and national funding to take him through his postgraduate degree in medicine. He owed everything, he wrote, to the support he had received from the community. Individual initiative by itself would not have been enough: his whole future was made possible by public investment in education.

  There should be no cap on the ambition of a child who is poor, as this surgeon-to-be once was; no ceiling, glass or otherwise, to thwart aspiration; no barriers that prevent her or anyone else achieving their potential. To achieve this, we require nothing short of an educational revolution: to improve teacher quality, empower school heads, develop relevant curricula, offer lifelong access to educational opportunities and use the latest technology to transform the learning environment.

  In the years I have served as UN special envoy for global education, I have seen how education holds the key not just to a fairer society but also to a stronger economy. Despite the growing use of robots and AI, it is human capital – our ability to innovate, acquire new skills and be entrepreneurial – that is the crucial determinant of a company’s success and a country’s progress. Investing in education is the starting point for re-establishing the link between high productivity and jobs with good pay. Alongside this, though, we must remind ourselves of the work that matters most and value it accordingly. This means valuing more highly – and paying more for – currently low-paid but highly responsible jobs in the personal services like nursing and caring.

  We must also ensure that workers benefit from a more equitable sharing of corporate profits that are currently reserved for a small elite of executives and shareholders. It is only fair that all employees should benefit from the successes they help create. Global corporations resist paying higher wages arguing that doing so in advanced economies will render them uncompetitive. One answer is profit-sharing, which is not an obstacle to competitiveness but a spur to it: while it spreads the benefits of success from the few to the many, it also incentivises employees, thereby increasing productivity overall.

  One of globalisation’s most persuasive historians, Branco Milanovic, has observed that redistribution of wealth and income has rarely been achieved outside of war, revolution or the collapse of a state. In Britain today, however, the chief executives of the biggest companies now earn on average 386 times more than workers on the national living wage, demonstrating that the biggest divide in income is between the top 1 per cent, who now amass 16 per cent of all income, and the rest. Such disparities of income and wealth have become so entrenched that they should offend even those who support mild forms of equality of opportunity, as inequality of outcome in one generation is creating what some now call a ‘hereditary meritocracy’ and destroying the possibility of equality of opportunity
in the next.

  I believe that it is not anti-wealth to say that both within companies and across the country the wealthy should do more to help those who are not so wealthy. Between 1997 and 2010 we tried to create a far fairer tax system, not just through tax credits but also through tax rises at the top – by twice raising the National Insurance ceiling, by increasing rates of stamp duty on expensive properties, by clamping down on tax avoidance and then, in 2009, by introducing a higher rate of income tax. Once we include tax credits, the share of tax paid by the top 10 per cent rose from 34 per cent of all taxes in 1997 to 43 per cent in 2010. Now, under the Conservatives, the share has started to fall again, making Britain more unequal. In fact, the top 20 per cent, who accounted for 53 per cent of taxes in 1997 and saw their share rise as high as 65 per cent after Labour’s top-rate rises went through, now account for 62 per cent of taxes.

  The Conservatives under David Cameron and George Osborne wanted to cut the top rate of income tax from 50 per cent to 40 per cent, but they cannot now risk the wrath of the electorate by lowering the highest tax rate – for those earning above £150,000 – below 45 per cent. Now that vast inequalities of income and large-scale tax avoidance have been exposed, the right is on the defensive. But there is more we can do. Ownership of capital is far more unequally distributed than income, and while living standards are, of course, raised by measures such as increasing the living wage, widening access to capital is one sure way of raising those standards further. Responding to this, the Child Trust Fund that we introduced in 2005 gave every child for the first time a share of the nation’s wealth. It entitled all children to an endowment at birth, and at seven and eleven, and allocated more to those who were least well off. Through its reinstatement, as well as through profit-sharing, employee ownership and fair taxation, we must widen the ownership of wealth. Today a windfall tax on the IT and big data giants is as justified as were past windfall levies on the utilities. And as I have argued earlier, a global levy on our banks is now an essential element of any modern economic policy, if only to insure ourselves against the need for a future bank bailout.

  Growing up in Kirkcaldy I hoped that the grinding poverty I saw around me could be eradicated in my lifetime. And yet it is a sad fact that even though child poverty fell during our government, more children – 4 million of them – are in poverty today than in 1965 when the Child Poverty Action Group was founded to deal with a poverty emergency. On current trends by 2022, 5 million children – one child in every three – will be consigned to poverty, more than at any time in the Thatcher–Major years. No child should be brought up in damp, substandard homes, and there is for this reason if no other a need to return to John Prescott’s original plan to build affordable houses. Nor should any child grow up ill-clad, undernourished, with basic needs neglected and basic chances denied. We must try once more to popularise the single most effective measure of ending child poverty, superior to raising tax thresholds, introducing a citizens’ income or even raising child benefit: tax credits.

  Taken together, these proposals and those I have made earlier in the book for reinvigorated public services can unite all the nations and regions of Britain in a proud and shared endeavour. Such a project represents a demand for equality not for its own sake but for liberty’s sake: to give every British family the best chance to make the most of their lives. In response to those who criticise this as a move to the centre, I would reply that we will be moving the centre towards the progressive cause.

  Of course, issues of identity and culture matter as well as economics. Some will conclude that no single party can be broad enough to bridge the divide between so-called ‘globalists’ and ‘nativists’, ‘cosmopolitans’ and ‘communitarians’, ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’, or hold together the socially conservative ‘settlers’, the swing-voting ‘prospectors’ and the socially liberal ‘pioneers’. It is true that there are many who think of themselves as somehow being more British than others and try to make patriotism their exclusive preserve. And we have yet to convince others, many of them potential Labour supporters, that immigration, if managed well, will not weaken our country’s sense of national identity or undermine social cohesion.

  I would argue that we can address these concerns and enhance cohesion by matching today’s celebrations of diversity – and of a Britain ‘safe for diversity’ – with the recognition and celebration of the common bonds that bind us together. Separate national, regional and ethnic loyalties are now well established across a United Kingdom that has lived with diversity as long as it has existed. But by putting more emphasis on what we hold in common, we can marginalise the intolerance that preys on difference.

  To sum up, we can approach the future in two ways, both of which lead us to similar conclusions: we can start, as I have in this chapter, from the massive insecurities and inequalities that twenty-first century globalisation now generates, and build for new times a fresh paradigm, based on the liberation of human potential, within which we deliver modern policies that create a fairer, more prosperous and more cohesive country; or we can start, as I did in the previous two chapters, by identifying the enduring British values that most of us share, and by coming together in support of them and by applying them in updated policies for new times, we can meet and master the challenges that lie ahead.

  What is clear is that the Britain of 2017 needs – even more urgently than the Britain I led ten years ago – a single national conversation that can engage the whole country, and which can take us beyond today’s entrenched, tribal divisions – between those who are for and those who are against Brexit, immigration, nationalism, capitalism and globalisation – a British Tower of Babel with factions ensconced in their own silos, using social media to talk at and across one another rather than to and with each other.

  We have to recognise the very real barriers to such a conversation: that in a multi-national state such as ours, there is no shared basis for a nationwide dialogue that appeals to common ethnicity; that popular trust in, and support for, national institutions like Parliament to lead such a conversation cannot be taken for granted; and that in a secular age, appeals to shared religious traditions have far less resonance than ever before. So, as I have suggested, we need to rediscover a common language that speaks to, and values, our traditions of tolerance and our love of liberty, and in particular gives voice to the British peoples’ strong sense of social responsibility, civic duty and our instinct for fairness – what we often call ‘fair play’. These enduring values, in support of which millions of our fellow citizens can find common cause, are the golden threads that tie the Britain of the past to the Britain of today and tomorrow. As an expression of what our country is about, they stand alongside, while constituting a uniquely distinctive British alternative to, France’s ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ and America’s claim to be the ‘land of opportunity’.

  Such a conversation would thus expose as out of date and out of character the two ideological extremes that have never commanded much support in our country: a very un-British selfish individualism that runs counter to our long-standing commitment, as reflected in the NHS, to an equitable pooling and sharing of resources and risks across our country; and an equally un-British over-centralisation of state power that would stifle both individual initiative and Edmund Burke’s ‘little platoons’ of public-spirited citizens whose voluntary service makes for strong communities and reflects our need ‘to belong’.

  Upon this foundation, rooted in a modern articulation of lasting values, and rejecting the ahistorical notion that Britain is at its best when it chooses to stand apart and alone, we can debate, agree and unite around a credible and radical vision for the future of a United Kingdom founded on liberty and built around fairness – one that commits us to minimising the insecurities that globalisation has created and to maximising the opportunities young people should and can have.

  What is certain is that we cannot chart a path ahead by reverting to the policies of
the 1940s, the 1970s, or even those of the years after 1997. The test now is to live and lead not through attempts to re-live these years but in the world that is ours now, and the world that is to be. I said in the Introduction that there are cycles in politics: eras of collectivism and then of individualism; periods of rapid change that yield to times of consolidation; demands for a new stability that then give way to an impatience for something new. I am convinced that Britain is once again a country ready to move forward: a Britain tired of adversarial extremes, exhausted old ideologies and politicians with nothing to offer beyond themselves – and tired also of its inability to move our national conversation beyond all this. The British people are yearning for something different. There is an impatience for change. A new generation has a right to dream and to hope – and we have a responsibility to respond.

  AFTERWORD: OUR TIMES

  Modern leadership offers huge opportunities and makes huge demands: the pace and unpredictability of Macmillan’s ‘events’ is just a starting point. The 24/7 news cycle – avid for coverage and comment – adds an urgency that is often disproportionate to a story’s relevance beyond that news cycle. Headlines about crises, splits, anger, fury and horror – not always justified by the details that follow – compete round the clock for the attention of readers, listeners and viewers.

  As a result, leadership is sometimes left with too little time to think, to sift and absorb information, to plan, to persuade and deliver. And yet the challenges we confront are greater than ever. In this book, I have set out the four strands that in my view have defined our times and formed the backdrop to my life in politics – globalisation as an unstoppable economic force, neoliberalism as a long prevailing but failing economic theory, the sometime perilous condition of the Labour Party and the fate of Britain itself. Each of these has been a source of mounting pressures during the forty years I have been in politics.