Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, at a Commonwealth Finance Ministers Press Conference in 2004

Gordon Brown was the principal intellectual architect of the transformation of the United Kingdom's Labour Party from a moderately socialist party into an explicitly market-oriented social democratic party. Then, as the country's longest-serving Chancellor of the Exchequer he made major changes to its system of economic and financial management, and resisted pressures to join the European Monetary Union. Subsequently, as Prime Minister, he took the lead in the international response to the financial crash of 2008 and managed the United Kingdom's recovery from the recession of 2009. After the Labour Party's defeat in the general election of 2010, he resigned from its leadership and returned to the opposition back benches as Member of Parliament for a Scottish constituency.

Parliamentary career

Introduction: New Labour

"... markets are part of advancing the public interest and the left are wrong to say they are not; ...markets are not always in the public interest and the right is wrong to automatically equate the imposition of markets with the public interest." "The challenge for New Labour is, while remaining true to our values and goals, to have the courage to affirm that markets are a means of advancing the public interest; to strengthen markets when they work and to tackle market failures to enable markets to work better." (Gordon Brown's speech to the Social Market Foundation on 3 February, 2003).

When Gordon Brown became a Labour Member of Parliament in 1983, a battle was raging between the party's parliamentary leaders and its grass-roots activists. The leadership had largely abandoned its earlier policy of nationalisation in the course of the 1970s, but it still featured in Clause IV of the party's constitution, and its re-adoption as an active policy was vigorously sought by the self-styled Militant Tendency that regarded market capitalism as an instrument of oppression. The reforming zeal of party leader Neil Kinnock, and his successor, John Smith, gradually prevailed over the party's militant minority, but Gordon Brown urged them to go further in modernising its policies. He and the like-minded Tony Blair were influenced by the Third Way advocacy of Anthony Giddens at the London School of Economics, and the communitarian thinking of Amitai Etzioni at George Washington University in the United States.

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair as prophet and evangelist together created New Labour as a party that had retained its traditions, but abandoned its former ideology: giving priority to growth over redistribution or wealth, and advocating the market system as a the key to growth. Their 1997 election manifesto was to say that "New Labour is a party of ideas and ideals but not of outdated ideology. What counts is what works", and contained no proposals to reverse their opponents extensive privatisation and deregulation measures. That approach may have marked an end to the left/right divide in the United Kingdom's politics that, in the past, had resulted in a major policy swing with every change of government.

Opposition, 1983-97

"He was ... the most impressive young MP I ever met — erudite, eloquent, intellectual, unassuming, industrious and, most important of all, clear and certain about the better society he hoped to see. He was, in every political way but one, the superior member of the Brown-Blair partnership. The exception was charm." :(Roy Hattersley, writing in The Times, May 11, 2010) "He taught me the essence of how to put my arguments across" :(Tony Blair interview - see Anthony Seldon: Blair,p269, Free Press,2004)

Although they had little else in common, the new MPs, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, were high-fliers who had a shared conviction that they could create an electable Labour Party and then a high-achieving Labour government. They shared an office in the 1980s and were seen by their fellow-MPs as an inseparable team. Their campaign to change the party was joined in 1987 by Peter Mandelson (then the party's Director of Campaigns and Communications and later to become a Member of Parliament himself). The changes that they brought about over the following ten years were eventually to be reflected in the party's 1997 election manifesto - changes that were designed to overcome voters' misgivings about the party's ideology as well as presenting an attractive programme of reform.

The first of the major rejections of the party's once-cherished doctrines was the formal abandonment of industrial nationalisation (as reflected in the revision of Clause IV of the party's constitution), and a tacit acceptance of all of the previous administration's deregulation measures. Secondly, there was an explicit undertaking not to repeal the Conservative government's industrial relations legislation - which had outlawed the closed shop (union shop), secondary action (strikes in support of another union's dispute), and strikes called by union officials without first balloting their members. Thirdly and fourthly, the party's policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament was abandoned, and its traditional aversion to the European Union was reversed.

Among New Labour's positive objectives the highest priority was given to an increase in educational standards by raising the level of investment, reducing class sizes and closing failing schools, and it was also considered important to increase investment in the National Health Service. It was considered essential, however, to dispel the popular impression that the election of a Labour government would lead to big increases in taxation, public expenditure and budget deficits. There was an undertaking not to increase the basic or higher tax rates, and initially to accept the previous government's public spending plans, as well as proposal to confine government borrowing to the financing of investment.

According to Anthony Seldon, Tony Blair's biographer, Gordon Brown had been the star of the 1983 intake of Labour Members of Parliament, and his leadership had been acknowledged by Tony Blair and others throughout the rest of the 1980s. By the time of John Smith's death in 1994, however, Tony Blair had become the more popular among Labour Members of Parliament and with the public (and, in a MORI opinion poll Tony Blair scored 32 percent against Gordon Brown's 9 per cent). That much is relatively uncontroversial, but there have been many conflicting accounts of the relations between them in the following months. It is an established fact that Gordon Brown did not stand for election to the Labour party leadership and a consensus that he obtained, in return, promise of untramelled control of economic policy as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the next Labour Government.

Tony Blair was duly elected leader of the Labour Party in 1994 and, in the General Election of 1997, the Labour Party won a sweeping victory over its Conservative opponents.

Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1997-2007

The first term: 1997-2001

In his first year as Chancellor, Gordon Brown introduced major changes to the conduct of monetary policy and fiscal policy. On monetary policy, one of his earliest actions was to send a letter to the Governor of the Bank of England in which he announced his intention to to give the Bank operational responsibility for setting short-term interest rates to achieve an inflation target which the Government would determine (the Bank of England Act 1998 subsequently provided the necessary statutory authority). On fiscal policy, he announced the adoption the Code for Fiscal Stability which would limit its conduct by the adoption of two rules: the golden rule - that over the economic cycle, the government would borrow only to invest and not for public consumption; and the sustainable investment rule - that, over the economic cycle, the government would ensure the level of the national debt as a proportion of national income would be held at a "stable and prudent level" (subsequently interpreted as up to 40 per cent of GDP).

In July 1997 he presented his first budget, the centrepiece of which was a welfare-to-work scheme designed to help the young and long-term unemployed back into work, financed by a one-off tax on the privatised utilities. In his budget speech,, he presented a five-year plan aimed at reducing the structural budget deficit, and reaffirmed his intention to adhere for two years to his predecessor's public spending programme.

In 1999 he replaced the existing family support system with the more ambitious Working Families Tax Credit to support low-income families with children, and to encourage participation in the labour market by increasing the financial rewards from working.

Prime Minister 2007-2010

Brown's first months in office were marked by continuing speculation over whether he would call an early general election, both to benefit from an electorate apparently broadly supportive of his leadership, and neutralise his critics' charge that, having taken over from Tony Blair unopposed, his premiership was yet to earn a mandate from the public. Away from political speculation, Brown was forced to confront a number of difficult issues in his first 90 days as Prime Minister, while at the same time developing a range of policy proposals which he would set out at the 2007 Labour Party Conference on 25th September.

Brown's conference speech made reference to both domestic and international tests he had faced in his new office. These included the return of foot and mouth disease to the UK countryside, and the avoidance of terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow. He presented domestic proposals to create more home ownership, crack down on crime through extending stop and search powers, clean up hospitals, and suggested that permitting the serving of alcohol for 24 hours a day could be reviewed. Internationally, he pledged that British forces would remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, and also highlighted Darfur as a foreign policy priority. His reference to "British jobs for British workers" was criticised by the Conservatives, who pointed out that such a policy would contravene European Union law. They also demanded that he keep a manifesto pledge to hold a referendum on the draft EU Constitution, claiming that the new EU Treaty is that in another guise.

Personal history

James Gordon Brown was born in Govan, Glasgow and raised in Kirkcaldy, Scotland by his parents, John and Elizabeth.