Can the British PM find a new way to be left? 

 

Listener: 14 July, 2007. 

 

Keywords: Political Economy & History; 

 

Although he was Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister) for a decade, and had a free hand with the economy, new British PM Gordon Brown is still considered an unknown quantity. 

 

On the one hand, former London Times editor Simon Jenkins, in his book Thatcher and Sons, argues that Brown – who sees himself as rooted in Labour’s socialist traditions – is essentially a Thatcherite. 

 

Jenkins’s nuanced portrayal of Margaret Thatcher is of a Prime Minister much more tentative, much more politically shrewd, than the bull-at-a-gate, conviction-driven politician of the usual rhetoric. Yet, while he rightly sees her and her team in the 80s giving a new direction to British economic policy, he also argues that Brown is her follower. 

 

It is easy to see differences. The fiscally disciplined Brown is not so much against increasing government spending, and has not been cutting taxes as much as Thatcherites would want. When he has cut them, he has favoured the poor more than the rich. And he has been much more reluctant to allow the private supply of public services in education and health. 

 

And yet, Jenkins is right insofar as Brown’s stewardship did not reverse a lot of the Thatcher reforms. Britain in the 70s had become politically constipated by self-interested groups that could veto change to protect their privilege in the short term, even if that stagnated the economy in the longer one. Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter, was as contemptuous of the privileged right as she was of the left, and wrecked both. Brown has consolidated many of Thatcher’s changes. 

 

But as much as I admire Jenkins, one of the world’s most sophisticated and insightful columnists, his political perspective, descending from that of the great centre-right intellectual Edmund Burke, does – I think – limit his ability to see the problem faced by left politicians concerned with the economy. 

 

Many are not, as Nick Cohen’s book What’s Left? nicely illustrates. Cohen, also a British newspaper columnist, but from a traditional left background, excoriates the political left’s selective outrage on international issues. In a fiery polemic of almost 400 pages, he devotes a dozen or so to economic policy issues, and even there he is dismissive of socialist economics, rather than offering any insight into where it could be going. 

So, where does the left go economically? Anti-globalisation gets a few more pages, but it is too easy to be in opposition: what would one do in government? Reinstate the privileged institutions of the left, such as traditional unionism? Stand up for the poor? Too often it does, provided it is not asked to make personal sacrifices. Economically, the left (including some New Zealand commentators) is reactionary, trying to inhibit progress and prevent change rather than facing that challenge, as its ancestors proudly did in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. It is as if their great progressive tradition is now in a defensive reverse gear. 

 

That is the fascination of Brown. He has tried to implement progressive left economics for the 21st century, building on the traditions from the 19th. If then it was against business, we know it was more concerned with the social control of business. His predecessors instituted policies that lifted many of the grandchildren of the 19th-century poor into moderate affluence, but the left is puzzled about what to do for the rest, and concerned that those a couple of steps up the ladder seem to ignore those at the bottom. 

 

On the other hand, everyone on the ladder is more and more worried about the impact of the economy on the environment. But how to marry the two without destroying one or both? Perhaps, too, things that once seemed soluble now seem unresolvable. Does anyone know how to get the heath system working properly – other than to spend lashings of public money on it with barely any gains (the left position) or privatise it with even fewer gains (the right view)? 

 

Brown has spent 10 years struggling with such issues as Chancellor. I hope he does not want to be PM just to enjoy the glory. Blair’s New Labour miserably failed to capture the hearts of the populace and the left. We will be watching to see if Brown’s modernised and reinvigorated traditional Labour will do better.