Brown never used the term ‘left-of-centre’, preferring the less threatening and vague ‘progressive’ to describe his politics. Some of his motives and objectives were almost entirely hidden in a haystack of words aimed at reassuring potential doubters about what he was doing. One of those who worked closely with him in opposition and in government says:
Gordon believed that quite often he could accomplish radical acts, but sometimes he felt able to make the case for them only once the acts had been implemented. Sometimes he did not want to say too much in advance. To take one example he redistributed quite extensively without making the case overtly for redistribution, because he felt that voters would regard such a term with fear, associating it with Labour in the 1980s. But once the controversial policies, such as tax credits and discreet increases in public spending, had been implemented and middle England or the media was not raging, he would make the case for them.
The sequence does not seem particularly significant now, but it was revolutionary at the time. What had happened previously was that Labour shadow chancellors would make a general argument for tax rises, only to be slaughtered for it in much of the media and in opinion polls. By the time they came up with the detailed policies they had lost the argument.
An informative early guide to Brown’s values and approach is his biography of John Maxton, the left-wing Scottish Labour MP who helped to light up Westminster in the 1920s and 1930s. The book is revealing for the distant authorial voice that makes the case for expediency over impotent idealism.
Brown joked in the introduction that the book was ‘twenty years in the making’. He studied Maxton as a student at Edinburgh University in 1967, then wrote a PhD thesis about Scottish politics in the 1920s, and finally published the biography in the mid-1980s when he was an ambitious Labour MP. By the time of publication he was already calculating how closely he wished to be associated with the book’s subject, a Labour MP who never ruled. Even the publication of a book became an act of pragmatic idealism.
Brown described the scenes, evoked the personalities and told the story. But as an author he kept himself out of it, conveying neither enthusiastic approval nor the opposite. By the time the book was published in 1985 he was already developing his ambiguous public voice.
Quite often in the years to come, when he wanted to convey his own views he would do so under the protective clothing of somebody else, so that no one was quite sure where precisely Brown stood on highly charged matters. Many people, from the banker Sir Derek Wanless to President Obama, were to play the role of a shield for Brown as he implemented controversial policies. He never dared to rely on his voice alone, one that would be exposed to the howls of a thousand reactionary voices in response. His first shield was Maxton.
Brown noted that Maxton had suffered the ‘condescension of posterity’, but did not make entirely clear whether he believed the verdict was undeserved: ‘The Independent Labour Party which he dominated for twenty years dwindled eventually to nothing, even as his audiences grew larger. But at the height of his powers, in the 1920s, he threatened to change the whole course of politics by offering British socialism a third way between Labour gradualism and communism.’ He went on to acknowledge that the failure to implement Maxton’s ideas ‘foreshadowed the failure of a whole generation of British politicians to solve the problems of unemployment and poverty’.
This is the nearest Brown gets to intervening personally, with the implication that the task of left-of-centre politicians was to find a way of addressing unemployment and poverty, his two lifelong obsessions, by getting to a position where they could make a practical difference.
Towards the end of the book he also dared to offer an interpretation of Maxton’s beliefs that was close to his own:
Cold bureaucratic state socialism held no attractions for him. For Maxton, the only test of socialist progress was in the improvement of the individual and thus the community. Greater educational opportunities would not only free exceptional people to realize their exceptional talents but allow common people to make the most of their common humanity, and ordinary people to realize their extraordinary potentials.
In the years to come, especially when he was Prime Minister, the essence of his philosophy remained firmly in place. Like Maxton he was in politics above all to help people to fulfil their potential, and he associated education, training and work as the way in which this would be brought about.
He developed this theme most openly in a lecture he delivered to Charter 88 just before the 1992 election, when he was free more or less to express what he felt. Later he often cited the talk as evidence of a sustained commitment to constitutional reform, but the words are more interesting as a clear evocation of his long-standing views about the relationship between governments, markets and individuals, the contentious theme that was to dominate both his own political career and Tony Blair’s. He stated clearly in the lecture that: ‘The 1979 settlement abandoned responsibilities for individual well-being that government had discharged on behalf of the community because it was now assumed that these could be left to the individual and the marketplace.’
Brown put forward an alternative interpretation: ‘Individual well-being is best advanced by a strong community backed up by active and accountable government.’
He was still a sceptic about markets. He always had his doubts, but soon he would hold markets less critically because they would fill his Treasury’s coffers with much-needed cash. But even then, before the 1992 defeat, in case there was any nervousness about an assertion of active government he made clear: ‘Community need not be a threat to individual liberty but can assist the fulfilment of it … So the growing demand of individuals is that they should be in a position to realize their potential, to bridge the gap between what they are and what they have it in them to become.’
After Labour’s defeat in 1992 the chances of his ever getting the opportunity to achieve his overriding objectives seemed about as slim as they were for Maxton in the 1920s and 1930s. Not surprisingly therefore, the outcome of the 1992 election reinforced Brown’s caution and pragmatism.
For the five years preceding 1992, Brown had been part of Labour’s agonized gyrations over its ‘tax and spend’ policies, an area they all of them entered like walkers with a fear of heights approaching the edge of a cliff.
When he was a youthful shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Brown had vetoed any proposed increases in public spending, knowing that explaining how they would be paid for was an almost impossible and vote-losing task. He was not alone. His successor in that role, Margaret Beckett, was at least as vigilant. ‘If any of my colleagues propose a spending increase I will just say “no”,’ Beckett told journalists as the 1992 election came into view. Beckett was still widely seen as an irresponsible left-winger at the time.
Meanwhile at the top of the party Kinnock and Smith limited precise spending commitments to increases in pensions and child benefit. In his famous shadow budget launched amidst a ceremonial pomp that inadvertently exposed deep insecurity about the party’s standing, Smith had outlined in detail how the commitments would be paid, for, spelling out why most voters would pay less tax. Voters were far from thrilled and the Conservatives had a ball projecting Smith’s shadow budget as the equivalent of the Communist Manifesto.
After the 1992 election Brown concluded that Labour could not enter another election where its plans for taxing and spending were the central issue, or any issue. The conclusion seemed fairly obvious in the light of a fourth election defeat, although it was by no means universally shared within the Labour party.
More important, it was not clear where such a conclusion would lead, and