8 - Saving the World?

Summary

One of the most powerful figures in British post-war politics, Gordon Brown was at the heart of a remarkable period for both the Labour Party and the country as a whole. Although his political destiny was bound up with Tony Blair, Brown's fiercest rival and predecessor as prime minister, Brown remained a personality within the New Labour machine in his own right. While it was Blair who embodied the modernisation of the Labour Party, Brown was the ever-present, and indeed, as this book has demonstrated, the principal figure of the New Labour project. Not only was New Labour based upon Brown's carefully designed model of political economy, so institutionalised was his model that its very arrangements allowed the Chancellor to gradually accumulate the power that could be exercised across Whitehall and into the world.

Although his premiership – the job he prized above all others – quickly unravelled, Gordon Brown was nevertheless a Chancellor distinct from any other. He was, of course, concerned principally with the management of the British economy, and the way in which monetary and fiscal policy was set. Yet whereas many, if not all, of his predecessors had at some stage or another felt restricted by the role, Brown revolutionised it. For Brown, the chancellorship became the means by which his strong moral instinct could address the economic and social injustice and inequality that he saw before him, both at home and abroad in some of the world's poorest nations. While it would be unfair to dismiss Brown's predecessors as dead-eyed economists and number crunchers concerned only with making the finances of the country add up, it quickly became clear that Brown sought to achieve far more than this in his own stewardship of the UK economy. For Brown, both his chancellorship and his premiership represented a challenge as well as an opportunity to not simply navigate Britain through the choppy waters of the global economy, but to apply the principles of his personal politics and economic philosophy in the fight against world poverty.