3 - Capitalising upon Globalisation

Summary

Faced with the both the opportunities and challenges of globalisation, Gordon Brown deemed it necessary to create what he would term a ‘new economic architecture’: a set of arrangements that would enable Britain to withstand the pressures and experience the benefits of this new global economy. This carefully calibrated model of political economy would provide Brown with the framework that he hoped would deliver a sustained assault on Britain's continuing economic underperformance and widening social inequality. This, however, was not simply a British model of political economy. Its blueprint would enable Brown to embark upon his personal crusade to address the matter of global poverty too, and the Chancellor set about establishing a clear line of transmission between the two previously separate spheres of domestic and international policymaking.

The focus of this chapter is upon those three central areas of domestic policy that Gordon Brown attempted to export into the realm of international development: (1) macroeconomic policy, (2) business, and (3) welfare. For Brown, these core areas of domestic policy were animated and driven by the strategic context of globalisation (mapped out in the previous chapter) and reconfigured accordingly. Crucially, however, for Brown, these policies could no longer be thought of in simply the domestic or national sense. Globalisation had resulted in a blurring between ‘the domestic’ and ‘the international’, necessitating the same type of ‘global thinking’ applied to one sphere as to the other. In this respect, globalisation provided Gordon Brown with a golden opportunity not simply to concern himself with matters at home (as important as these were to the Chancellor), but also to fulfil a personal desire to address issues concerning global poverty, debt and disease. This chapter therefore explores the hand of Brown in the design of these policies as they appeared in the British context, and highlights those themes and motifs that would reappear in New Labour's international development policies examined in much greater detail later in this book.