He will not appreciate the comparison, but Gordon Brown may be becoming the Jimmy Carter of British politics. The first thing anyone ever says about Carter is that he was one of America’s worst presidents. They then go on to say that he is nevertheless America’s best former-president. Brown seems to be on a similar trajectory on the other side of the Atlantic.
Though he undoubtedly had his good moments at Number 10, Brown was not — let us just agree to this and say no more — a good prime minister. But after much licking of personal wounds, he has re-emerged from the darkness of the defeat of 2010. As a result, in his 60s, he may slowly be turning into the kind of statesman he looked like becoming when he was in his 30s. In my view, he should reverse his decision to leave the Commons. His country — whether it is Scotland or Britain — needs him. Brown’s speech last week in an adjournment debate on Scotland and the union is one of the best things he has done in ages. It is frustrating that it may have been his last speech at Westminster, because it ought to become a set text for our times.
The speech may not have the impact or the glamour that his somewhat over-hyped eve-of-referendum speeches had in Scotland back in September. But Brown’s readiness last week to face up to the immense constitutional dangers that now face the United Kingdom made the speech one of the most honest — and certainly one of the most important — he has ever made. No one who thinks carefully about the options in British politics over the coming decade can afford to ignore the many interconnected things Brown said. The internal cohesion of the United Kingdom is visibly weakening. Its political system is unfair and is widely perceived as such. The institutional and cultural textures of its earlier solidarity are fraying and being foolishly destroyed.
As a result, the nations of the UK are moving in different directions. There is something both incredible and irresponsible about the general casualness within which this process is occurring.
The real power of Brown’s speech is its perception that there is not much time left if anything is to be done to prevent a break-up. The case for the union of the nations — for which there is still, after all, a majority in all parts of the UK — is being squandered before our very eyes by mutually reinforcing bad behaviour in England and Scotland alike, of which William Hague’s English votes plan this week was merely the latest example.
It is clear that some on the Right and the Left do not really care where this leads. But unless Britain gives real and responsible priority to the task of reforming and renegotiating the union as a whole, not on a bilateral or unilateral basis, there soon may not be a union to reform or renegotiate at all. This was Brown’s Speak for the England moment.
Brown put the case for urgent action better, more frankly and with greater authority than anyone else has yet done or probably could. This is not to pretend that his speech was flawless, because it was not. Nor is it to say that his argument will prevail, although it should. It is not even to say that Brown has suddenly rediscovered the agenda-shaping skills he honed as a young MP and as shadow chancellor. His speech was made on the evening that a poll predicted the almost total rout of Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the hands of the nationalists in May.
Brown may be right, but not enough Scots are listening any more. In some respects his is a voice in the wilderness, which is why he should consider running again in May.
There are two principal reasons why not enough people are listening to his argument. The first is the fashionable conceit that the two main UK parties have nothing significant to say about the modern world and that there is no difference between them anyway. Both parts of this claim are false. But it means that, when Brown speaks, many hear only the old politics.
Labour’s failure is that it does not provide a clear and plausible account of what it would actually do in government. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP) provides a vehicle, doors invitingly open and the motor revved and purring, for such jaundiced voters to hop aboard. The SNP’s recurrent claim that Labour and the Conservatives are joined at the hip — a pair of indistinguishable English parties — is an astonishing audacity. It has no connection to reality. But it is believed — look at the polls. The nationalists have made the sale, that is for sure and it is both deeply impressive and deeply scary.
The other underlying reason is the wider Labour failure to impress either its own loyalists or its rivals that it is a plausible government in waiting. Here, the buck stops with Ed Miliband. Labour’s fundamental failure is not really that it is too Rright-wing or too Left-wing. Its failure is that it does not provide a clear and plausible account of what it would actually do in office as a government.
Whether the issue is business, tuition fees, the National Health Service or immigration, Labour takes a stance — whether it is a good one or a bad one is not really the point — and then fails to follow through. The result is uncertainty, which, as an election nears, is the most corrosive of all problems for an opposition party.
In this context, the fracturing of the UK, of which Brown spoke so eloquently, is merely one among many issues on which Miliband’s failures of leadership must take some of the responsibility. But it is the one that counts in Scotland.
It is not Miliband’s fault that, like many Londoners, he has little feel for Scotland or Wales. But it is his fault that he has done far too little for far too long to focus on the things that might help him overcome his vulnerability.
Labour’s credibility in Scotland rests on whether it is a plausible government in waiting. Every uncertainty about Labour undermines that. If Scots believe that Labour will form a government, the Labour vote will remain reasonably solid. If they do not then they will continue to desert Labour for a party that says it will stand up for Scotland against the Conservatives. The result will be an existential battle for Britain of the kind that Brown rightly fears.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
