In times of crisis, there is one person to whom the left still turns for guidance.
More than a decade and a half after leaving government, Gordon Brown has mellowed into the Labour party’s favourite wise elder; one who has never disappointed the faithful by going off to make a ton of money, remaining quietly committed to public service and deeply engaged with the world’s knottier problems. Having successfully led the global response to the financial crash of 2008, and advocated powerfully during the pandemic for global cooperation against the virus, he was never going to simply sit back and shrug as the world spiralled into conflict and chaos under Donald Trump.
But still, I thought, as I opened his latest book on the collapse of the old world order, it’s barely three years since his last tome on fixing the general mess (Permacrisis, written with the economists Mohammed El-Erian and Michael Spence). Does he really have anything new to say, or is this prolific output born mostly out of frustration that the world has seemingly stopped listening?
A bit of both, it turns out. The new twist involves some polling commissioned to back Brown’s hunch that deep down voters actually crave a return to the more stable, orderly, benevolent world of the 2000s, despite voting repeatedly for the opposite. But to reach this research, readers must first wade through multiple chapters ramming home once again what’s wrong with the world, which will have many readers nodding in agreement without telling them much they didn’t already know. What could have been a deep, rich essay thus becomes a book: essentially a sermon on the moral failings of neoliberalism, ending in a rousing hymn to hope, echoing both the rhythm of his best party conference speeches and the broad themes of Andy Burnham’s first few weeks in power. (So much so, indeed, that you wonder how much the two men have been talking lately.)
What is new for Brown, however, is that this book is preoccupied less with economics than with the argument that collapsing civic ties – the fact that we’re less likely now than a generation ago to be part of a club, trade union, church or community group – have helped undermine “the very idea that we are all in this together, that there are common causes worth fighting for”.
What could be just another nostalgic, even reactionary, argument for a bygone age when everyone knew their neighbours is tempered by Brown’s willingness to acknowledge that much of this togetherness was built on the unpaid labour of women stuck at home. But it’s also brought up to date by his argument that this fraying of social bonds – especially in towns fallen on hard times, now leaning towards populist politicians – is actively connected to fragmentation and the retreat from multilateralism on the world stage. It’s time, he argues, to stop treating breakdown at home and breakup abroad as separate phenomena.
Beating populism obviously means tackling the economic grievances – the disappearing jobs and hollowed-out high streets – on which it feeds in post-industrial communities across the US and Europe. Yet the general rolling chaos that populists tend to unleash on the world stage makes it actively harder for everyone else to build stable and prosperous economies, creating a vicious circle of decline.
Brown’s answer is to build a virtuous circle instead, from the ground up. Strengthening civic ties should make people feel less lonely, more secure and trusting, and thus hopefully more relaxed about their governments acting generously and collaboratively at an international level. That, of course, is key to tackling everything from the climate crisis, to global poverty, to forming the kind of alliances with other middle-ranking powers that might prevent a country like the UK being totally steamrollered in a standoff between the US and China. At least, that’s the theory.
The idea that dying high streets at home and rogue superpowers overseas are different threads of the same great unravelling does at least create a clear narrative hook on which a new Labour prime minister can hang lots of otherwise seemingly disparate ideas, and seek political buy-in for them both in the “red wall” and among big-city liberals. There’s material here too for a foreign secretary capable – as Ed Miliband arguably is – of thinking big and acting local, connecting foreign policy much more closely to progress at home. But just how plausible is it?
Enter the new polling, of 32,000 people across 20 developed countries, from Argentina to the UK to South Korea. It distinguishes between “zero sum” thinkers – people who believe they can only win if others lose, colouring their attitudes to everything from trade to immigration – and a more generous “civic core”, open to some compromise for the greater good, on whom progressive governments depend. In the UK, at least, the latter group still outweighs the former, with a significant group lying between the two that Brown reckons could be persuaded to heed the better angels of their natures.
He then calculates the impact of measures like reducing economic grievances, or increasing people’s face-to-face interaction with others from different religious or racial backgrounds, on propensity to vote for populists. To cut a long story short: deploy all the virtuous circle measures together, and with luck (and time), you might have a potent means of tackling populism from the ground up.
Rather less convincing, however, is his formula for restoring the international rules-based order, starting with a new universal charter to which responsible countries could sign up. We already have plenty of grand statements of intent and bodies to enforce them, from the international criminal court to the Paris climate change accords: what’s missing is governments prepared to actually stick to the rules.
Unusually for Brown, the best of this book isn’t in the big-picture thinking on globalisation or the rise of China, but in lessons learned at neighbourhood level. After a life spent trying to push through huge decisions, he writes, only recently has he begun thinking that he should have started small.
One obvious hurdle is that the neighbourly civic engagement he favours is of the decidedly muscular, worthy kind. The clubs Brown sees as capable of teaching “active citizenship” are those that demand the most time and effort from volunteers – and they have died out. Just signing up for fun times doesn’t count. Like the good son of the manse he is, Brown personally practises what he preaches in Kirkcaldy, where he is heavily engaged with local charities. I’m not sure your average Briton, spending their downtime from work scrolling exhaustedly on the sofa, will feel the same.
Then again Brown does say that cynicism like mine is part of the problem; that if liberal politics is to compete with demagogues, it can’t simply confine itself to the art of the possible – it must “show it can make the desirable possible”. Even if, just occasionally, that sounds like wishful thinking.
