The two sides of Brown
By Andrew Rawnsley
LONDON: To his fury, Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, was accused of plagiarising phrases from the speeches of American politicians in the address he gave to his party conference last month in September. That allegation certainly cannot be levelled against the lecture ‘On Liberty’ he delivered to an audience at the University of Westminster. Says one of the Prime Minister’s friends: ‘He wrote it all himself.’ That I believe. The copyright on the title of the Prime Minister’s lecture belongs to John Stuart Mill. But the content and style were clearly all Mr Brown’s own work. Indeed, they couldn’t be anyone else’s work. I can think of no other leading Anglophone politician who could or would deliver such a self-consciously intellectual speech.
Five minutes in and the Prime Minister had already mentioned Milton, Locke, Orwell, Churchill, Voltaire, de Tocqueville, Bolingbroke and American revolutionary Patrick Henry. Gordon Brown is not a Prime Minister to wear his learning lightly. By the time he had completed a historical sweep through liberty and its contentions, he had also managed to name-check Green, Hobson, Hobhouse and various other historians and philosophers, British, French and American. When did a Prime Minister last mention one philosopher in a speech, never mind half a dozen of them?
Gordon Brown was famous for arriving on holiday with a suitcase packed with books. With him, you can be sure that he not only knows the works he is quoting, but he has read them all.
Densely argued and historically referenced, it was an audacious speech to make in an age when many will think that Coke is a reference to a sugary drink and Tawney is a type of owl.
It was a speech to set you thinking both about the arguments and the contradictions of the man making them. His contention was that liberty and toleration are the most important strands of Britain’s story. Our politics have too often forgotten that, so he suggested without quite saying that this was especially true of his predecessor in Number 10. In future, he promised, everything done by government would be subject to a ‘liberty test’.
One thought provoked by this was that the Prime Minister is two people. There is Doctor Brown, the Prime Minister with a PhD, who can wax expertly and eloquently on big philosophical questions, as he did to that university audience.
It was in stark contrast to his party conference speech, which was dismally anti-intellectual with its clumsy assembly of focus-grouped phrases and crude populist slogans.
This Doctor Brown, learned lecturer, exists in the same body as Doc Marten Brown, the political streetfighter with the steel toecaps who tries to bellow and brutalise opponents into submission.
While Doctor Brown surveys the historical sweep, Doc Brown is a brawler who thinks in terms of the next day’s headlines. Listening to cerebral Doctor Brown, you had to pinch yourself to remember that the illiberal and intolerant Doc Brown had ranted to his party conference about ‘British jobs for British workers!’, a slogan that would get a cheer at a conference of the far-right British National party.
The split in the Prime Minister’s personality is reflected in his entourage.
The tacticians in Team Brown are obsessed with trying to maximise every ounce of advantage from the daily firefight with their opponents and the media. The Prime Minister’s more strategically minded advisers reckon that his premiership will only have a long-term future if they plan for the long term. The debacle over an early election has been blamed on the tactical tendency in the Brown camp and the Brown brain. It seems to have strengthened the hand of those around him who want him to think and act more strategically.
The charge that he bottled the election hurt him less than the accusation that it has revealed that he lacks a vision for Britain.
This speech was a response to that charge. The word ‘relaunch’ has been banned in Downing Street. It has too many echoes of the hapless days of John Major, the last Conservative PM. But there is clearly an effort to try to regain the initiative and reclaim some of Gordon Brown’s reputation as a leader with a serious and long-term purpose.‘It’s an important indicator that he’s thinking strategically rather than tactically,’ contends one of his allies. Some will say that this talk of strategy is actually just another tactic, a tactic designed to get him through the criticism that he has no strategy.
Other sceptics will argue that his government cannot hope to pass any ‘liberty test’ when it is still pressing ahead with the introduction of identity cards and hoping to double from 28 days the time that terror suspects can be held without charge.
In his late period at Number 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair only made speeches on liberty in order to argue that freedoms had to be surrendered. So it was refreshing to hear his successor arguing the case for liberty in principle.
As for practice, he is going to surrender some important prerogatives wielded by the Prime Minister under the cloak of the crown. He seems serious about curbing the number of agencies with the power to force their way into private homes. It’s a gain for transparency that the government will abandon plans to restrict media access to coroners’ courts.
Anti-terrorism legislation has been used in ways for which it was never intended by MPs: to arrest peaceful and legitimate protesters. Mr Brown should be commended if he puts an end to that. A British bill of rights could be big stuff. This is such a large, contentious and complex undertaking that it will not be completed before the next election. There is nothing short-termist about that.
About identity cards, he says there will be a ‘continuing debate’. You bet there will, Prime Minister, as there will be about extending detention without charge. He has a lot of work to do to persuade many of his backbenchers, never mind the country, that either should be included in ‘the next chapter of British liberty’. He will be judged as a Prime Minister not by his grasp of history, but what he does to the country’s future.—Dawn/The Observer News Service
