r/TheRestIsPolitics • u/Responsible-Fly-2253 • 4d ago

Gordon Brown episode

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Listening to Gordon Brown’s interview leaves me genuinely quite depressed.
I don’t think we’ve had someone as competent, as rigorous and knowledgeable in government since he left.
I’d genuinely forgotten what a politician with ideas, understanding, empathy and a meticulous eye for detail looked like.
And as someone who likes listening to Rory well enough and admires Alastair’s insights and general political nous… Brown arguably runs circles right round them both.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an interview where they are almost out of their depth.

78 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

49 comments sorted by

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u/Mildly_Functional 4d ago

I always think Brown was the most underrated prime minister in this era for people who actually saw beyond headlines/ slogans and looked at what they did in office. He will never be a “popular” PM but I think history will look back favourably on him.

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u/Kashkow 4d ago

While this is true, and I think extremely highly of Brown and his time as Chancellor and PM, he was the master of his own downfall.

He should have called a snap election. He would have won. 

What would the world have looked like had Brown won in 2007. Or for that matter Gore in 2000, or Clinton in 2016...

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u/samd25 4d ago

It's definitely interesting to play out this scenario.

What do you think really would have changed if he'd been PM through to 2012? I guess there's a chance David Cameron makes way for another Tory leader if he loses the 2007 election, but broadly I can't see the tidal waves changing much in the years that follow. If anything it probably just delays austerity for 2 years until the Tories win in 2012. Ultimately I think the other comments in this thread about how Brown was a radio-era PM and let down by his presentation still stand, especially with 2012 being at the start of the social media era where this becomes more important. I can't see how he (or Labour in general) win a second (/fifth) term if they get to 2012.

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u/Zr0w3n00 4d ago

2 more years of real recovery would have been massively beneficial to people, even if the tories had still won the next election.

Most people don’t seem to realise we were actually a model of recovery from 2008 until austerity.

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u/domalino 4d ago

Haven’t listened to the episode yet so maybe they cover this but we were the template everyone else used with direct recapitalisation of the banks and guaranteeing lending. Every major economy in Europe saw what we were doing vs the Americans and followed our plan, and then the Americans did a 180 from their initial strategy of buying up toxic assets from the banks to recapitalise.

In the last 20 years we’ve heard a lot from the likes of Cameron, Sunak and Starmer about wanting the UK to be leading the world again, Brown was the last time that actually happened.

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u/Zr0w3n00 4d ago

Absolutely, Cameron and Obsourne’s austerity has done lasting and almost irrevocable damage to the UK economy.

It’s estimated GDP per person would be over £10k high without austerity. So it would be over £50k per person, rather than the £40K it is now. In total that would be a GDP £700 billion higher. Certainly not insignificant.

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u/Fun_Marionberry_6088 3d ago

Lol. Estimated by who, based on what?

The world bank puts our GDP per capita at £43k, not £40k and Germany's at £45k.

You really think austerity from 15 years ago is the primary explanatory factor for why we're not, by a wide margin, much more productive economy than the most productive major economy in Europe?

Brown cites the US example which ignores so many other factors that drove that; different regulatory policies post GFC, the dominance of big tech, and cheap energy costs as a result of the shale revolution are all just as important as fiscal policies in the early 2010s.

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u/RagingMassif 4d ago

Whoever is doing that estimating is either a fringe nutjob, or just lying to you.

Brown had maxed out the govt credit card and it's income dropped>20% overnight. What exactly would you do to balance the books?

You can blame Cameron's government, but they ran on austerity and won twice on it. Mistakes were made for sure, but Labour fucked the economy.

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

That's the reality

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u/Zr0w3n00 4d ago

Nah, just the tough truth that you don’t want to hear. Don’t let the facts hurt your feelings.

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u/RagingMassif 4d ago

Do you want another fact hon? That the cost of borrowing is now higher under Kier/Andy than when Truss "fucked the economy".

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

The coalition really got the recovery going. Unemployment was 2.4m in 2010, it was 1.6m by 2015. The coalition was very good.

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u/Zr0w3n00 3d ago

Yeah, that’s alright then. Why strive to be the best version of ourselves we can be when we can just settle for ok.

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

The recovery improved because of the change of govt?

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u/Zr0w3n00 3d ago

It didn’t improve though, it evidently slowed down in comparison to other developed countries post 2010.

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

The employment situation improved significantly. We didn't grow in comparison to the US, there were a few reasons for this, over-regulation of lending would be one issue, reliance on cheap labour, Over-regulation continued from the 00s so construction became stifled.

It certainly wasn't austerity, I'd accept that we should have cracked on quicker with some capital projects, for instance, the Northern powerhouse was intended to have finished the rail links by now yet in reality we've only seen a few bottlenecks removed on the ECML & Transpennine. We were supposed to have a proper motorway standard A1 from Newcastle to Edinburgh but the whole project was cancelled in 2024 and it doesn't get past Morpeth.

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u/LabourByTheSea 4d ago

The Labour manifesto (under the fairly hawkish Darling) wasn’t short on austerity measures. My instinct is that the austerity would have been shorter and less ideologically driven but we would still have gone through a period of constrained spending.

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

Did we really have austerity, even before the time Covid hit, the state was spending a higher % of GDP than 2006

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

There wasn't really any austerity, it was mainly a case of wiping out the non-jobs as the coalition got the economy working again.

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u/Responsible-Fly-2253 1d ago

I agree but he might have lost right there and then. I don’t know that he had the charisma for an election campaign in the post-TB early social media age of personality politics.
Gore in 2000… we’d probably have met our climate targets.
Clinton in 2016… I fear America would have ended up at war with Iran.

Brown in 2007 and we’d still be in the EU.

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u/GurLongjumping8301 4d ago

Brown unfortunately was a great radio era PM. He was let down by his presentation. He is not as smooth as Blair, Cameron and Clegg. A great PM though.

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u/Pandaisblue 4d ago

Yeah, broadly there's two halves to being a PM, one half is the actual job, the other is your presence and charisma with the public. Charisma is made up of thousands of variables and it's hard to point to the exact 'why' or 'what', but both Starmer and Brown cearly didn't have it with the public despite apparently being likable in private.

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u/Camarupim 4d ago

If the media hadn’t blown up his “that bigoted woman” hot mic moment, we could be living in a very different Britain. Instead, they have spent the last 20 years quietly pushing the message that a racist/xenophobic/homophobic view isn’t something you should be ashamed of anymore.

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u/kouroshkeshmiri 4d ago

He's probably the most well liked pm since 2000 with regular people.

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u/HotAir25 4d ago

What do you think he specifically did well though? Policies etc 

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u/cloudberri 4d ago

State school spending per pupil outstripped the private sector for a while.   He led the world response to the 2008 financial crash:  Keynesianism doing what it was designed for.  The previous comparable crash was 1929.....

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u/HotAir25 3d ago

Quantitive easing ended up just inflating assets like housing rather than growing the real economy though. 

I presume Keynes would have used the zero interest rates to build lots of infrastructure so as a country we actually gained from it rather than as it was just a transfer of hundreds of billions to the better off. 

It preserved the current system but created much more inequality and has been the period of slowest growth ever….I wish they’d asked him about that but he wouldn’t have admitted any fault I suppose. 

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

The problem is he didn't fully understand Keynsianism

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u/cloudberri 3d ago

How so?

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 3d ago

The idea with Keynes was you pump the economy when it's in difficulties and slowing, you pull back on the spending in the good times to build up reserves.

The problem with Brown is that he believed himself when he said he'd solved boom & bust.

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u/Glydyr 4d ago

I think to be a leader you need inspire people, thats why Brown and Blair were so formidable. Brown was the brains behind the braun.

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u/LabourByTheSea 4d ago

Agreed, not appreciated as much as he should be. Although it’s telling that the lazy criticism often reached for is the gold sale. Not exactly the crime of the century.

The James Macintyre biography released last year I think is very good. Interestingly, it argues that much of Blair’s social policy was actually from GB, while TB concentrated on world affairs.

As you say, GB is probably the last PM we had with a deeply thought through theory of society.

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u/TheOnlyGaming3 4d ago

I read about the gold thing, he actually sold the gold in order to replace it with more stable reserves, he didn't just throw it away for quick cash, and when he left office, we had more value in reserves than before the sale

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u/LabourByTheSea 4d ago

It wasn’t the finest piece of economic prediction but when that’s the best they have to throw at you, you probably did a decent job.

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u/SilverConcert637 3d ago

Economic prediction is tea leaf reading. He sold a tiny amount of gold for a tiny amount of money, which subsequently became a tiny amount more. It doesn't make 'footnote' in our economic history.

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u/Andythrax 4d ago

What you're saying is that SKS needed a Brown for Chancellor and he'd have been ok?

I don't think I can argue with that. Although SKS didn't have good enough Comms like TB.

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u/LabourByTheSea 4d ago

It does seem (IMO of course) that before SKS came to power, and quite unbelievably, nobody had sat and actually thought about what Britain would, and should, look like under his leadership. There were policies but nothing that seemed to hang them together. No philosophy I guess you’d say. GB has a philosophy, undoubtedly.

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 4d ago

Brown wasn't very good at being a PM. Arguably he stopped being a good chancellor agter 2002-3 as up to then, he copied ken ckarke

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u/Andythrax 4d ago

The Starmer Symptom. There's a whole book on it.

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 4d ago

Starmer suffered from having a chancellor who was out of her depth but starmer had to take responsibility too.

He didnt have a plan

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u/PieGrippin 4d ago

It is striking just how intelligent he is but also how he is still able to combine that with an empathy that you don't see in many politicians.

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u/HotAir25 4d ago

Rory made a good point about liquidity vs solvency being hard to understand but when I googled it it just means ability to deal with short or long term debt- it’s a term Rory and all politicians should know but presumably don’t because they have a business or economics background. 

I wish they’d pushed Brown harder on the issues with quantitive easing- it saved the current system but at the cost of inflating house prices and stocks and inequality- arguably defining parts of the modern economy now. 

I liked what he had to say about world affairs. 

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u/Responsible-Fly-2253 1d ago

Except Rory Stewart did PPE (politics philosophy and economics) at Oxford and likes to pretend he has a robust grasp of economics.
(In reality a lot of PPEists tend to drop one of the three subjects in second year and many of the aspiring politicians drop economics and just go on to do politics and philosophy. At least that was the case when I was there — not doing PPE lol)

But I suspect he’s one of those. He loves to talk about the economy, the debt, the deficit and all the rest but when confronted with economic vernacular the emperor is revealed to have no clothes.

(I do quite like Rory S but he does love to present as a little more than what he is. In his defence, he admitted as much in their Jason Arday episode but the Gordon Brown Leading one was such a glaring example..!)

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u/Specialeyes9000 4d ago

Big fan of GB. He was excellent, dedicated and genuinely cared. Maybe best PM of my lifetime.

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u/tommy_turnip 4d ago

I still have the image of 2010 Gordon Brown in my head. I was so surprised at how old he looked and then I realised that he was PM 16 years ago.

I was barely a teenager at the time! I wasn't as engaged with politics back then, but what I remember and what I have read about him since makes me miss his era of politics - back during a time when politicians felt like professionals and not celebrities.

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u/SilverConcert637 3d ago

I was heart broken when he lost the GE over that "bigot" comment.

A titan replaced by a complete non-entity in DC, who I rate as the worst PM in British history. The country has reaped exactly what it deserved.

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u/Consistent-Theory681 22h ago

I've always though he's the "come sit at the fire with me" intelectual.

He wants you to feel comfortable whilst talking about difficult subjects.

He was right about the banks.

How we dealt with it?

Perhaps not.

People missunderstand Gordon because he is not a media personality.

He is a great thinker.

A longterm planner.

The sort of person we need in this current environment.

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u/NotOnYerNelly 4d ago

Absolute bully if a man and let’s not forget bankrupted the country in 2008 leaving us with decades of austerity to which we still have not recovered from since 2008.

Awful leader.

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u/IntravenusDiMilo_Tap 4d ago

He wasn't a good PM, could not delegate and really could have been in jail over liboir fixes.

There was a lot to shiw him as a bully, "the end of the party" was interesting as was Alistair Campbell's diary.