Inside Gordon Brown's head

During the past forty years, Gordon Brown has been on a personal political odyssey, abandoning the ideas of the mainstream Scottish Labour Party and its socialist heritage. In their place, Brown has embraced the liberalism and moral political economy of Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, whose moral sentiments have moved him much closer to the values first learnt from his parents during his Kirkcaldy childhood. The constant element throughout this political and philosophical journey has been Brown’s moral sense, and commitment to politics as a moral duty.

Gordon Brown’s political philosophy to date can be best understood as comprising four distinct stages. The first phase, characterised by ethical socialism, lasted from Brown’s childhood years until his election as a Westminster MP in June 1983. During his formative years, the Brown family’s politics were, above all, personal, moral and religious. As Brown told the 2006 Labour Party conference, while his father was a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, ‘His motivation was not theological but compassion’. Indeed, Brown’s father was ‘more of a social Christian than a fundamentalist’.

The specific values taught to Brown by his parents were ‘duty, responsibility, and respect for others’, allied to a belief in ‘honesty and hard work, and that the things that matter had to be worked for’. This moral sense and the ethical dimension of politics have been central to Brown’s philosophy for the whole of his adult life. His parents taught Brown that ‘each of us should live by a moral compass’, and by ‘a simple faith with a fundamental optimism’.

Therefore, like the English ethical socialists, Brown has believed in the power of moral character, inspired by the key moral sentiments, to perfect a person and ennoble a nation. Brown has defined his British Way of modernisation in terms of the moral character and particular qualities of the British people.

During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Gordon Brown’s political ideas were located in the mainstream of the Scottish Labour Party. His politics were couched in impeccably socialist terms, expressed in a commitment to community democracy, a planned economy and the empowerment of workers. He identified capitalism as the cause of Scotland’s economic and social problems, rejecting the alternative explanations of national suppression and London mismanagement, although Brown claimed in the The Red Paper on Scotland (1975) that ‘we have had our share of both’. For Brown, in the mid-1970s the way forward for the Labour movement in Scotland lay in the creation of ‘a socialist society, a coherent strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism’.

At this juncture, Brown demonstrated his commitment to a gradualist, parliamentary socialism, rather than to any more radical form of political organisation. The most significant historical figure for his socialism was James Maxton, who served as the Independent Labour Party MP for the Glaswegian constituency of Bridgeton from the 1922 General Election until his death in July 1946.

Maxton developed the notion of the ‘the third alternative’ to either capitalism or economic and social collapse. Maxton’s idea would secure political power in an evolutionary manner by a strengthening of the trades unions and co-operative movement.

The second phase in the evolution of Brown’s political philosophy lasted from his election to Westminster until the Labour Party’s fourth consecutive General Election defeat in April 1992. The key feature of this second phase was Brown’s commitment to a parliamentary and supply-side socialism. Brown’s alternative to Thatcherism would be a technocratic, state-led industrial modernisation programme.

Supply-side socialism underpinned the Labour Party’s 1992 General Election campaign and manifesto. It delivered electoral failure. If the Labour Party was ever to govern Britain again, Brown realised a major review was called for, one that would not only be confined to policy and strategy, but would also embrace the ideology of the Labour Party.

At this juncture, in recruiting Ed Balls as his personal economic adviser, Brown abandoned supply-side socialism in favour of an alternative economic strategy based upon a supply-side liberalism that embraced the liberalised financial markets of the City of London.

The key tenets of supply-side liberalism were market liberalisation and deregulation, and an unshakeable faith in individual entrepreneurial initiative exercised through the discovery process of competition and risk-taking in open markets as the prime agency of innovation and social change.

From the November 1992 victory of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, Brown learnt the importance of appealing to the new affluent middle-class, and identified the central importance of globalisation for economic policy.

Brown’s political philosophy had come to terms with Thatcherism by embracing many of its key assumptions, including the devolution of power to corporations and the individual as consumer and entrepreneur, rather than as citizen.

The fourth phase began with the Labour party election victory in 1997, and was facilitated by the lack of crises Brown faced.During this phase of his philosophical journey, Brown has abandoned the socialist tradition within the Labour Party’s history of thought in favour of the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment in general, and the moral sentiments of Adam Smith in particular.

Like Thatcher, Brown’s project is firmly rooted in Smith’s moral sentiments. However, in the case of Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph, their harnessing of conservatism to liberalism was a genuine messianic conversion. In the case of Gordon Brown, he has simply turned to the philosophy of Adam Smith, a fellow Langtonian, from the ‘Lang Toun’ or ‘long town’ of Kirkcaldy.

Thatcherism focused upon Smith’s invisible hand of the pursuit of individual self-interest as the key to the restoration of an enterprise culture and the creation of a property-owning, share-owning popular capitalism. Brown has focused upon The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Smith’s ‘helping hand’ that matched the invisible hand of his ‘wealth of nations’. Brown has sought to emphasise Smith’s selflessness, in contrast to Thatcherism’s self-interested individualism.

In an attempt to reclaim Adam Smith’s work from the New Right, on the 25 April 2002, Brown chaired an ‘Enlightenment Series’ lecture at Edinburgh University. He invited the audience to contemplate whether Adam Smith would have felt more at home with the left-of-centre Smith Institute (named after the late John Smith MP) or the right-of-centre Adam Smith Institute.

That question has been duly answered by Brown’s fellow Scot, Professor Iain McLean of Oxford University, who has set out the case for Adam Smith to be reclaimed by the Left as a radical and an egalitarian. In developing his thesis, McLean has argued that the importance of Adam Smith’s Scottishness has been understated, and that his radical egalitarianism was rooted in the Scotland that he grew up in.

McLean has contended that ‘what we might call a social-democratic reading is truest of all to the historical Adam Smith’. It is superior to the New Right’s libertarian conservative interpretation because that ‘does not acknowledge the depth of Smith’s analysis of market failure, nor of his case for redistributive taxation’. At the root of both Smith and Brown’s philosophy is their sympathetic liberalism, and a belief in human beings’ possession of an innate moral sense.

Another vital philosophical reference point for the calibration of Brown’s moral compass has been the work of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks’ thesis about the moral dimension of politics and the market economy has resonated increasingly powerfully with Brown’s sense of moral duty.

For Sacks, it is evident that social order has failed and has delivered ‘social disorder’. The alternative is to restore a liberal order and a civil society resting on covenantal moral relationships brought about by families, friends and citizens rather than governments. Salvation lies in a re-moralisation of society through ‘a politics of hope’ that will develop ‘a public language of shared values rather than private claims’ to enable people to identify the goods which we hold in common.

The world of self-interested individualism, where morality is privatised and relationships defined in terms of contracts and vested interests, must be rejected. It must be replaced with a stronger recognition by society of the importance of covenantal obligations, where a moral component is exercised through loyalty and fidelity to one’s family, friends and community, and the voluntary associations which constitute the basis of civil society.

This is precisely what Gordon Brown’s British Way of politics is attempting domestically, and his global New Deal for poverty promises internationally. By drawing upon the insights of Enlightenment thinkers, Brown is seeking to expose the moral dimensions of contemporary markets and to expose the moral sentiments that can help create a more humane world.

For Gordon Brown, the key to giving further effect to the moral sentiments of Adam Smith’s ‘helping hand’ and Jonathan Sacks’ ‘politics of hope’ is the restoration of civic society. Brown’s childhood in Kirkcaldy taught him the value of the ‘network of civic society’, how a town with strong community and voluntary organisations at its heart could make people ‘feel they belonged and, in turn, could contribute, as part of an intricate network of trust, recognition and obligation’.

The free and co-operative association in civic society which Brown wishes to promote is based upon the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers’ conception of ‘moral sense’, ‘a set of moral sentiments of dispositions that all human beings possess in common’, namely human sociability as ‘a shared feeling of mutual sympathy’. In Brown’s sympathetic liberalism, one of the key functions of civic society is to impose limits upon markets. Here, Brown has cited Michael Sandel’s identification of the ‘moral limits of markets’ — ‘the dimensions of life that lie beyond consent, in the moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy’.

Brown’s vision of civic society sits very uneasily with the emphasis on competition and the pursuit of risk, profit and innovation in liberalised markets at the heart of the British model of political economy. This has encouraged active and contractual individual entrepreneurship and consumerism. At the same time, civic society is difficult to reconcile, and to a significant degree contradicts, the Treasury’s nationalisation of policy design and resource allocation in England, through the biennial Spending Reviews and Public Service Agreements, which have actively discouraged covenantal citizenship.

As Gordon Brown’s political beliefs have become increasingly distant from the traditional ideas of the Labour Party, it has moved ever closer to the ideological foundations of contemporary neo-conservatism. When Brown gave the first Donald Dewar memorial lecture, he cited the prominent conservative commentator, David Brooks. That Brown should have chosen to cite a commentator from the right in a memorial lecture to an eminent colleague and friend from the left was in itself extraordinary. However, the choice of Brooks was particularly interesting.

Brooks too had been on the liberal left of American politics until April 1983, when he had participated in a television debate with Milton Friedman. As Brooks later recalled, this encounter with Friedman was a cathartic moment in his conversion to the political ideology of the right. Brown’s intellectual conversion may not have been as sudden as Brooks’, but he too appears to have undertaken an equally significant personal philosophical journey.

Brown also has cited extensively the work of the American conservative philosopher, James Q. Wilson, who has explored the four aspects of the moral sense, ‘sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty’. It is these which have informed the principles of Brown’s own personal ‘moral compass’: ‘to do my best and to work hard but to treat everyone equally, to respect others, to tell the truth, to take responsibility’, and also to understand that ‘for every opportunity there was an obligation, for every demand a duty, for every chance given, a contribution to be made’. Brown has asserted that Wilson has described the moral sense ‘so brilliantly’.

What will surprise Labour Party MPs and members in particular is that Brown has decided to align his personal moral compass with reference to the ideas of a man so intimately connected with the American Right. These links are reflected not only in Wilson’s position as Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, California, but also his role as the Chairman of Academic Advisors to the free market American Enterprise Institute. In awarding Wilson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in July 2003, George W. Bush described Wilson as ‘the most influential political scientist in America since the White House was home to Professor Woodrow Wilson’.

Wilson’s purpose has been ‘to help people recover the confidence with which they once spoke about virtue and morality’. This means engaging in an age-old war, ‘a cultural war, a war about values’. In this respect, Brown has noted how the Cold War was fought and won not only with military and intelligence weaponry but also through ‘a cultural Cold War — a Cold War of ideas and values’. This was fought ‘not just through governments but through foundations, trusts, civil society and civic organisations’. It is this cultural war for hearts and minds that Gordon Brown has identified as the philosophical cornerstone of the foreign policy of the future Gordon Brown, and its battle of ideas with extremist terrorism.

When Gordon Brown commenced his political career his political philosophy and moral compass were firmly aligned with ethical socialism and the development of a withering critique of capitalism. As prime minister, Brown’s political beliefs now articulate an equally committed moral defence of the market.

Simon Lee, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Department of Politics and International Studies, Hull University, s.d.lee@hull.ac.uk, is author of ‘Best for Britain? The Politics and Legacy of Gordon Brown’ (Oxford: OneWorld, 2007).