In Praise of Gordon Brown
Britain's former PM has shown his committent to ending child poverty since leaving politics, but could he have done things differently when in power?
Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House this morning, on the subject of The Multibank, the charity he has established to help poor children and their families.
As it says on their website,
‘A Multibank is a clothes, bedding, baby, hygiene toy and furniture bank all rolled into one. The idea is simple: companies have the surplus goods people need and local charities know the people who need them. The Multibank initiative connects the two to reduce the effects of poverty, enable children to access opportunities while contributing to a sustainable economy.’
What a brilliant way to spend his time post-politics, leveraging his reputation and contacts from his time in government to get corporations (who can easily afford it) to donate goods to relieve the acute poverty of thousands of families in dire need.
He talks of when he was growing up in the small Scottish town of Kircaldy in the 1950s and 60s: while there was terrible poverty, he says, much of it was pensioner poverty. The problem now is child poverty.
No older person should have to live in penury obviously, but child poverty inevitably does much more harm. A safe, secure, loving childhood is the key to creating content, fulfilled and successful adults. Harm done in the early years is often impossible to reverse, and can have significant ongoing costs to society.
Brown went on to remind us that,
‘the biggest cause of hospital admissions for under tens is dental decay’
His charity is ensuring that families, the poorest of which, when faced with a choice of buying food for their kids or toothpaste, are obviously going to choose the former, have access to both.
Soap and shampoo are other priorities: many poor children are avoiding going to school because of the obvious stigma attached to being unwashed and smelly. As Brown says,
‘kids are ostracised at school because they are not clean’
He goes on to point out how, historically, the cause of high levels of child poverty was unemployment. Today it is low pay. Their parents have jobs, but they still can’t afford to buy the essentials necessary to send their kids to school clean, and in clothes appropriate for the winter conditions.
How is this possible? Britain is the sixth wealthiest nation on the planet. Yet, in the year to March 2024, 655,000 households were obliged to use a foodbank for the first time. Yes, poverty has always existed. But in my lifetime - I was born 1964 - there has never been a period when it has worsened as rapidly as it has in recent years.
So what has gone wrong?
Clearly Britain has endured an extended period of economic mismanagement: the previous govenment’s policy of austerity is central to this. Austerity doesn’t just have an impact on people who previously took advantage of state-funded services, now cut. It has an enduring impact on the wider economy, which can take years to reverse.
One of the key causes of Britain’s economic woes is lack of investment. As the economist J.M.Keynes taught us nearly a century ago, when, after an economic slump, the private sector becomes risk averse and stops investing, it is essential that the state step in to offset the investment shortfall, otherwise the economy will not recover.
The 2008 financial crisis was followed by what economists now term The Great Recession. But rather than follow Keynes’ prescription, in Britain we did the reverse: we compounded the lack of private sector investment by cutting public sector investment. One consequence is that despite recent wage growth, average earnings in Britain are still below pre-2008 levels in real terms.
In the United States, the Obama administration did follow Keynes’ advice. This largely explains why the US economy has done so much better (at least according to conventional measures) than that of the UK.
Of course, it’s so much easier to set up a charity to mitigate the worst effects of economic mismanagement, than it is to run the economy so as to avoid those negative impacts in the first place.
For what it’s worth 14 years on, I don’t think George Osborne and David Cameron believed for one minute that their programme of austerity would turn the UK economy around. They saw an opportunity to make progress in respect of their ideological fetish to cut public spending and shrink the state.
But Gordon Brown must also take some responsibilty. While the story peddled by Cameron and Osborne - that it was Labour profligacy that caused Britain’s economic problems post-2008 - is now accepted as politically brilliant, but entirely untrue; Brown was Britain’s Finance Minister for a decade in the run up to the financial crisis.
For ten years he attended all the meetings of the world’s top finance ministers and was welcomed to Davos to address the great and the good of the global economy. He was one of the key people running the economy in the decade preceding the greatest economic crisis in nearly a century, and neither he, nor his fellow finance ministers, saw it coming. Or did they?
We may never find out. Brown, Tony Blair and the New Labour government rode a wave of economic growth and stability that enabled them to deliver on their social objectives (NHS, school building, Surestart). But that wave was a product of easy credit, and an enormous and unprecedentedly complex (private) debt bubble that would, like all bubbles, burst, with serious consequences for the real economy. It was a bubble that they did nothing to prevent.
That process is still unwinding, with the consequence of blighted lives for far too many children.
Brown is to be applauded for his interventions since he left politics, and for using his clout to improve the lot of the poorest in society through The Multibank. His committment to ending child poverty is unwavering. But he must know that while charitable efforts can make a huge difference to the lives of some poor children, many others will slip through the net. And the danger of relying almost exclusively on charitable interventions is that we become used to the idea that charity is the only solution.
Brown is still fighting the good fight, but there will always be a voice in my head saying: could he not have done more when he was in government to prevent the sequence of economic events that have unfolded over the last two decades?
If you can afford it, why not join me in making a donation to support the work of The Multibank?
The economist J.M. Keynes, referenced above, is the subject of my historical novel, Maynards’ War, which is now being serialised on my other subsack, The Bloomsbury Trilogy. If you’re insterested in Keynes, The Great War, or that fascinating group of friends known as The Bloomsbury Group, why not susbscribe?
Charity… such as food banks … is what the rich give to the deserving poor. Solidarity, and adequately funded state services, is what we share among ourselves.