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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
