Moral certainty
Here the Brownites are on comfortable ground. There can be little doubt that by virtue of upbringing, background and whatever else it takes to give a person ‘character’, Brown has it in abundance. He certainly is not given to the worship of celebrity unless, as with Bono, celebrity can be harnessed to the cause of eliminating poverty. Nor does he have a taste for the material things that drive most people to work. Had he followed his father into the clergy, he would undoubtedly have urged his flock, “with all thy getting, get understanding”. Not exactly a message that the Blairites believe will play well in the aspirational set, but one that provides a clue to what we might expect from Brown as prime minister – a sure sense of the difference between right and wrong, with a lashing of austerity thrown into the mix. Austerity, by the way, more in matters personal than in matters relating to the welfare state.
Brown’s personal value system, which places service above material gain, and which assumes that most other people do the same, is not an unmixed blessing, for two reasons. First, his belief that people do not work in order to have bigger houses and better cars and more gadgets is the reason he is willing to raise taxes to incentive-threatening levels. He just does not believe that high marginal tax rates will discourage good people from working hard, and real entrepreneurs from creating businesses and jobs.
Second, he believes, really believes, that all employees of the NHS are good people, whose primary aim in life is to succour the ill. As a consequence, he believes, really believes, that if he sets targets for them to reach, they will strive to do so in an honourable way, rather than game the system so that they can ‘tick the box’ and keep the clipboard wielders off their backs. The idea that these people would leave patients in ambulances rather than admit them to an emergency room, thereby avoiding triggering the countdown to the time limit for stays in A&E, is something he just cannot accept. A charming weakness, actually, but also a very dangerous one in a policymaker.
It is, of course, Brown’s character, his background, his roots in an environment in which doing unto others was so great a part, which creates a problem for those trying to make informed guesses as to how he will discharge his expanded responsibilities. It is no secret that if Brown could have one wish, it would be that poverty, especially child poverty, be eliminated from the world. He might have forgotten to bring the proper jungle wear to maximise photo ops when he visited Africa, but he brought a driving desire to do something for those less fortunate than the rest of us. And some ideas of how to do more than make gestures of concern. Raise the wellbeing of women; debt relief; international efforts to improve accountability and transparency – all ideas that tumble from his fertile imagination, some sensible, some (debt relief that creates moral hazard and loans to unreformed kleptocracies among them) not so sensible. See a problem, devise a programme: that’s pure Brown, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
Brown’s war on poverty is more than a mere moral crusade, if ‘mere’ is the right word in this context. He sees the elimination of poverty and the creation of wealth (in moderate amounts, of course) as a key weapon in the war on terror.
The logic goes something like this. The Palestinian-Israeli dispute is at the root of the problem. (That’s wrong, but let’s follow his logic.) That dispute will be settled only when the Palestinians get their feet on the ladder to prosperity, with jobs for all those men now running around brandishing Kalashnikovs, and those with nothing better to do than shoot rockets from Gaza into Israel. So economic development, the elimination of poverty, and the availability of jobs, social services and education for children, are the route to peace in the Middle East. Poverty no, peace yes, is the chancellor’s slogan, and the reason he has sent Ed Balls on so many trips to Israel and Palestine in the hunt for some way to get the process of economic development underway. How you bring prosperity to a people who dismantle productive greenhouses after receiving them as gifts or who waste half of their human capital by denying women access to jobs, is a question that, so far as I know, Brown has not yet attempted to answer.
