Think global
Gordon Brown’s vision for a more hopeful future is passionate, informed and articulate, if over technical at times, writes Joyce Mcmillan
Gordon Brown celebrated his 70th birthday earlier this year; but to judge by the breadth, detail, and dynamism of his latest book, his energy remains undiminished, as does his passion for using the powers of government to create a more just and morally sustainable world.
A decade on from the end of his illstarred period as UK Prime Minister, he remains defined in the public mind both by the perceived failure of that premiership, and – in Scotland – by his subsequent diehard defence of the Union, in increasingly Tory and Brexit-ridden times.
The truth about Brown, though, is that he is one of a small but growing band of 21st century politicians whose focus has long since moved beyond the powers and possibilities of national government, towards the range of global issues highlighted in this book. In his preface, he refers to the world’s “ungoverned spaces”; not only those failed states where national governments have broken down, but those areas of global and transnational activity where no effective governance has ever yet existed. These areas, he says, include “the entire global environment – polluted oceans, desiccated forests and fast-expanding deserts. They span the global financial system, as illicit flows of money facilitate the looting of public coffers. And they include the world’s thermonuclear safety regime, ever more vulnerable to accidents and manipulation.”
And so begins Brown’s forensic examination of seven areas where global reform and action are essential, if our world is to survive the coming century. The succeeding chapters cover the future of global health and pandemic prevention, economic recovery, the potential for a global Green New Deal, the urgent need to deliver education to every child, the reform and upgrading of global humanitarian responses, the abolition of tax havens and the massive looting of global wealth by those already rich, and the elimination of nuclear weapons. by Gordon Brown Simon & Schuster, 512pp, £25
Sometimes, the sheer detail and technical complexity of Brown’s proposals defeats even the interested reader; the technical density of his chapter on economic reconstruction, for example, raises questions about who the likely audience for this book might be.
Yet Brown’s prose is never less than lucid and energetic, and some of his chapters – notably on the imperative of education, and on the humanitarian challenge of the coming decades – are as accessible as they are interesting and challenging. Towards the end of the book – where Brown engages, in moving and thoughtful style, with his own failures of narrative and persuasion as Prime Minister, and with the idea that government can no longer deliver change without the support of powerful social movements – it occurred to me that there is one other active Scottish politician who would doubtless share almost every