BECOMING GORDON BROWN
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Gordon Brown - quite literary By Mitchell Miller and Johnny Rodger The Red Paper on Scotland, 1975 The Politics of Nationalism and Devolution, 1980 Scotland:The Real Divide – Poverty and Deprivation in Scotland, 1983 Maxton, 1986-2002 John Smith: Life and Soul of the Party, 1994 New Scotland, New Britain, 1999 Global Europe: full employment Europe 2005 A ‘text’ is woven, as are webs, and Gordon Brown has been at the centre of both. Brown’s political capital is invested in a latticework of adherents marbled throughout Scottish (and to some extent English) public life. If this is a secret, it’s a badly kept one; less frequently discussed is our Chancellor’s literary career, having generated a reading list of nine books with his name on the spine. Do these represent some residual attraction to his pre-parliamentary preoccupations with labour (and Labour) history? A matter of keeping the academic hand in – or is there at work some intuitive understanding of the document’s political role in Scottish history that has led Brown to leave so many of his own? In a country where, historically speaking, politics has failed so spectacularly to secure the state and status of the people, the text and the web have worked in concert to mitigate London’s vampiric advances; the Solemn League and Covenant and the Conventicles; Lord Stair’s The Institutions of the Law of Scotland and its Advocates, or Das Kapital and The Scottish Labour Party. Brown’s wielding of his pen as a political tool has been done with some similarly very specific aims, against some specific threats, and with some considerable subtlety. David Stenhouse has pointed to Brown’s grounding and involvement in the wider Scottish and indeed European intellectual life, with literary figures like Hamish Henderson and Owen Dudley Edwards bearing influence; and of the Red Paper Stenhouse says ‘the influence behind all this was Gramsci, the Italian socialist thinker’. While some of Brown’s generation, like Robin Cook, believed that the traditional leftist soapbox techniques – argument and debate – could win the way forward to a rejuvenation of Labour politics, Brown used his writing to cultivate supporters and to furnish them with the intellectual tools to fight specific battles. Thus we find that Brown addresses the three great challenges presented to
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the Labour Party – from both the inside and out – in the 70s to 90s. On the inside he faces down the Militant, extra-parliamentarian and allegedly Trotskyite challenge to the moderates, and on the external front he provides the faithful with the tools for combating both Thatcherism and nationalism. Brown’s editorship of The Red Paper on Scotland (1975) can be fitted to this pattern, being published at a point of crisis for Scottish Labour – except the threat came not from the longitude but the latitude in the form of the Scottish Nationalist Party. Labour were down, the Nats were up, the economy was in crisis; enter the Edinburgh Uni whiz-kid and chums to reinterpret the flickerings on the cave wall. The Red Paper on Scotland, (1975) Gordon Brown (ed), Edinburgh University Press. This was in fact the second Red Paper, (the first being 1970’s Red Paper on Education) the spectre of the SNP leading to a reorientation of socialist debate from the technocratic to the national. The book’s contributors are built around a unionist core that give a cautious endorsement to limited Home Rule (a Labour policy that had previously been safely buried with R. B. Cunningham-Grahame) but seem doctrinally terrified of a ‘slippery path’ to independence. A smatter of Nationalists (Tom Nairn and Owen Dudley Edwards being the heavyweights in this camp) function as antibodies within the Labour Kirk (Jim Sillars’ contribution on land reform comes long before his famous defection), but it is this core group of Ronald Young, John Foster, Ray Burnett and John McGrath who, tellingly, steer the anthology into a Stuka-dive against the ranks of the Scottish National Party, their remit to cast the SNP as ‘no place for a socialist’. In doing so no corpse was too mouldy to disinter: ‘Can a socialist really justify his membership of the SNP’ asks ‘Socrates’ Burnett, swaddled tightly in his Red Flag, ‘and yet at the same time stand with John MacLean and say “I have squared my conduct with my intellect”?’ Clearly, dialectical materialism need not mean that romance is dead; but we do not remain misty eyed for long as The Red Paper gamely tries to land the rabbit punch that will knock the SNP out of the constitutional ring. The cunning of it is that as an anthology encompassing various shades of opinion, the match appears to be boxing when it is actually a
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form of wrestling. Fixed or not, the game was won. The subsequent publication of the Scottish Government Yearbooks between 1977 and 1992 gradually shifted the constitutional agenda firmly towards limited devolution of power, understood within the framework of Scottish Labour Politics. Labour identified itself as the best hope for Home Rule, as shown in the constitutional convention of 1997, dominated by Labour and boycotted by a stroppy SNP. A reasonable argument could be made for Brown’s introduction to the Red Paper as a first step in this process of ideological realignment. His analysis of nationalism permits both a cultural and a class-based socio-economic understanding of the phenomenon: ‘Scotland’s social condition and political predicament cries out for a new commitment to socialist ideas, policies and action emerging from a far reaching analysis of economy and society … searching for a new social vision for Scotland which begins from people’s potentials, is sensitive to cultural needs, and is humane, democratic and revolutionary … what this Red Paper seeks to do is to transcend that false and sterile antithesis between the nationalism of the SNP and the anti-nationalism of the unionist parties.’ Brown’s understanding of Scottish identity expertly finesses the role of both culture and class in fomenting Scottish national feeling, and does so with far more delicacy in 1975 than Vince Mills in his introduction to 2005’s Red Paper: ‘But if it is accepted that creation of a national identity is a sine qua non of a nationalist movement, and given the complexities and contradictions of the Scottish Peoples, then the definition of what it is to be Scottish has to come in contradistinction to what we are not – English.’ Why Mills thinks this is not at all clear, but it is, seems odd that the original should have a far more sophisticated handle on the nature of Scottish ‘identity’ than its post-Devolutionary counterpart. But Brown must not escape with all of the credit for this adjustment of constitutional politics. Excepting the maverick Tom Nairn, an entire generation of Scottish academics were writing Scottish politics back into existence: James Kellas, whose seminal The Scottish Political System was published in 1973, Michael Keating, Henry Drucker, Alice Brown, Lindsay Paterson, David McCrone and Arthur Midwinter, the latter having discredited the ‘subsidy junky’ myth then peddled by London. They did so through the identification of ‘patterns of influence’ in policymaking, framing the constitutional
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debate as an exercise in systemic problem solving. To these systems analysts, issues of Englishness and Scottishness were secondary to a ‘relentless trend of centralisation which is damaging both the efficiency of Scottish governmental arrangements and the quality of Scottish democracy’ (from The Government of Scotland, Keating and Midwinter). But if the game is fixed, then Brown has at least a sound understanding of the nationalist position. As referee he is able to make his own posthumous political appropriations (see Maxton, below) that show his breadth of vision but perhaps also, gradually undermine Nationalist territorial claims. He quotes C. M. Grieve’s own grievances with the SNP over economic policy, the latter in his view: ‘having “no concern … with the great spiritual issues underlying the mere statistics of trade and industry”.’ And what of Brown’s ‘spiritual issues’? The introductory essay to The Red Paper competently argues a broad socio-economic case against nationalism (a symptom of ‘Scotland’s uneven development’, solved if that development can be evened out – (pretty much the Scottish Executive’s current tack) entirely consistent with the materialist traditions of his party. Indeed, implicit in both Red Papers is the ethic Scottish Labour borrowed from their Covenanter forebears: of spreading true religion beyond just Scottish borders and essentially, of saving the English from themselves. The Red Paper (1975) is, in many respects, a Solemn League and Covenant for the 70s – as is The Red Paper of 2005. In Brown’s solemn assessment, Scotland is not so much a culture seeking to be free as an aggregate of socio-economic stresses that must be addressed. Our ‘Iron Chancellor’ has yet to be forged, though there are already the clear signs of a political sophisticate, both moderate and moderator, able to trash the opposition in the most collegiate fashion. MM
The Politics of Nationalism and Devolution (1980) Gordon Brown and Henry Drucker, Longman. In this book, written together with Henry Drucker, Brown focuses attention and brings a much more detailed scrutiny to bear than is to be found in The Red Paper on the phenomenon of late 20th century nationalism in the British Isles. By this time (1980)