For a party founded on the principle of human brotherhood, the British Labour has had a phenomenal record of internal discord. It was the party’s extreme susceptibility to ideological conflict and bloody personality clashes that helped to keep it out of power during much of the 20th century.
“New Labour”, the centrist successor party fashioned by Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, was determined to eradicate this suicidal tendency. “Unity” became the party’s watchword. Indeed, during the Blair years the Labour Party has manifested an unprecedented degree of collective discipline, with the vigorous debate for which it was once renowned yielding to the smooth politics of presentation. The greatest presentational triumph of all has been that of Blair and Brown themselves. Despite having become increasingly ill disposed toward one another, the pair has contrived, for public purposes, to put on a more or less plausible show of being team players. Their well-honed double act was on display in the House of Commons last week. As Brown wrong-footed Labour’s Conservative opponents with his latest tax-cutting budget, the prime minister beamed approval of the chancellor he privately detests.
Of late, however, there have been signs that old Labour habits are reasserting themselves. The coming months could yet see a fresh outbreak of civil war within the Labour Party, though the likelihood remains that Brown, with the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw now championing his cause, will shortly take over from Blair as party leader and therefore as prime minister. It is a prospect that fills Blair and his followers with horror. Not only do they loath Brown, they also fear that he is too much of an old-fashioned leftist to be entrusted with the task of carrying forward Blairite neoliberal economic “reforms” — which is why they have been frantically searching for a candidate who can credibly challenge Brown in a party leadership contest. At the same time, there is growing anxiety throughout the party that Labour under Brown could be defeated in a general election by the Conservative Party’s answer to Tony Blair, the fresh-faced, media-savvy David Cameron.
Brown has the misfortune of being inextricably linked in the public mind with the most discredited British prime minister of modern times, one who has led Britain into a monstrously ill-conceived war in the Middle East and who has now been twice interviewed by the British police regarding allegations that his government sold peerages in exchange for donations to the Labour Party. Because of this, Brown’s acclaimed stewardship of the British economy may be a dwindling electoral asset. What is more, for Brown and Blair alike the pretence that they are not locked in an interminable feud has become counterproductive. For the two men’s mutual loathing is an open secret. It is an open secret, too, that Brown is not “collegiate”, that he is the very reverse of a team player, and liable to bouts of infantile petulance. Years ago, the Blair camp briefed that the chancellor was “psychologically flawed”. By this stage, few doubt it. The reported characterization of Brown by the former top civil servant Sir Andrew Turnbull as a Stalinist bully merely confirmed the view of Gordon Brown that is widely held. At best, the image of this brooding Scotsman is that of a political workaholic who is also a maniacal control-freak.
The paradox of Brown is that for so tyrannical a figure he has been remarkably compliant in helping Blair remain in office. On more than one occasion, he has had the opportunity to topple Blair yet has stopped short of delivering the killer blow. In the waspish words of Alexander Pope, he has been “willing to wound but afraid to strike”. The explanation for this seeming timidity may be temperamental caution but it may have also have its roots in Labour Party tribalism. Imbued from an early age with Scotch egalitarianism, Brown defined himself as a politician with a mission to help the underprivileged (a mission, incidentally, he seems far from fulfilling, to judge from new statistics indicating that poverty in Britain is once again on the rise). The charitable interpretation of Brown’s reluctance to challenge Blair is that he is all too mindful of the Labour Party’s fratricidal past and anxious to avoid causing a split that could plunge it back into the limbo of unelectability.
Whatever lies behind his fealty, Brown has effectively sustained the premiership of a politician who has committed Britain to following the neoimperialist policies of US President George W. Bush. In short, when it comes to warmongering, he has been as much of an asset to Blair as Blair has been to Bush. Indeed, with Blair, he shares responsibility for lending British moral and military support to the disastrous US invasion of Iraq. His own position about the Iraq war has never been entirely clear, though it is understood that he had rather more reservations about the case for intervention there than he has ever admitted to. What is appalling now is how little discussion there is in Britain about the attitude to foreign policy of the man who may soon become Britain’s prime minister. It is a shocking indictment of British political culture, if not of British people at large, that at a time when Britain is so deeply embroiled in the Middle East, the question of Brown’s probable succession to Blair has been largely discussed in terms of domestic issues.
That Brown sets great store by the Atlantic alliance has never been in doubt. Nursing long-standing ties with the American political and business elites, he is in truth just as fervently pro-US as Tony Blair. It is also safe to say that he is a staunch supporter of Israel — one, moreover, who esteems Judaic morality and who not only counts as a friend Britain’s chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, but has enrolled the rabbi’s daughter, Gila, among his special advisers. It’s worth adding that Brown’s attitude towards Muslims and Islam is nothing like so clear-cut and positive. Endorsing current skepticism about the value of multiculturalism while exalting “Britishness” and taking a tough line over national security, the chancellor has identified himself with the new orthodoxy that Muslims need to demonstrate their willingness to integrate with mainstream Britain.
As it happens, Brown has special personal reason to uphold the virtue of being British. His identity as a Scot is becoming a liability at a time when Great Britain’s constituent parts are asserting their independence, with resurgent Scottish, Welsh and northern Irish nationalism awakening a new spirit of chauvinism and xenophobia among the formerly ascendant English. The single-minded politician who has left nothing to chance in his pursuit of power could yet be undone by one thing over which he has no control: His nationality.
