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John Battle: Tackle the vital tasks for the future, Gordon
WHEN he was on his way to Prime Minister's Questions last week, surrounded by minders, I watched Gordon Brown go up to a school group.
There were about 30 youngsters in bright red and black uniforms from an inner-city London primary school, and he calmly walked up to them, started chatting and shaking their hands, listening to them and treating them as if they mattered.
It was no photo call – there were no cameras – just a spontaneous pause to give them some attention. He was on his way to the big test of the Parliamentary week, and yet Gordon Brown, who is often caricatured as being unapproachable or unfriendly, had time for them.
One of my first jobs after I was first elected to Parliament in 1987 was to be appointed to the Opposition Whips' Office to serve the Treasury Team.
Back in the late 1980s, John Smith was the Shadow Chancellor leading a team consisting of Gordon Brown, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith.
I had the privilege of attending the weekly early morning team meetings and sat in on discussions led by Smith and Brown on how we, as a Labour Party, had to blend together the two principles of "social justice" and "economic efficiency" to break the impression that though we were compassionate towards the poor, the disadvantaged, and the least well-off, we were not capable of running the economy.
Moreover, we had to develop that position of social justice and economic efficiency in the face of City markets that could remove investment overnight if the polls showed a clear Labour majority on election day.
We also had to recognise increasing globalisation in which multi-national corporations could relocate to other parts of the world with cheaper labour costs and no constraining policies such as robust employment rights for workers, welfare safety net provisions or minimum wages.
Economic globalisation and the internationalisation of markets were on the agenda at those Treasury team meetings well before they became part of the popular commentary.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of modern politics is the "law of inflated expectations" (measured by the rubric of the more ostentatious, showy and expensive the wedding, the nearer the divorce row).
As Gordon Brown was elected leader of the Labour Party to replace Tony Blair as Prime Minister, the commentary was universal: "What
we now need is unshowy, serious, down-to-earth leadership." But do
we actually want it? Are we really willing to do without brilliant rhetoric? Being in politics for the right reasons ought to carry more support than a quick glib riposte, but does it?
Today's politics is one of fast moves turned upside-down by the smallest of incidents and in which fear of the media, or of failure, or of upsetting people, can easily dominate. As Einstein discovered, the real problem is connecting the little to the big.
Not all decisions in modern politics can be boiled down to the binary for or against, yes-no, good-evil simplistic Manichean agenda. It is much more difficult to synchronise decisions to tune into the politics of the day, but Gordon Brown does have a capacity to see a bit further ahead – the need for our society to work at skills training, creativity and innovation, for instance, if we are to work in a global economy. Long before others, he pointed to the re-emergence of China as a force.
As the new Energy Minister in 1998, it was my job to get the new privatised energy companies to pay a windfall tax, which would go into the New Deal to get youth unemployment down.
That, along with introducing a minimum wage, and tax credits to supplement low incomes, were some of Gordon Brown's good ideas. I'd add that we should do it again now to eliminate fuel poverty properly.
The need to fuse tackling climate change measures to manageable daily budgets, and the ability to see that tackling poverty at home and abroad, is in all our interests. No matter how intractable a problem it is, it remains a top priority.
Gordon Brown's Government must not tread water, or bean
count time to June 2010 in the Micawberish hope that something will turn up. Nor must it focus too heavily on "opposing the opposition".
He must lead people with conviction to understand that agendas and problems are complex, and require joined-up solutions, if Britain is to thrive for centuries to come. That is the real task.
John Battle is the Labour MP for Leeds West. He is a former Energy Minister.
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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