Tag: Gordon Brown

As usual, Gordon Brown offers wise counsel (Give us a year, to really take back control, Opinion, 30 March). While we are clearly faced with a very serious, complex and perplexing Brexit issue, I would suggest that there are other more useful ways of framing the situation than as an unadulterated crisis. A narrative of crisis only perpetuates the fantasy of one big solution which, in this as in most cases, is clearly not yet obvious. In the debates of the coming weeks we need more inquiry into workable options (for us and the EU) and less advocacy of divisive and polarising opinions. Clearly we need more time for this process. Ken Starkey Professor of management and organisational learning, Nottingham University Business School • So, national treasure Grayson Perry tells us that, because leavers and remainers share a liking for “Marmite, the colour blue, tea and David Bowie”, “we all have much more in common than that which separates us” (Report, 29 March). When politicians and religious leaders issue the latter rather meaningless platitude, I accept this as part of mainstream community cohesion rhetoric. But when a contemporary artist uses such glib sentiment, which does nothing to talk to any of the fundamental issues that underpin the levels of social disaffection that stalk our green and pleasant land, I do fear for the inviolable role that dissension plays within contemporary art discourse. Perhaps Grayson Perry would do well to take a leaf out of Anish Kapoor’s book (Interview, G2, 14 March) on this account. Christopher Coppock Cardiff • Jonathan Freedland (Opinion, 30 March) points out that the European Research Group is not European, does no research, and barely counts as a group.

New research from Europe has found that culturally liberal politicians use more complex language than their socially conservative counterparts. The findings have been published in the open-access scientific journal PLOS One. “Many have ridiculed Donald Trump for his use of simple language with low levels of linguistic complexity. They found that culturally liberal politicians tended to use more complex language in their speeches. “We find that speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties. We find this evidence by analyzing 381,609 speeches given by politicians from five parliaments, by twelve European prime ministers, as well as speeches from party congresses over time and across countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden). “For instance, our scores show that former culturally liberal British Prime Minister Gordon Brown delivered speeches that were markedly more complex than his successor, the culturally conservative David Cameron.” “We saw the same thing in Spain, where the language used by liberal Prime Minister José Zapatero was much more complex than that of his successor, the conservative Mariano Rajoy,” Schoonvelde explained. First, it would be interesting to study the differences in language complexity by politicians of the same political party. Or do they do this because their language use actually reflects differences in the personality of these politicians,” Bakker said. The study, “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches”, was authored by Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher, Bert N. Bakker.

Ten years from now, Theresa May is making a speech in defence of the EU. Ten years ago, Gordon Brown was a prime minister adrift. A saviour for troubled times. This was the essential Gordon. On making it to the end of the day with as a few of her ministers resigning as possible. And even if, by some unexpected mischance, the prime minister did manage to come up with a withdrawal deal she could get through parliament, all the difficult issues still remained. Brown paused. People needed to feel heard, to re-engage with the democratic process. Nicola Jennings on May's waterlogged Brexit plan – cartoon Read more Then should come a second referendum. Not necessarily in time to prevent the UK leaving the EU, but certainly giving everyone the right to rejoin it once the realities of the situation had become clear.

I have mixed feelings about leaving the UK’s public debate about the future of our country’s relations with the rest of Europe. But I will no longer seek to play a public role in that debate myself. Profile Nick Clegg's political highs and lows Nick Clegg: political highs and lows Even though Nick Clegg spent five years as deputy prime minister, his probable political highlight came about a month before he took the post, in the unlikely arena of the pre-election party leaders’ debate of April 2016. After the election, the Lib Dems had 57 MPs – enough to gain a share in government with Cameron’s Conservatives and get Clegg an office adjoining Downing Street. It was a rapid fall for a man who ended up spending just 12 years in the Commons, becoming Lib Dem leader little more than two years after becoming an MP, following his work at the European commission and five years as an MEP. I do not arrive in Silicon Valley with a monopoly of wisdom on these crucial questions, but I have been impressed in my numerous conversations with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in recent months by the seriousness with which they recognise the profound responsibilities that Facebook has – not only to its vast number of users but to society at large. As concerns about the impact of technology grow, the left has tended to condemn “big tech” as representative of everything that is wrong in an unleashed market economy. We cannot wish away technological progress. The worlds of politics and tech too often speak past each other. •Nick Clegg is a former UK deputy prime minister and former leader of the Liberal Democrats

It’s fashionable to claim that progressive politics has been in decline across the western world since the global financial crash of 2008, that progressive politicians don’t know what they stand for anymore, and that parties of the far right and far left have been insurgent. At the core of our beliefs is the value of work – yet we acknowledge there is more to life than work. The centre-left administrations of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown lost power in 2010, having won three general elections in a row since 1997. In elections last year, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) got 20.5 per cent of the vote, and the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) got just 5.7 per cent of the vote. These politicians respect the achievements of the wave of “third way” leaders of the Nineties and Noughties, but also recognise times have changed, which means different, modern solutions to today’s problems. New Zealand Labour’s 38-year-old Jacinda Ardern – who describes herself as a “progressive” and a “social democrat” – became leader of her party just three months before their general election in October 2017. She went on to become prime minister of a coalition government after substantially increasing Labour’s vote share. But the debate could be about so much more than this if we could lift our sights beyond the domestic to the international, drawing on fresh ideas and initiatives shown to work by progressives in power. This month, The Progressive Centre UK, a new think tank and network of progressives – to which I have been appointed chair – launches with the explicit aim of connecting progressives from across the UK with the latest ideas and experience from across the globe. As it happens, Ardern, Trudeau and Sanchez were all involved in the gathering the centre co-sponsored in Canada last month, organised by the Global Progress network.

In both its content and its contradictions, the Church of England’s senior prelate was channelling not so much the infinite divine as a highly contemporary and earthly mood about what has happened over the past decade. The Great Crash exposed things that were very wrong with the way the economy is organised and those ills – sins, to an archbishop – have still not been fixed. | Yanis Varoufakis and others Read more He did nationalise them and he was right to do so. Bankers continued to enjoy lavish rewards while millions of other people paid the price in squeezed living standards and reduced services. There was a lag before the political blowback arrived. That formula went bust with the banks. It is likewise a struggle to believe that Jeremy Corbyn would have taken over the Labour party. In Britain, we were spared the horrendously high levels of unemployment that scarred the 1930s and the 1980s, but it also accelerated a change in the nature of work. The politicians who lost the last decade did not appreciate that enough. The politicians who win the next decade will likely be the ones who get it.

Sir Vince Cable has ruled out ever leading his party into a formal coalition with a Jeremy Corbyn-led government, a move he says would be just as “appalling” as working as junior partners in an administration run by Boris Johnson. He says the latter are planning to leave the party in droves if Corbyn becomes prime minister. Speaking on the eve of his party’s annual conference, which opens on Sunday in Brighton, Cable suggests he has already held discussions with disaffected Labour members about joining what he has called a new “movement for moderates” on the political centre ground. “If you talk to a lot of Labour backbenchers they just can’t, they’re not willing under any circumstances, to countenance a Corbyn government. But if they formed a coherent group, I’ve said that whatever happens with our internal reforms, I want to work with them. “It may sound a bit deterministic but I think the very odd combination of numbers combined with the financial crisis and people out there saying the whole bloody place is going in flames. A year ago, before the last Lib Dem conference, Cable was on strikingly optimistic form, telling this newspaper he believed there was a decent chance he could become prime minister, so unpredictable was politics. He now seems to accept that the job of leader has proved more difficult than he expected. “I mean, I remember 10 years ago when I was acting leader I had two questions a week in prime minister’s questions. I am now allowed one every four weeks.

A leaderless world is sleepwalking towards a repeat of its near meltdown in late 2008 and early 2009 because it has failed to remedy the causes of the financial crash of a decade ago, former prime minister Gordon Brown has warned. In the next crisis a breakdown of trust in the financial sector would be mirrored by breakdown in trust between governments In the light of the trade war launched against Beijing by the US, Brown doubted that China would be as cooperative a second time. He said the global economy still lacked an early warning system and a system for monitoring financial flows so that it was possible to tell what had been lent to whom and on what terms. “Yes, we did not know what was going on in some of the institutions, some of it illegal, and which was being covered up.” But he insisted that the mood at the time was for even greater deregulation of the City. “I was being criticised for being too tough in terms of regulation and tax.” Since the crisis, banks have been forced to hold more capital to protect them against possible losses, and a system of bonus clawbacks has been introduced to dissuade bankers from taking too many risks. Brown said there would be a different cause next time. There are problems in emerging markets.” Brown said one area of concern should be heavy commercial and industrial lending by lightly or unregulated shadow banks at a time when US interest rates are rising. We have had a decade of stagnation and we are now about to have a decade of vulnerability.” Recalling the freezing up of the financial markets a decade ago, Brown said governments had sought to compensate for the lack of trust between banks by cooperating more closely. “Countries have retreated into nationalist silos and that has brought us protectionism and populism. “We were out of recession in 2009 but back in it by 2011.

Labour raised £55.8m in 2017, while the Tories managed to raise £45.9m, also their highest ever total, as both parties financed general election campaigns. Labour received just over £16m from membership subscriptions, according to the data, an increase of £1.6m from the previous year. In total, these parties reported £125,322,000 in income and £122,194,000 of expenditure. Labour raised nearly £10m more than the Tories in 2017 Standfirst ... total income £0m 10 20 30 40 50 Labour, £55.8m Conservative, £45.9m Lib Dem, £9.7m SNP, £5.8m Green, £2.5m Ukip, £1.7m Guardian Graphic | Source: The Electoral Commission Labour beat its previous highest amount of £51m, which was raised in 2015, also a general election year, but one that was fought under Ed Miliband. The Tories’ second-highest amount raised in a year came in 2010, when donors gave £43.1m. Even Corbyn’s critics have been surprised by the way his popularity has turned around the party’s funding model. Under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Labour was reliant on a small number of wealthy donors. Labour received more than £16m from membership subscriptions in 2017 while Tory membership income fell below £1m Standfirst ... membership income 0m 5 10 15 Labour Conservative Guardian Graphic | Source: The Electoral Commission The party is now reliant on smaller donations from ordinary members. Spending by all political parties increased by 30% in 2017 compared with the year before, the figures showed. The Guardian disclosed last month that in the nine months from July 2017, the party raised £7.4m from donors paying a minimum of £50,000 to dine with Theresa May.

In the US, Donald Trump has periodically monopolised the headlines since 2015 with his rude and obnoxious behaviour, often showcased via Twitter or at international summits, where he has pushed presidents out of his way and left his counterparts visibly exasperated. In British politics, for one, there is a long history of politicians being openly rude to each other, including in parliament itself. Cameron was known to deploy every tactic from character assassination (“The truth is he is weak and despicable”, he said to Ed Miliband in 2015) to outright mockery (“If the prime minister is going to have pre-prepared jokes, I think they ought to be a bit better than that one – probably not enough bananas on the menu” – this to Gordon Brown in 2010, mocking his opponent’s dietary choices). The House of Commons’s benches are organised in such a way that confrontation is encouraged, and adversarial style is both encouraged and expected by members of parliament. Rudeness is also a useful way to curb others’ behaviour or challenge their political views with as much force as possible. Some researchers suggest that such behaviours aren’t rude when considered in the context of political discourse; it has been argued that “heated discussion” (both face to face and online) should be encouraged to enable voters to engage with politicians, express disagreement and heighten engagement with the political process. But bystanders who witness the behaviour can also be adversely affected, experiencing anger and compromised performance. Journalists and politicians are increasingly citing past incidents (say, Trump’s repeated references to Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas) as the basis for any rudeness directed towards the administration, including a recent incident where the homeland security secretary was booed out of a Mexican restaurant. Then there are the diplomatic consequences of Trump’s rudeness towards supposed allies, many of whom seem to be running out of patience. So while rudeness might be a perfectly effective strategy in some adversarial contexts, it’s a dangerous game to play in the public eye.