Dan Snow's History Hit - Gordon Brown on How To Save the World

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Gordon Brown stood at the pinnacle of UK politics for 13 years first as Chancellor of the Exchequer and the as Prime Minister but it is as a private citizen that he now seeks to set out and help solve some of the world's most pressing problems. In this episode, Dan speaks to Gordon Brown about his time as prime minister; the power he wielded and the limitations of even the highest political office. They also, discuss the global issues that humanity needs to address and Gordon's firm belief in the power of internationalism and the dangers of failing to work together. 

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I promised you a month ago as part of our Prime Minister's 300 series that we'd be interviewing a Prime Minister on this podcast and today I am. Gordon Brown was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, followed Tony Blair in that office who's also been on the podcast. He was the Chancellor of Exchequer, the Finance Minister for the UK before that, So he was no stranger to high office. And he then served as prime minister during the economic catastrophe of 2008-2009. He's now written a book about how to save the world, really, what we can do to solve the great challenges we face. Initially, I was pretty concerned that someone who has held the highest political office

in one of the world's biggest economies feels the need to leave office and write a book about what we should do about it. But as you'll hear, he talks about the problems that require international agreement and cooperation, as distinct from the competence of national leaders and the power they have within their own state. So it's a really interesting conversation as I thought about where power lies and what is the appropriate level to fix things that need fixing. Neighborhood, regional, national or international. I'm very grateful to Gordon Brown for coming on. We got close with Theresa May. We got so close but then her team ghosted me. So it must have been something I said but if you're listening please come on the pod it's a safe place we can talk about your tenure as prime minister if you wish

to go back and listen to Tony Blair coming on the podcast then all you've got to do all you've got to do is go over to historyhit.tv it's like Netflix for history it's like a huge digital history site we've got hundreds of documentaries on there we've got thousands of podcasts on there stretching way back into the past there's some real gems on there and you just go to history hit dot tv for a very small subscription you become a member you become part of this mad journey that we have set out on and it's getting more and more exciting all the time. So head over to history.tv, everyone. But in the meantime, here is Gordon Brown.

Gordon Brown, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. A pleasure, pleasure. Must be very exciting to write a book basically called How to Save the World. I don't think it's as brave as that or as bold as that. I think what I'm saying is we're at a turning point. History can turn either for the good or it can turn for the bad. We know what's wrong, though we've seen in the pandemic our failure to cooperate. We know it's not working when it comes to climate change. We know that even with all the ability and expertise we have, we don't seem to be able

to deal with the economic crises that hit the world. And of course, we've got these sustainable development goals that every country has signed up to, but have no chance of being realized, because we don't cooperate well enough. So the turning point is this, we have seen what has gone wrong. I think we now know what needs to be done. The question is, will we do it? And that's why the big international meetings this year, the G7, the G20, the UN itself, the review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons, and COP26, which is going to happen in Glasgow, all these are important tests now

of whether the world, which failed to cooperate last year, dismally and objectively failed to cooperate, when we could have stopped the virus more successfully, whether the world is going to wake up to the need for cooperation and actually cooperate to deal with some of these most pressing problems. So that's what I'm trying to bring the world's attention to. You ran through them there, but each chapter of the book is about one of these problems. You've got health, financial instability, education, environment, nationalism, and nuclear

proliferation. Climate change. Yeah, the climate crisis and i deal with this issue of tax and why there's so much inequality and why we've done so little to deal with tax haven something that was addressed last friday at the g7 meeting of finance ministers but we haven't yet got the the solution to this that would bring about a fairer taxation system i kept thinking as I was reading your book, I don't know whether I should have been sort of happy or deeply depressed or inspired that you're writing this book now

for everything you've learned, and yet you're one of the few incredibly lucky people in the world that has held high executive office, and that you still feel that you were unable to make as much of a dent into these things as you would have wished is that you know is the nation state fit for purpose is what how did you see your role when you were prime minister well i saw during the global financial crisis that he was a global problem it wasn't simply a british problem it actually started in america spread around the

whole world the whole banking system internationally was at risk. It was a global problem. And once you decide it is global and not just national, then you need to have globally coordinated responses. And the question was whether the world could come together. So what we did in 2009 was we brought together all the countries under the auspices of what we called the G20. So previously, it was just the West and Japan that met, seven countries. We brought China,

India, Africa, all into the picture and said, look, we've got to work together. And I remember the first meeting that I held, the dinner before the day when we made most of our decisions, I quoted Churchill, actually. And I said, in the 1930s, we retreated into protectionism. Everybody went just for themselves. And Churchill said that the world had been resolved to be a resolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, and all-powerful for impotence. And we must not make that mistake again. Now, fortunately, in 2009, we did things. So we underpinned the world economy by a trillion dollars of support. We got the banks recapitalized, some of them had to be nationalized. And we had a plan to get the world moving again

with a reform of the architecture of global decision making so we could deal with pollution and poverty and proliferation, and of course, potentially pandemics. But that never got off the ground. I was out of office, austerity became the order of the day. People retreated into the silos, import controls, immigration controls. Then we had all sorts of border controls. People kept building walls, not just the Trump wall. There are 66 walls now around the world. Half of them built since the Berlin Wall came down. And then we got America first.

Then we got China first. Then we got India first. Then we got Russia first. And so my tribe first became the name got China first. Then we got India first. Then we got Russia first. And so my tribe first became the name of the game. And so we retreated into what became a very aggressive nationalism. And once you've got that, you're a million miles away from getting the cooperation that you need, because people are thinking only of the self-interest and not thinking of how we could coordinate our activities to deal with these global problems that require global solutions.

how we could coordinate our activities to deal with these global problems that require global solutions. Internationalism runs through this book. And I find that very interesting. If your experience of being a national leader is that we need to become more internationalist, that's a very important lesson, isn't it? Yes, that our interdependence limits our independence, Our interdependence limits our independence, that you've got to share sovereignty. And the issue is not really anymore what power we can have over others. The issue is what power we can have with others working together. And so, yes, I don't want to remove all the benefits we have from national decisionmaking. And indeed, I understand people's desire to respect their own national identities.

But I do think we've got to get a better balance between the national autonomy we desire and the international cooperation we need. Otherwise, as we fight with the pandemic, we can't solve the problem. The pandemic is just a classic example. Nobody's safe till everybody's safe. The disease spreads and then it mutates and then it comes to countries that thought they have eradicated it. And even the vaccinated may be affected by a new variant, a new mutation. And so we've recognized in the pandemic, we've got to work together, or we will hang separately.

hang separately. And I think that that's a lesson for climate change. It's a lesson for financial instability, which usually reverberates around the world with contagion through the financial system. And it's a lesson, of course, if we're trying to deal with some of these tax problems that cause so much inequality when people siphon off resources to tax havens, and we haven't yet found a successful way of getting the money back from them. So all these problems require some form of international cooperation. And yet, the order of the day, perhaps the dominant ideology of this age is nationalism. And so we've got to find a way of reconciling these things. We've got to have respect for national identity, but we've got to have a recognition that we need international cooperation.

This is something we talk about in this podcast all the time with wonderful thinkers like Anne Applebaum or Barack Obama's advisor, Ben Rhodes. Is it simplistic to say that after World War II, there was a very obvious understanding, a direct understanding from people who fought, lost family, lost property, seen unbelievable destruction of their communities. There was an understanding that

nationalism was potentially disastrous and could lead to this kind of conflict. And as we've drifted further, despite our attempts to keep the sort of lessons and the memory of those stories alive, politicians have seen it in their own narrow interest to abandon the attempts at internationalism after World War II. Is that what's going on here? It's partly that. I think what happened after World War II is that people with the creation of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods Institutions, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank recognized that we had to work together, that prosperity to be sustained had to be shared, and that if we didn't have international institutions that would work and deliver results, then we'd fall back into the age of nationalism, protectionism, isolationism, and xenophobia. But what happened very quickly after 1945 was obviously the Cold

War. And so instead of the United Nations being the center for security through the Security Council, it became NATO. It became the West organizing its own security. Instead of the World Bank delivering the prosperity that people needed, it became the Marshall Plan, an American initiative that crossed Europe. And of course, Russia was offered the chance to be part of it and refuse. So we retreated in a way from the global ambitions to the Cold War, which was, of course, it was inevitable. We had to deal with that.

And then came the Washington Consensus. And the Washington Consensus, I think, was if you could just follow what America did, liberalize, privatize, deregulate, concentrate on controlling inflation, then everything would be OK. And of course, it wasn't. And American leadership, of course, has changed. You know, in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, George Bush and others were in a unipolar age, but generally, perhaps apart from Iraq,

acted multilaterally. Now we're in a multipolar age because China and Europe are big players in the international scene. America does not and cannot have its own way. But in this multipolar age, America has tended to act unilaterally. And so things have got to change. America under Biden is becoming more internationalist. Europe, I think, is becoming more outward looking.

Britain has got to find what global Britain actually means, because it's not clear at the moment what it does mean. And we've got to avoid this one world, two systems future that would happen if China and America

were at loggerheads with each other. And I suggest that even if we can't cooperate on many issues, including human rights, of course, we've got to cooperate on issues that really matter, like the environment. And if we could find a way forward that diminished the power of nationalism in the world and recognised the importance of working together, then we'd be a better place. Very frustrating being a politician and sitting at your desk in Downing Street and knowing these are the big problems that are coming down the slipway towards us. And yet, the day-to-day, your kind of poll numbers depend on these totally bizarre, effervescent, transitory, often quite silly things that you also have to deal with? I mean,

how do you work on both those planes? I mean, it's fascinating because in your prime minister, you've got to have a view on what's happening on Coronation Street or East Enders. You've got to have a view on sport. I don't mind that because I'm a great sports enthusiast and football. And everybody's asking you questions about all these very day-to-day things. And at the same time, well well particularly during the global financial crisis you're phoning up the australians in the evening and the chinese and leaders and then you're talking to the west coast of america at another time so you're really an 18-hour day dealing with international issues so it is frustrating but i do think we did show that things can work when people are prepared to work together. And then I'm sorry

to say that we relapsed into the nationalism and protectionism and the austerity, which is another form of, if you like, protectionism that we saw during the last decade. I think we're now coming out of it. I think it is a turning point. The question is, can we do enough to show that we can solve problems? Because they're all piling up. It's not just the pandemic, it's the aftermath of the pandemic. It's the short-termism of the financial system. It's the shadow banking system. It's clearly COP26. And if we can't deal with some of the problems of climate change, and that means bringing in the coastal states, it means bringing in the poorest countries in the world. the world. Listen to Dan Snow's history here. We've got Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister on the podcast. Big time. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions

and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics. Understandably when we see it from hindsight the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying yeah tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he'd discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair.

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where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. so many of us think that being prime minister is this enormous wellspring of power and influence and yet if you're on the phone all day to your international partners did you feel

powerful as uk prime minister i felt the uk could lead and it could offer to do things and propose to do things but i knew we had to get support from other countries to follow. You see, I wanted to set a global growth target in 2009 to get us more quickly out of recession. But I couldn't get the support from the Europeans to do so. I wanted us to move very quickly on taxation. The Chinese, all people, didn't want us to take action on tax havens. The environmental summit at Copenhagen in 2009, it really failed because we couldn't get China, India, America to come to the proposals that Europe collectively

had agreed. You're always having to try to persuade, but obviously you have the power of initiative. I used to say of Lloyd George, the prime minister, he took a leap in the dark, looked around and then took another leap. And there's some truth in this. And you've got to push your views forward and just hope that you can bring the rest of the world together. Many of the things that a government wants to do, it can only do if it cooperates with other governments. Looking longer term, and your book is typically because you're famous for, you know, you don't just diagnose the problems, you actually have really interesting solutions and often go into quite a lot of detail on what they might be in changing where the IMF

operates for example longer term how are we going to survive as a species in the face of climate proliferation of nuclear and other weapons unless we find a way to formalize transnationalism what's the dream where do we want to end up? Well, this is the difficulty. Nationalism is so ingrained at the moment and great past struggles are so endemic that we've got to work stage by stage, issue by issue, institution by institution. So we've got to say, here is a shared problem. Let's have a shared solution. So I say, issue by issue, let's try and solve the problem. And then if we can prove that multinational cooperation is actually in the national interest of every country that's engaged in it, but it will take time. So I say, well, let's go to COP26 and let's put a series of proposals. Let's make sure that we mitigate and adapt the climate change that's hitting the

poorest countries. Let's set more ambitious targets for carbon reduction so we're on the way to get to near net carbon zero far more quickly than is planned at the moment. Let's force companies to disclose their carbon footprint so that instead of companies just making announcements that nobody can prove whether they're going to do this or not, when they say they're going to plant X number of trees and then you don't know whether they do, let's actually then show what their carbon footprint actually is. And I think there's a groundswell of opinion, particularly amongst young people, for this to happen. I mean, the danger at the moment still is that COP26 fails because there's not enough momentum behind the changes that are needed. But I think there's more of a consensus

now about the urgency of action. And therefore, some of the proposals I make are very much based on what very sensible people around the world, from David Attenborough to Greta Thunberg, are saying about what needs to be done. So I'm listening to the voice of youth and the voice of experience and thinking, well, if I was in power, this is what I think we could actually do. And this is what we could persuade other countries to do why do you think after a career in trying to persuade people and countries something i've never understood why is it easier to sell people nationalism and internationalism when in our personal lives we all talk regularly about you know many hands make light work takes a village to raise a child all these expressions in our

personal lives and our experiences and you know we know that if you want to achieve things you're going to work as a team you derive enormous benefit from sharing problems sharing loads why is it that when you go up a level to strategy and politics that we're so bad at convincing people of that because i think everybody and i think you as a historian indeed as a great historian who's written very widely on this, we all need a sense of belonging. We all need an identity. And the old identities that were based on your workplace, your trade union, your religious faith, and your church or synagogue or mosque, these are less salient than they used to be. And it's a lot easier for people to say, well, look, think of your nation, think of the flag, think of the history, think of the traditions, think of the culture. And the problem is that patriotism, which is a great sort of thing that I feel proud of my country, its traditions, its history,

its culture, can easily descend into what is I call political nationalism, from a celebration of us, which is being a patriot, to a hatred or a resentment or a dislike or a blaming of others. And so nationalism gets its force, I think, from people's need for identity, but also there are huge problems that have got to be confronted that perhaps we're failing to deal with at the moment. People's economic insecurity, people's sense that our country is not what it used to be, people's feeling that politicians have let them down. And all that feeds this idea that perhaps if you can just play up your national identity and the importance of your own country, then lots of problems would be solved. Now, of course, it's not the case. You can't solve the

problems of poverty, pollution, perforation by simply changing your borders. But it's in a sense, an easy answer for politicians to weaponize people's sense of belonging, and say that the way to solve your problems is to either secede or to operate in relation to other countries in a chauvinistic and xenophobic way. I mean, look at Hungary at the moment. I'm shocked when I see the Hungarian politics where there's hardly any immigration. There's hardly anybody in Hungary who's been born outside the country, maybe 5%. And yet the prime minister has made it a huge issue. Someone said there are more anti-immigrant parties now in Hungary than there are immigrants. Because even in a country with very little immigration, he's weaponized immigration

as an issue to force a nationalist perspective that is far more extreme than any form of patriotism. And of course, he's now saying that those Hungarians outside Hungary should be brought back into Hungary. He's now blaming the European Union. He's got an enemy. So nationalism thrives on having enemies and inventing enemies even where they don't exist. So it's a moral effort. Orwell wrote about this, the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Us is patriotism. Us versus them is nationalism. And it can only be dealt with and addressed by a moral effort to put the positive case for empathy, reciprocity, solidarity with other people. And yes, you're right. People say far better if we

work together, but we've got to make that happen. We've got to show it works. We've got to make the moral effort to put the case for a more cooperative approach and greater solidarity in dealing with global problems. I found this very profound

coming from you because the key thing about nationalism, as you say, is also this idea that developed in the last couple of centuries that a nation state is something that can exist, should exist,

and should be the sort of essential repository of sovereignty and the essential building block of the global community. And you're someone who has run a nation state. You had a nuclear arsenal. Very few people have been on paper as powerful and a guardian of our sovereignty as you.

And yet you're sitting here saying, look, I've been there. The nation state is not what it's cracked up to be. We can't solve these problems just through taking back control. Yes, but I do think the nation state and the leaders of nation states can make a huge difference. So you've got the problems which can be solved within your own country. And of course, you're trying to deal with unemployment, economic recession, or mortgage repossessions, or trying to deal with social care and health and so on. or mortgage repossessions or trying to deal with social care and health and so on.

But the range of problems that require a collective approach that involve you working with other countries has grown, and it will continue to grow. The pandemic emphasises that. Who would have thought that the whole of the world would be convulsed after a disease happened in only one country and yet was able to spread to the whole world? And perhaps we could have prevented the loss of deaths in a way. So when you look at all the problems we've got to deal with, and we'll look at climate change at COP26 in a way that says that Britain can't solve this problem on its own. You can't be a free rider and allow other people to solve the problem with us doing nothing. We need to work together with other countries to do so. So yes, I'm not saying that you're not powerful within a nation state. In fact,

you've got the ability to do a whole series of different things that are, if you like, common problems that are part of what is happening in your own country. But many of the things happening in your country require collective solutions. And we've got to get the balance right. I'm not calling for some world government that is going to replace nation states. What I'm calling for is getting the balance right and understanding that when nationalist movements say take back control, everything must be done within our own country, isolate, pursue our self-interest at the expense of what happens internationally, charity begins and ends at home, all these things, that's not good enough anymore. We're affected by what happens elsewhere. Nobody's safe till everybody's safe, as we say in the pandemic.

Last thing, there are moments of inspiration from our recent past, whether it's agreements around Antarctica, space, CFCs. You pick out some of these examples of transnational cooperation. Tell us what you think they show us. The Reagan-Gorbachev agreement, when we created an international space station. And it's remarkable. Russia and America are at odds with each other. They're fighting each other in every other area. But every few hours, this international space station is above our heads, getting around the world. And it's manned by an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut. And they can't get the space station astronauts up to the space station without using Russian launchers. And they can't staff the space station

without American technology. And so if we can actually cooperate in what was probably the biggest area of controversy during the Cold War, the space race, if we can cooperate in space up there in the heavens, surely we can cooperate on Earth. And I take that as one example of where cooperation ought to be extended into other areas and where we've learned that even if people were reluctant to do it initially, and Reagan and Gorbachev fought each other over the Cold War, we proved that it can actually work. Now it worked for CFCs, as you say, it's worked in other areas as well. HIV AIDS, a great success in so many different ways when we actually got the treatments and the drugs around the world through a collective effort. It ought

to work with this vaccination. It's so obvious. Since this vaccination was first administered in Britain, 2 million people have died around the world. So we have the vaccination, scientific genius. The easier task is getting it around the world and we we have the vaccination, scientific genius. The easier task is getting it around the world, and we failed to do so. And so 2 million have died since the vaccination was actually developed and was made available. And that's a real tragedy that ought to be averted. So I can see how cooperation can work, and I gave you many instances of that. So I'm optimistic, I'm hopeful about the future. I remember Alfred Lord Tennyson, our great poet, writing this poem, Loxley Hall, 40 years on,

at the end of his life. And he was getting very pessimistic about the fate of the world. And the poem goes something like, oh cosmos chaos, oh chaos cosmos, when will it ever end? And Gladstone, the prime minister at the time, took this unusual step of writing

to the poetry magazine, 19th Century, and saying of Tennyson's poem that he'd got it all wrong and he should go writing to the poetry magazine, 19th Century, and saying of Tennyson's poem that he'd got it all wrong, and he should go back to his first poem, Loxley Hall, not Loxley Hall 40 years on, the first poem actually entitled Loxley Hall, in which he said, dipped into the world as far as the eye could see, and saw the vision of the world and the wonder it could be. And Tennyson, of course, wrote Ulysses, to seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield. And perhaps the message of my book, and really of all of us who believe in a more shared future, is to strive, to seek, and not to yield to nationalism, xenophobia, protectionism,

isolationism, all these things that bring us down, and instead to strive for a healthier, fairer, safer, and safer and of course greener world well thank you thank you so much my dad made me learn that poem when i was literally decided i had no education and he made me learn that tennyson ulysses so get your boys on that make give them i don't think um poetry is is my youngest son if it wasn't a football story he wouldn't be interested in it and my oldest son I think thinks that 19th century writing is a bit

passe, you know he's into modern literature but you'll probably find the same Last time I was in Fife I went to watch Dunfermline play, the mighty Paz they won I know exactly so it's nearby and when I there, everyone was joking about you

and how you support the other teams. There was a daggers drawing, yes. I'm a shareholder in Ray Thrower. My goodness me. I started by selling programs outside Ray Thrower to make money to get free into the match afterwards. And now you're a shareholder. And now I'm a shareholder,

which is an act of charity, not an act of investment. Thank you very much. The book is called seven ways to change the world seven ways to change the world by golden brown thank you so much for coming on the podcast thank you i feel the hand of history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished hi everyone thanks for reaching the end of our country, all them's the rules. Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us,

and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well.