Simon Lee is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Hull University. In this brilliant book, he examines Gordon Brown's record and his growing embrace of Thatcherite policies and language.Brown has dropped the Labour Party's rhetorical commitment to state-led modernisation of our manufacturing industries. He has embraced the City of London's liberalised financial markets and the domestic property market, increasing our vulnerability to global shocks.
As a result, Britain lost a million manufacturing jobs under his Chancellorship. Monthly deficits in trade in goods average £6.5 billion. From 1966 to 1994, we had more assets than liabilities; since 1995, vice versa. Outward investment was £5279 billion at the end of 2006, inward investment £5544 billion: a net loss of £265 billion, 20% of GDP.
Average houses are now unaffordable for first-time buyers in 93% of towns, as against 37% in 2001. The housing market now drives increasing inequality and in turn is driven up by increasing immigration: 2.54 million new NI numbers were issued to overseas nationals between 2002/3 and 2006/7.
Inequality has soared: in the 1980s the richest 1% owned 17-18% of the wealth; by 2007 they owned 20-24%. Directors' pay rose by 28% in 2005 alone. The average pay of a Tesco's worker fell from £12.7K to £11.6K while Tesco's CEO got £5.4 million, 466 times the average worker's.
Private and public debts are growing. Training, transport and communications still lack investment. His PFIs and PPPs mean that we taxpayers subsidise firms to run public services badly.
His Foreign Secretary Miliband vaunts `the hard power of economic and military incentives and interventions' - i.e. sanctions and wars. Brown is raising military spending from £34 billion in 2008/9 to £36.9 billion in 2010/11, including two aircraft carriers costing £3.9 billion with 36 Joint Strike Fighters on each, another £5 billion.
Brown said, "We should be proud ... of the empire." Thabo Mbeki reminded us what empire meant - `genocide, vast ethnic cleansing, slavery, rigorously enforced racial hierarchy and merciless exploitation'. Brown's `outward-looking internationalist patriotism' is sanctimonious code for identifying Britain with past, present and future aggressions.
Brown wants above all to enforce trade liberalisation - which has cost sub-Saharan Africa $272 billion in the last 20 years, far exceeding the aid Brown promised (but did not deliver). His proposed International Finance Facility would pay out $500 billion and cost $720 billion, due to interest payments to bondholders profiting from aid. Brown wants profits from climate change too. His key environmental goal is a global carbon market centred on the City.
He wants a Global Europe, an `outward-looking, globally-oriented EU', meaning, again, more wars. The Lisbon Agenda is Brown's agenda - making the EU even more Thatcherite, more like the USA, by making the Single Market more liberalised, deregulated and privatised. The European Commission says that in `Enterprise Europe', "Entrepreneurship is the key to the new economy."
His commitment to Britain is just rhetorical. He is actually breaking up Britain by devolution and regionalisation (unelected regional assemblies and ministers), under EU orders.
Lee indulges in some wishful thinking about the supposed benefits of devolution and about Brown's breaking with Blair's war policies and opposing the revived EU Constitution. But overall, this is a most useful and well-researched book, giving us the evidence to prove that Brown's policies are pro-capital and anti-Britain.
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