Gordon’s ghost

• Text settings

  Text size

  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large

  Line Spacing

  • Compact
  • Normal
  • Spacious
• Comments
• Share

  Share

  The Spectator

  Gordon’s ghost

  Copy link

  • Linkedin
  • Messenger
  • Email

Already a subscriber? Log in

This article is for subscribers only

Subscribe today to get 3 months' delivery of the magazine, as well as online and app access, for only £3.

• Weekly delivery of the magazine
• Unlimited access to our website and app
• Enjoy Spectator newsletters and podcasts
• Explore our online archive, going back to 1828

Most popular

Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

In many respects, Mr Brown can be regarded as an astonishingly successful politician. His agenda was to increase the size of the state and he did exactly that: government spending is now at 53 per cent of the nation’s economic output, up from 37 per cent ten years ago. No other country has expanded its government as quickly — over this or any other decade in postwar history.

Brown set out to destabilise conservatism and he succeeded tremendously. Among his greatest achievements will be that George Osborne signed up to his spending plans (a promise abandoned only when the debt crisis showed where these plans led).

We may not hear Mr Brown’s voice much on the airwaves in future. But you can hear its echo whenever a Conservative MP refers to state spending as ‘investment’, or claims that the Tories care about health because they will protect its budget. If you care, you spend more, is an idea that is fundamental to the Brownian economics in which the Tories have been unwittingly tutored. The Tory decision to keep the 50p tax rate — which will, unusually for a tax, lead to a loss of revenue — is testimony to how, even to the end, the Tories did not feel confident enough to break free of his fiscal traps. Mr Brown may have been a dismal campaigner. But it is hard to think of another politician who so firmly set the terms of debate.

So even if he leaves No. 10 (which looked likely but not inevitable as The Spectator went to press), his ideas will live on. Fear of what Gordon Brown might say has inhibited the Conservative party’s intellectual development for the best part of two decades — it is hard to think of a postwar politician, other than Thatcher, who exerted such an influence on the other party. Mr Brown can thus be regarded as a giant of postwar British politics — who reclaimed for big government vast tracts of territory which the Tories had thought permanently liberated.

We firmly believe that David Cameron’s agenda is bold, and necessary. But how much faster he could move if he did not feel the need to cling on to the 50p tax, the pledge to double overseas aid, and other various tactical concessions made to Mr Brown on the campaign trail. Ernest Bevin once declared that he intended ‘to be Minister of Labour from 1940 to 1990’ by setting the terms of debate. Mr Brown would like to be Chancellor from 1997 to 2027. And with these Tory concessions, we see how he may yet succeed.

Lord Salisbury put it best. ‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies,’ he said. ‘When a mast falls overboard, you do not try to save a rope here and a spar there in memory of their former utility. You cut away the hamper altogether. It should be the same with policy, but it is not so. We cling to the shred of an old policy after it has been torn to pieces, and to the shadow of the shred after the rag itself has been torn away.’

Britain is the victim of Gordon Brown’s failed agenda. His pernicious policies should be identified and discarded. The Conservatives wish to win power. But removing Mr Brown from office is only the first step.