Gordon Brown, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had been in office for less than a year at the start of the Great Recession, in December of 2007. Brown, who had spent the previous decade as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, implemented a rescue plan after the 2008 market crash, which included aiding British banks and hosting a G-20 summit that led to a crucial package of support for ailing economies from the International Monetary Fund. Despite generally high marks for his management of the crisis, however, Brown lost an election in 2010 to the Conservative Party’s David Cameron, after which the Conservatives embarked on an austerity push.
Brown remained in Parliament for five more years, and published a book, “Beyond the Crash,” that reviews Britain’s response to the financial crisis, surveys global economic challenges, and argues for greater worldwide coördination in order to head off future disasters. As the coronavirus pandemic and economic distress have worsened around the world, Brown has again been talking up the benefits of international coöperation. The crisis has compelled governments to inject more money into their economies than at any time in recent history, but has led to only halting collaboration. In the United Kingdom, which has had some fourteen thousand deaths from the coronavirus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson flirted with a “herd immunity” strategy before announcing that a lockdown has only just started to stymie the further spread of the disease, which at one point landed him in an intensive-care unit.
On Wednesday, I spoke by phone with Brown, who is currently the United Nations special envoy for global education. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the difficulties of international coöperation at a time of rising demagoguery, the future of center-left politics, and why Downing Street is a very bad place for social distancing.
Sir, it’s Isaac Chotiner, at The New Yorker.
Yes. I am sorry for getting you up so early in California. You must at least have good weather out there.
Where are you right now?
Just outside Edinburgh. They say Scotland has two seasons: June and winter.
What was your biggest lesson about global coöperation in 2008 and how does it relate to today?
That you’ve got to work hard to make it effective. And I think people may be discouraged at the moment, because they see China going in one direction, America going in another direction, Europe quite divided over its own response. And, therefore, people may feel that some international coöperation is not going to be effective, and therefore it’s not worth fighting for, and that would be a terrible mistake.
When we created the G-20 as the new leaders’ organization, the G-7 was not that much in favor, because it could have been overshadowed. And so we had to work very hard to get everybody together around the same table. [Laughs] In fact, it was called the G-20, but I think there were twenty-three or twenty-four countries at the first meeting, just because the politics of it made it difficult to get everybody agreed, even on the composition. But I think the lesson is that, if it’s necessary and it has to be done, you have got to work really hard. And I can’t see that an exit strategy from the virus is going to work as successfully as it should unless we have that level of international coöperation.
What does “work hard” mean in practice, if you’re a world leader?
Well, night and day. We were talking to Australia at one point in the day and to New York and Washington at a different point in the day. People were going to sleep all over the world as we were trying to bring people together—with the advantage, of course, of being in London at that time and being able to operate with the different time zones. It was difficult to persuade people initially that this was going to be necessary, because for a while the Europeans did not think that the global financial crisis was global. They thought it was American or Anglo-Saxon. They didn’t realize until quite late that the biggest problems in the banks were actually in Europe. Half the subprime in America was actually being sold to European banks. So you have to persuade people that it’s relevant to them, as well.
World leaders were far from perfect in 2008 and 2009, but we didn’t see the situation we have today, with authoritarians rising around the world and some of the biggest countries on Earth, such as Brazil and India and the United States, controlled by demagogues, often with no interest in science. Is it naïve to assume that global coöperation is even possible now in the same way?
Interestingly enough, we have America First, we have China First, we have India First. The “First movement,” so to speak, has gone global, and you have probably what might be called an international coalition of anti-internationalists. After 2010, we had a defensive nationalism, which was basically about tariffs, closing borders, building walls, and immigration controls. More recently, we’ve had a more aggressive nationalism, which is an us-versus-them nationalism. It’s unilateral action. You could argue that America in a unipolar age acted more multilaterally, and in a multipolar age is acting unilaterally. So there are difficulties.
But the issue of global health invites a popular understanding—which I think is shared actually across America—that you need international coöperation to deal with a global pandemic. And I think the Pew opinion poll that I saw a few days ago suggested that a vast majority of Americans, Republicans and Democrats, believe that the one issue on which you needed international coöperation most was global pandemics or global health.
And you need it really for three reasons. One is research for a vaccine. It’s going to be best achieved by coördinating efforts internationally. There are about a hundred vaccines that have been investigated at the moment, and I think about five in development. There are about two in testing. You’d probably get to a stage where you may have three or four that are worth scaling up. But you need to do that on such a massive scale around the globe that I think people do understand that, if the vaccine is going to work, it’s going to have to be available in all countries, and therefore it’s a collaborative international effort.
The same thing is true of capacity—the ventilators, the test equipment, the protective health equipment. The issue at the moment that people find difficult is that everybody’s competing for a limited amount of capacity or supply, when in fact what we should be doing is building up the capacity. We should have an international plan to produce them, to procure a huge amount of additional capacity in these areas where we know that testing equipment is going to be needed in every part of the world. And we know that ventilators are needed even in some of the poorest parts of the world, where they don’t have them.
The third thing is the second round of the disease. And I think people do realize that if you have a second and third wave, and perhaps it comes out of some of the poorest countries—which have never had the protected health systems or the social safety nets that could allow for social distancing and people not to go to work and everything else—we’ve got to do something to help these countries. And so the case is very strong. I think public opinion is actually more attuned to this than people believe.
At the same time, you have President Trump cutting funding for the W.H.O. and you have leaders who seem to keep getting elected who are anti-science and anti-coöperation. So people may say they want this, but—
I mean, I think one of the problems in this is that, look, America has pulled out of U.N.R.W.A. [the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees], it pulled out of funding UNESCO, has pulled out of the nuclear-weapons treaty, has pulled out of the climate-change agreement, but, if you give up on this, then the world is a less safe place and it’s also a more vulnerable and fragile place. And, if you don’t bring China and America together to try and to solve some of these problems, then they’re not going to be so easily solved.
We did manage to do it in 2009, and it was a group of us working together that managed to do it. And the Republican and Democratic Presidents in America were both involved in these initiatives. Europe, which is of course to some extent divided today between north and south over the response to the crisis, managed to come together and would do so again. Pedro Sánchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, has suggested a new Marshall Plan.
What I would do is call a pledging conference to try and solve these problems. In fact, President Trump’s complaint yesterday was actually that there had been too little international coöperation at the beginning. You may not have thought that that was how you would take his remarks when he criticized the World Health Organization and China, but he was basically saying there was not enough coöperation at the beginning to understand what the disease was about and to get things moving. And I would call a pledging conference. With the European Union, Japan, the rest of Asia, and then Africa pushing for it, I think China and America would want, in the end, to be part of that.
I just want to turn to the U.K. for a minute. What do you think would happen—
Just let me finish on global health. When we talk about the World Health Organization, I think we’re failing to recognize it is essentially a network of networks, and if it hadn’t been created by now it would have to be created to deal with this problem, because it is coördinating the funding of the search for a vaccine under this organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. It’s got a coördinating role also in this organization called FIND, which is the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics. It’s involved in a thing called the Therapeutics Accelerator, to find cures, and of course it’s involved in helping developing countries be better prepared than they are for a time when they’re hit and they don’t have adequate health systems.
Now, when you come to talk about the World Health Organization and just think of it as a bureaucracy, that’s maybe where you can make political headway in criticizing it, but there has been an international public-health organization since 1851. It was very much part of the League of Nations and the United Nations, that global public health was essential to any global coöperation, and I think somehow they’re mistaking the fact that if you need, as you do, data, you need an exchange of expertise and information. You need the coming together of experts.
The United Kingdom looks like it’s headed toward being one of the most affected countries in Europe. Why do you think that is?
I think we’ve got to wait and see what is going to happen in the next few weeks. I’ve been very reluctant to pronounce on individual countries and what’s happening to them. I sympathize obviously with those people who are facing the difficulties they are, and the number of deaths in any country is unacceptable. But I’m hesitant about drawing conclusions at the moment about what’s happening in individual countries.
I asked because Britain obviously flirted for a while with the herd-immunity strategy. The Prime Minister was shaking hands with COVID-19 victims in the hospital, and so on, and then shifted to social distancing.
I think there’s going to be a review and an inquiry at some point into what happened. But I’m making anything I say more about what we do in the future rather than what’s happened in the past. I want to be constructive rather than critical. I do see that one of the missing elements in the solution to this crisis is learning the lesson that you have got to work together internationally.
O.K., but how much more difficult would it be for a British Prime Minister, any British Prime Minister, to take a leadership role right now after Britain has departed from Europe? Do you think the British global role is the same, or could be the same, if there was the desire?
I think Britain has played a role in the last twenty or thirty years in some of the big international developments. The creation of the Global Fund. And, of course, we led the way in 2001 in the big initiative that relieved about two hundred billion in debt in some of the poorest countries in the world. So I don’t think 2008 is the only incidence where Britain has tried to play a part.
Each country has bilateral relationships—Britain with America, Britain with Europe, Britain with the Commonwealth—but I think we’ve got to understand the importance of the global architecture and how it can be better and more effectively working to solve global problems that do need global responses. So I think Britain obviously is still working inside the European Union—although it’s officially left, it’s still part of the European trading arrangement at the moment. So if there was a pledging conference to raise money for health, then Britain would be part of that, I hope. I mean, certainly Norway, which is outside the European Union, would be part of it. So there’s no reason why Britain cannot be involved in these big initiatives.
But one reason, and I know you don’t want to criticize people—
[Laughs] You’re drawing me into a wider discussion.
The Europeans were often very angry with the British, and international coöperation goes both ways, and relationships involve reciprocity.
You know, I’m not going to apologize. I’m a pro-European and I wanted Britain to stay part of Europe, and everybody knows that. And I regret the fact that Britain is leaving. But I don’t think that should prevent the kind of coöperation we’re talking about. And I don’t even think it should prevent Britain playing a part in leading that coöperation today and over these next few years. I do come back to this: if you cannot find the basis of reconciling globalists and nationalists in terms of their over-all outlook on the world generally, you’ve got, in my view, to be more pragmatic and say look on the individual issues where there’s an urgency—and it could be climate change, it could be some pandemics, it could be cybersecurity, it could be nuclear nonproliferation—which are so important to the future of humanity. You’ve got to try and find a way of working together.
The world’s got poor options. You can go back to the Washington Consensus, which is a simple view about how the world economies should be run. But that is not even supported as a consensus in Washington now. So that’s in a way gone. You could embrace some sort of America First, India First, China First—some sort of unilateralism that just says to let the world continue in a way where every country just does its own thing and it’s everyone for himself. You could accept that it’s one world, two systems, and that’s what we’re moving toward—China and America. Each of these models for the world seems to be wholly unsatisfactory.
I was asking because I know the British government had missed some meetings with the E.U. about preparing for the coronavirus in February and March, and I’m sure that was the type of thing that upset you.
I can understand that there’s a lot of questions about what Britain’s future relationship with Europe is going to be. But Britain is still part of the single market and the Customs Union at this point in time. And if there was, like I’m arguing for, a pledging conference, I do think Britain would be part of it with the rest of the European Union and with countries, like Norway, which are outside the European Union but historically have wanted to coöperate when all these issues come about. I see no reason why Britain can’t coöperate on these big issues and actually play a leading role if it chooses to do so.
Two things and then I’ll let you go.
It’s O.K. I got you up very early, so I feel guilty about that.
How do you think the need for massive government investment and stimulus will change politics going forward? I’ve heard people suggest that this will be the end of kind of a Tony Blair-style neoliberalism, and further saying that Conservative governments are going to have to move away from austerity, as we’ve seen Boris Johnson’s government do.
I never subscribed to neoliberalism, nor do I think did the Labour government. I think what we were trying to do was to find a way of managing globalization. It can either be well managed or badly managed, but it cannot be left unmanaged. So this was not a sort of neoliberal approach to the way the economy should be run.
I think the big issue is not so much the amount of intervention that’s been necessary at the moment, because this is a temporary intervention to try to keep the economy moving forward—first to protect jobs and companies, and then to get us back to growth. I think the real issue is going to be the balance between risk and security, because I think people are understanding that the social contract we have at the moment really has not measured up to the challenges that we face. People will be worried about the risks that they face in their individual lives. They’ll be worried that they’re not being properly insured. They’ll be worried that the social contract is particularly hard on people who are already vulnerable. And young people are finding it difficult to buy houses and now they’re finding it difficult to get secure jobs. And the gig economy is not working to give them the security that we feel we need.
I think, however, that this balance between risk and security will become a big, big issue in the next few years. It will not be expressed that way, but it will be people saying that they want a better protection in health care. They want better social care for the elderly, and not to leave them vulnerable. They don’t want to be unemployed without any form of social protection, and they may be willing to support better forms of social protection in the future.
When you look at the austerity that Britain went through, especially in the first half of the last decade, do you think it will have an effect or has had an effect on the way Britain has been able to respond?
I think austerity has been proved to be the wrong policy economically as well as socially. And, obviously, not enough was spent on our public services, including our health service. I think, however—if you want to look at this in a wider context—that, when I was working to try to get Britain out of recession, in 2009, fiscal activism was not popular. We didn’t win the election because debt and deficit was a major issue that was thrown up against us.
For the years until about 2015 and 2016, fiscal activism was regarded as the unorthodox and unacceptable way of dealing with a crisis. I think that has changed. I think there’s a new orthodoxy that understands that the government’s got to play its part. So the fiscal-obsessive view, or the obsessively orthodox view of 2009, 2010, which led to austerity, I think has been discredited.
We’ve got another set of issues that we’ve got to deal with, and that’s the issue of inflation, because I think probably people still feel that their economies are at risk if they allow some inflation back into the system. I think we’ve got to get a more balanced view of economic policies for the future.
Boris Johnson’s recovering from the disease himself. Did you have a plan in place if you ever got sick, and what was it?
I think it’s very difficult working in Downing Street, because—I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but—it’s two houses that have been knocked together. And imagine a hundred people working in two houses. So that’s really what you’ve got, is people working very close to each other, side by side, desks and corridors and people sort of falling over each other because you’re trying to operate a system of government.
The pre-quarantine quarantine.
Yeah. But a hundred people working in very close quarters is not a good sort of illustration of social distance, is it? So I think it’s unfortunate that so many people who are at the center of the crisis did suffer from the virus. It’s possibly understandable given the working conditions, but people in other countries may find it strange that you’ve got two old houses as the center of your system of government.
And Boris—it must be very difficult for him. We have sent him a message. Although he’s now recovering, it must be very difficult when you’ve got your biggest crisis that you’re actually wanting to be at the heart of the solution and you’re prevented because of being ill. So you’ve got to feel for someone who’s in that position, because leadership is about being there at the time when you’re most needed.
I, funnily enough, was never in hospital when I was Prime Minister. I did have a problem with my eyes, but I never had to pass over any days to anybody else. Remember, the British system is very informal. There’s not the formality of having a Vice-President and there’s not the constitutional requirements that’s got to be met. It’s far more informal. So Boris effectively chose who he wanted to take over for him.
Did you have a plan in place?
I think everybody had plans but I never contemplated that it was likely to be necessary. Most people, when they’re in an office like that, don’t expect to be taken out when they’re working so hard. You expect to be able to continue. The challenges of office have really changed over the last hundred years. When Disraeli and Gladstone were Prime Ministers in Britain, one could be writing a novel, the other studying literature. They could be writing letters every day to friends, like Asquith during the First World War. The pace of government has changed so fundamentally that it is potentially a twenty-four-hours-a-day job, if you allow it to be that.
Didn’t Harold Macmillan used to sit and read Jane Austen for long stretches, to calm his nerves?
Well, there’s a wonderful story about John F. Kennedy arriving in Britain for a meeting with Harold Macmillan, and arriving to meet him and finding that Harold Macmillan was still asleep. And, now, if that had happened today or even five years ago, ten years ago, it would have been an international crisis—“President snubbed by Prime Minister.” But Kennedy apparently just waited in the waiting room, took a copy of the Times and read it, and waited for Harold Macmillan to get up. [Laughs] A very different world from where we are now.
It’s such an interesting illustration also of the pace of government, isn’t it? That you could be the President of America and wait in the waiting room, whereas every visit I had with a President the timing was split-second, and if you weren’t there at a certain point people would be asking questions about whether there was a snub or whether there was a breach in the relationship that had caused something to not work to clockwork. So the pace of government has changed fundamentally, but we’re still operating out of these two houses.
Sir, thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me.
Well, I hope it makes sense. And I hope getting up in the morning proves to be worthwhile.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
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- How the coronavirus behaves inside of a patient.
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- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
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- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under coronavirus quarantine.
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