Gordon Brown: ‘Brexit was fought on Project Fear. Nobody put the case for Europe. Nobody’

Fintan O'Toole: The current pandemic represents a huge global crisis and after the banking collapse of 2008 you found yourself in the middle of a very different crisis. What is it like to be in that position?

Gordon Brown, former British prime minister and Labour MP: There's two things I learned about this. One is you've got to get to the root of the problem quickly; if you don't understand what your problem is, you will spend ages trying to have palliatives and expedients that don't actually deal with the problem . . . And secondly you've got to be ahead of events . . . and the real problem about this [Covid-19] crisis is that most of our leaderships were behind the curve.

What I saw in the first few weeks of this crisis inspired me to write this book – the lack of co-operation . . . I looked at the figures today. Three billion vaccinations but we need to have 11 billion. Africa only 1 per cent of the population vaccinated fully, India only 3 per cent . . . If you can’t vaccinate the rest of the world, then you have an ethical problem – half the world vaccinated, half the world not – you’ve got an epidemiological problem, it’s going to come back to haunt us.

The G7 a few weeks ago should have had a plan to vaccinate the world . . . co-operation at an international level has been minimal. It's been disgraceful, actually ,and it's been a real moral failure because we are leaving thousands of our fellow citizens to die.

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F O'T: Are we in a general crisis of losing our moral centre?

GB: I think people have recognised the dependence on each other and I think that people have recognised how important it is to have a community where people support each other . . . [Joe] Biden's latest economic programme shows you're not going to be back to the neoliberal economics of the past.

We know what’s wrong . . . to put it right depends on a more enlightened view of how we can co-operate with each other across borders . . . we’ve got to have better forms of international co-operation and I think the 21st century will be tested.

F O'T: The book really places the idea of a restoration of equality as a fundamental economic and political goal at its heart.

GB: What we've seen in the last few years is the rise of a particularly illiberal and populist form of nationalism . . . it's xenophobic, it's isolationist, it's anti-immigrant obviously . . . a nationalist sort of attack on the failures of globalisation and an attempt to exploit it by the idea of taking back control. This is people weaponising economic insecurity, cultural fears, you know, my country's not what it used to be. This populist nationalism will make European unity impossible, it will break up Britain. And while Biden beat Trump, we can't forget that Trump got 73 million votes and he had a large amount of support from people who felt themselves excluded. So, this is a movement that's got to be dealt with around the world.

F O'T: Corporate taxation is a sensitive subject here because Ireland gets a lot of foreign direct investment and has invested itself in this almost totemic idea of low corporate taxes. Your book suggests that this era's over.

GB: I think Ireland itself realises that if you're going to keep companies you've got to have the skills, the training, the infrastructure, and all sorts of other advantages that make them want to stay in your country, not simply a tax advantage.

I don’t actually think the current proposals do much damage to Ireland because you’ve got a 12.5 per cent rate and the minimum proposed rate is 15 per cent. You know, Biden’s proposing 21 per cent, Britain is about to introduce a 25 per cent rate, so 15 per cent is relatively low. I think over time it will be actually higher, but I think you can deal with that.

F O'T: Climate change obviously is a huge reality that you're also dealing with in the book.

GB: If countries cannot get an agreement at COP26, which is being held in Glasgow in November, that you're going to speed up the reduction of carbon in your economy now, it will be impossible to meet that target by 2050 or even by 2100, you've got to take action now and the most difficult decision is actually taking action now.

F O'T: I was blindsided, not by Brexit itself so much but by this rise in English nationalism. Did this strike you at all that there was this resentful English identity which was emerging?

GB: The roots of this lie in the financial crash, what was happening to the economy, in people's sense of economic insecurity and people's feeling that they really have got very little out of the global economy.

You can't ignore the fact that people are patriotic; English, Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish, they're patriotic. And so our campaign should have been that we can achieve something in Europe because we can lead in Europe and we shouldn't be leaving Europe. But instead we fought this campaign on Project Fear . . . And nobody was putting the case for Europe during that referendum. Nobody.

F O'T: It must feel depressing watching Boris Johnson, who seems to have no sense of public duty or trying to be serious about the public good.

GB: Our lack of understanding of what our role is going to be in the future, indeed the obsession with a role instead of your ideas and your interests, is something that makes you feel that the government doesn't quite know where it is going.

There are two views of Britain. And they’re held sometimes by the same people. One is this idealised view of Britain standing alone, you know, Britain, the Dunkirk spirit, self-sufficient. And the other view of Britain, the trading nation, the merchant venturers, out to the world . . . We’ve got to make up our mind: are we open internationally, engaged and outward-looking, or are we going to glory in isolation?

We should have tested the case [for war in Iraq] a lot more closely. And, yes, I think it was responsible for the loss of trust in the British government at the time

F O'T: Can the UK survive without very radical constitutional change . . . the logic of federalism would seem to be really the only answer to separatism.

GB: England is 85 per cent of the United Kingdom population-wise. Scotland is 8 per cent, Wales is 5 per cent and Northern Ireland far less. So, you've got an asymmetry that makes a federal arrangement quite difficult. But you can get pretty close . . . We've got a Scottish parliament, a Welsh assembly, a Northern Ireland Assembly and very strong constituencies for strong regional mayors in Manchester and Liverpool.

So, we’ve been trying to operate as a unitary state in a multinational culture with a great deal of regional diversity and a very layered set of identities, and I think the constitution has got to come to terms with the reality of the country . . . I think that’s true of many countries in Europe, actually, not just Britain.

F O'T: How worried are you post-Brexit about the British government's apparent willingness to use things like the Northern Ireland protocol as a sort of a proxy war almost with the European Union?

GB: You've got to work at Northern Ireland . . . it needs time, and until you have a prime minister and a leadership that is prepared to spend that time listening to people . . . this is the one way that we can stop things descending into chaos and into, potentially, and as we've seen in the past, violence.

I worked well with Micheál Martin [onn Northern Ireland] and he was always someone who wanted to see progress . . . But I don’t deny that the structural characteristics of this are more difficult than they were 10 years ago. You’ve now got Brexit . . . You’ve also got the changing demography of Northern Ireland. You’ve got the DUP now it’s split . . . so you’ve got the potential for them not to be the first party in Northern Ireland next May.

And then a lot of the issues that caused the Partition in the first place are actually no longer as important as they used to be. So, there must be scope for making far greater progress as well.

F O'T: Was the Iraq War a crucial point in the loss of trust or a sense of people believing what they were being told by government?

GB: We were misled by people in the American administration who did know better . . . But we didn't have the right information at the time . . . we should have tested the case [for war] a lot more closely. And, yes, I think it was responsible for the loss of trust in the British government at the time.

F O'T: Can you name one good thing about Brexit?

GB: Europe is sometimes too formulistic and dogmatic. I think the fiscal policy in the European Union is not going to work in the recovery effort; a lot's got to be done to make it work far more successfully.

The fiscal orthodoxy now is very different to 10 years ago and that’s obviously accepted by the Biden policy in America, which is to go for expansion. When the private sector fails, the public sector is going to move in. But once the public sector can get growth, you can get revenues and you can therefore get your debts and deficits down. But it looks as if there’s going to be a big divide in Europe over the next year or two about whether you drop these very rigid fiscal rules that didn’t really work.

Europe has had low growth for 10 years. Ireland’s done relatively well compared to other countries, but low growth is something that destroys jobs, destroys income, and makes people worse off than they should be. So, Europe’s going to have to resolve this at some point.

F O'T: There's a marked optimism to the book. How have you maintained that sense of optimism?

GB: [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn was not a great optimist about human nature but he did say bridgehead of good . . . I think we've seen it during this crisis. People wanting to help other people, people giving up a lot, risking their lives. I think we need people to be talking in terms of hope . . . look at Mandela, he was no master of detail but he gave out a hopeful vision of a multiracial South Africa and then a multiracial world . . . And now you see the #MeToo movement, you see Black Lives Matter . . .

These are big movements for change. The things we thought impossible a few years ago are possible now. I think we’ve got to give people a message of hope.

This is an edited version of Gordon Brown’s interview with columnist Fintan O’Toole at The Irish Times Summer Nights Festival on June 30th