Chris McLaughlin talks to the Prime Minister about crises, cuts, taxes, Tories – and the forthcoming electoral contest
Gordon Brown doesn’t quite put it as succinctly as Barack Obama. He doesn’t share the American leader’s rhetorical style. The passion may be less demonstrative, but it is there all the same when asked if he really thinks Labour can win the 2010 general election. Yes we can, is the message, and while it takes him more words than that to spell out the reasoning, there is no doubt he believes it.
It is the day after the screening of the Piers Morgan party political broadcast on behalf of the Gordon Brown party, family and soul. The day British troops launch the coalition forces’ Operation Moshtarak against the Taliban and the day at least 20 civilians become its first casualties.
Brown is heading back by train from a regional visit to Suffolk where he has been visiting a base where troops are in helicopter training, before dispatch to Afghanistan and to a SureStart centre, one of those the Tories would close if they win the election.
As the City of London skyline appears, with the iconic Gherkin raising an insolent finger to the world on behalf of the banking community, Brown is anxious to talk about his new plan to take on the bankers, and save the world for a second time, although he doesn’t quite put it like that.
He is a late convert to the need for a “Robin Hood” tax, along the lines of the Tobin tax which would place a levy, or a series of levies ranging from 0.05 per cent to 0.005 percent on share trading, currency speculation, derivatives and other more exotic practices. Later in the week, Brown is to take the lead at an international conference of “progressive countries” in support of an attempt to implement the scheme globally.
“What this crisis has shown is that if you do not have global supervision, national regulation by itself is not enough. You’ve got to have global rules for the game, you’ve got to have overall global co-ordination. If you are in a global economy, a national supervisory regime cannot be enough so you’ve got to look at the rules under which financial institutions operate globally and one of those rules is that the banks, the financial institutions, make a proper contribution to society. Lots of banks have able to choose to avoid tax, to move to tax and regulatory havens and now that we are starting to close that down it is possible then to have a global financial levy which global financial institutions would pay as their contribution towards the risks that they potentially impose on society but also on the earnings that they have.
“We are proposing a global financial tax, a big reform of the global economic system. We have a plan for growth and jobs that would reduce unemployment in Europe and around the world. Britain is, as we led the way in restructuring the banking system in 2008, now leading the way with other countries in trying to forge a new international economic system. We have got to make sure that we deal with the problems that exist in the financial system and make sure that the relationship between the risks people place and the rewards they receive is properly aligned.”
According to the Governor of the Bank of England, the British economy is “not out of the woods” yet. Is Brown confident that Britain will not be back in recession before the next election?
“The important thing is not to wreck the recovery and that’s the big point of difference between us and the Conservatives on economic policy. They are so wedded to the old ideology that they would cut away the stimulus now and have cuts in 2010 and the evidence is that public investment has been absolutely crucial to taking the country out of recession and that if it was all withdrawn then there is a danger of this fragile international recovery being undermined. So my message is, don’t wreck the recovery and the one thing that could really wreck the recovery is Tory policies that would withdraw the support.”
But cuts would still come under a Labour government, just later. Why should the less well-off public service workers pay with job losses and salary cuts for the sins of those who created the mess and are still giving themselves huge bonuses?
“The Tories want to cut now. Every international advice is that we should maintain the fiscal stimulus until we are absolutely sure of recovery, but at some point we’ve got to implement a deficit reduction plan. We’ve set out plans to halve the deficit over the next four years. Much of that will be achieved by growth itself, some of it will be achieved by tax changes and some of it by public expenditure changes. I was not afraid to say, in 1997-98 as Chancellor, I had to restrain public expenditure. The 2006 expenditure review cut the budgets of seven departments. We will do what is necessary to make sure that the deficit is reduced by half over the next four years.
“I have tried with Alistair Darling over the last two years to ensure that we maintain public expenditure and public services and at the same time we have helped the economy by ensuring thousands of people given help to get back to work, hundreds of thousands of businesses being given help with cash flow and people being protected against the sort of mortgage repossessions we saw in the 1990s. So we, the Labour Government, made the decision to protect people against recession in a way that no other government has done in Britain and in a way that was quite different from the 1980s and 1990s. We accepted that it was right at that stage to raise the deficit but that once the recovery has happened it is right also to deal with the deficit. We will protect frontline services and I think we have already shown that schools and policing budgets will rise but the important thing to realise is that it is possible to make economies in other areas and it is possible while the whole economy keeps rising.”
The suggestion that Trident would be a more prudent expenditure cut gets short shrift. Britain is ready to cut its nuclear arsenal but only part of a multi-lateral agreement, achieving non-proliferation is more likely from a position of nuclear strength: “ Our aim is to reduce the number of weapons the nuclear states have while at the same time persuading non-nuclear states not to acquire nuclear weapons.”
On the day that David Cameron embraced the concept of co-operatives, what will the Government do to encourage more mutualisation, especially in the banking sector?
“I think the banking system needs more entrants and we do what we can to encourage people to enter it. We have a proposal to use the Post Office as a banking system and to ensure that people can save more effectively through the Post Office. We want to see the equivalent of a savings institution for individuals, what is effectively a bank for innovation, a new investment fund for innovation and better services in banking for small business and if we need to do that with the public sector more involved we will do that.”
What needs to be done before we can say mission completed in Afghanistan?
“We are in Afghanistan because we want to keep the streets of Britain safe. I know that some people doubt this connection, but I’ve got to remind people that three-quarters of the terrorist plots we’ve had to deal with on a major basis have started in Pakistan-Afghanistan and if the Taliban were to get control back in Afghanistan and if al Qaida were to have the freedom to roam across Afghanistan there would be a greater danger and that’s what most other countries think as well so it’s a 43-nation coalition.
“What we’ve got to do is to help the Afghans themselves run their own country free of the Taliban. Now, we know there is no popular support for the Taliban but we also know that we’ve got to strengthen the Afghan security forces and the Afghan civil institutions, including local government and therefore the issue for me is training up the Afghan forces, police, ensuring that there is local provincial district governors and that there is local government that is working. And once we’ve trained the Afghan forces then we can gradually bring down the number of British coalition forces.”
And the timeline?
“There is no timeline. What there is, is a proposal that we start handing over control district by district, province by province, starting in 2010 and what we also propose is that by 2011 Afghan forces will be at a total level of about 300,000, police and army and that will be far bigger than the coalition forces so gradually the other forces can be reduced.”
Aren’t the security services pulling the wool over the Government’s eyes over torture or did ministers know about MI5 complicity?
“I oppose torture and cannot condone any situation in which it is used. Where there have been questions asked we have rightly been asked for them to be investigated. We are about to publish new guidelines for the security services to make it absolutely clear what their responsibilities in this area are. But we should not ignore the fact that Britain has strong and effective security services which have served us with distinction over many years.”
What about closer oversight by the House of Commons?
“I have always thought that the Intelligence and Security Committee should have a stronger role in relation to the House of Commons and I did actually create, after I took up this job, new procedures for it to act. I think we can always consider going further. I’ve got to listen to what’s being said by them and by other people as well. I want to proceed on a consensual basis.”
It is “absolute nonsense”, he says, to suggest that there are any Cabinet rifts over the election strategy.
“You have got to go for the widest coalition possible, renewing the coalition that won us the 1997 and 2005 elections. Our strategy is core values not core votes. Core values are what we believe in, why we act, prosperity and justice for all. It is the Conservative Party that are betraying the middle classes, they are refusing to give people the support they need, they are going to take away the child trust fund from potentially millions of people, they are going to take away the child tax credit from more than a million middle-class families, they are refusing to support education to 18 which is the key to opportunity for millions of teenagers in this country and their families, they are refusing to support SureStart, other than for the “tragic” disadvantaged 20 per cent and are refusing to make them universal. In all these areas the Tories are hurting middle Britain.
“We are going to build a fairer future for all the people of this country. The Tory theory has been proven to be wrong. They have been exposed as a party that is clinging on to the orthodoxies of the 1930s when it is clear that laissez-faire just leaves people behind.”
Why have you converted to the alternative vote now?
“I think the events of the last year, the MPs’ expenses, has changed a lot for me. I never knew that MPs were in this position. I think people were genuinely shocked by some of the revelations and I think we have got to prove that as a political system we are more accountable to the people of the country. And I think what we can do is give people the choice as to whether they want their MP to be elected with the majority of the votes of their constituents.”
How does the expenses scandal lead to AV?
“You’ve got to change more than the processes of drawing up expenses forms. You’ve got to show people that you are ready to listen more and to make Parliament more accountable. One way to make Parliament more accountable is, first of all, to give people more choice over the way the system works, so that’s why there is a referendum, and secondly, to put a proposal to ensure that every MP who is elected will not have 20 or 30 per cent of the votes cast as has been true in the past and will have more than 50 per cent.”
Brown delivers a short display of exasperation at the possibility of working with the Liberal Democrats on a policy-by-policy arrangement in a hung Parliament.
“Look, I’ve just got to tell you that we as a Labour Party are going all out for victory and we will fight every inch of the way to secure
as many seats as possible and to secure a majority, so we are not contemplating any other scenarios.”
And does he think he can do it?
“I’m not complacent. I believe we have made huge advances in the last few months in exposing the Conservative Party, but also in showing that Labour is the party of strong ideas about the future. It is the Labour Party that has been leading all the debates. The Tory Party are the first opposition party to have run out of ideas even before there is an election, even before they have written their manifesto.
“But I don’t want people to wake up six months from now and find their services have been cut under the Conservatives. I don’t want to see a Britain where all the advances we have made together over the last 12 years by investing in our public services have been swept away, that is the danger and I think people are starting to ask questions about the Conservative Party and starting to see through them.
“At then end of the day politics is about judgement and the Tory Party under [David Cameron’s] leadership wants to present itself as middle-of-the-road and centrist and pro-poor and pro-public services, but whenever the challenge is made about what they would do they reveal themselves as totally unreconstructed. So the problem the Tories have is that there is a huge difference between how they want to appear and what they actually believe. There is a difference between the brand which they portray and the beliefs which they hold. They are essentially an unreconstructed party and they are just posing as new. When people look into it in greater depth, they find it is the same old Tories.”
And if that leadership deal wasn’t done at Granita’s after all, where was it done?
“I’m not going to talk about that anymore.”
Not even in the book? “What book? I’ve absolutely no interest in that, I’m just getting on with the job.”
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