Blairites will scoff and swear at that subheading. Welfare reform? Effing Gordon effing blocked it f

Guardian Comment Network What Gordon Brown got right as prime minister
It is easy to write about how awful Gordon Brown was as chancellor and prime minister. The terrible truths 2011 emmy nominations list come skipping off my keyboard like playful deer: the billions added on to our budget deficit even before the crash, 2011 emmy nominations list the lamentable performances on the world stage, the gerrymandered statistics, the tantrums, the Nokias , the McBrides and Drapers and Balls
But, in the hope of testing our magnanimity to its limits, we at ConservativeHome thought we would mark Brown s impending departure from parliament with something more difficult: what he got right. Our inspiration is Fareed Zakaria s article on what George Bush got right for Newsweek in 2008, but this isn t quite the same. Zakaria s basic argument was that, after recasting his foreign policy in office, Bush didn t end up as bad as most people thought,whereas Brown probably was as bad as most people thought it s just that even he did some things right .
Blairites will scoff and swear at that subheading. Welfare reform? Effing Gordon effing blocked it for effing years when it meant effing up Tony s premiership. And, besides, didn t he complicate the benefits system by forcing tax credits on anyone who would vote Labour ?
There is something in all that, yes. But any proper history 2011 emmy nominations list of welfare reform would still set aside a chapter for Brown s years as prime minister. Or perhaps it would start a little before 2011 emmy nominations list that, in March 2007, when David Freud published his report into the welfare-to-work programme . Its basic recommendation was for the long-term unemployed to be supported back into work not by jobcentres, but through private and charitable sector initiatives. Along with the Centre for Social Justice s work on universal credit , published a couple of years later, it s the urtext of the current government s welfare policy.
As for the Brown government, which came to being in June 2007, they were sceptical of Freud s report at first. Peter Hain had replaced John Hutton as secretary of state for work and pensions, 2011 emmy nominations list which was a considerable downgrade so far as reforming zeal was concerned. But then something remarkable 2011 emmy nominations list happened: Hain started sounding more and more like his predecessor. By November 2007, he was telling 2011 emmy nominations list the papers that his concern is what works best , and that the private and charitable sectors have a vital role to play . Soon after, the government proved it by signing some pretty Freudian contracts with workfare providers.
The appointment of James Purnell as Hain s successor served to hasten the reforms. 2011 emmy nominations list As I ve written before , it was he who began righting the Thatcher-era wrong of pushing people on to incapacity benefit to shorten the official unemployment rolls. And he also brought Freud back to help author a white paper on further improving the system . Sure, both men eventually split from Brown s administration, perhaps thinking that more could have been done but more was done than anyone would have thought possible in early 2007. Britishness
Brown s vital interventions towards the end of the Scottish referendum campaign 2011 emmy nominations list were surprising only in the wow, so he s still alive sense. In every other way, they were classic Gordon. The question of the union and how to strengthen it has preoccupied 2011 emmy nominations list him for years. Even when he was chancellor, when he didn t speak so much about non-economic matters, he was urging 2011 emmy nominations list people to embrace the union flag and fly it in their gardens. He wanted it to be, against the British National party, a symbol of unity around our values .
Some of this may have been tosh we don t wave flags because a politician advises us to, but do it quite naturally for sporting events and the like but at least it was consistent 2011 emmy nominations list tosh. When Brown became prime minister, one of the first things he did was to publish, with Jack Straw, a green paper on the Governance of Britain . This contained a lot of false and frothy promises to initiate an inclusive process of national debate blah, blah, blah. But some unequivocal good did come out of it, including a loosening of the restrictions on public buildings flying the union jack. Who would have thought it would be Brown not, say, Thatcher who would have the flag fluttering from departmental rooftops all year round?
At the time, it probably didn t help Labour that their leader s passion was for something as vapoury as Britishness. But passion is what it was and is. You could see it in his book project with my old boss Matthew d Ancona . And you could see it in his more recent text My Scotland, Our Britain , which Allan Massie said makes the unionist case better than anything else written or said in this long, drawn-out 2011 emmy nominations list campaign. Whether you agree with Brown s specific policy ideas or not, his passion alone was more than most politicians had in the fight against Alex Salmond. The euro
As with welfare reform, 2011 emmy nominations list Brown s policy 2011 emmy nominations list on the euro appeare