Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband's new books reviewed by Iain Macwhirter

Bodley Head, £18.99

Seven Ways to Change the World: How to Fix the Most Pressing Problems We Face

Gordon Brown

Simon and Schuster, £25

Review by Iain Macwhirter

“War! I must write my memoirs.” So begins a Goon Show skit (available on BBC Sounds) about the race to publish during the Second World War. Every crisis is an opportunity ... for politicians to claim a piece of the action. Publishers who wouldn't normally be interested in recycling their thoughts suddenly see a gap in the market.

And so, with the pandemic we have two substantial tomes from ex-Labour leaders, which contain many sensible ideas, a lot of humanity and a bit of history all tied up with the kind of hopey-changey rhetoric that goes down well at elite gatherings like Davos. It is all about “The Power of Hope”, says Gordon Brown, with thunderous banality in Seven Ways to Change the World.

These fixes turn out to be policies he championed in government: education, poverty reduction, and empowering global financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. The text is pumped up with the kind of breathless rhetorical flourishes favoured by political speech-writers because no-one really asks what they mean. Brown says his ideas are “not just at the radical end of the possible, but the credible end of the desirable”. Yoda would have been proud.

Brown is actually a rather good, if wordy, writer. He is a genuine intellectual and a statesman of immense experience. So, what is he doing resorting to leaden cliches like: “Never Lose Sight Of the Big Picture” or “Build Upon What's Best In People” in his chapter sub-headings?

Over at Go Big, the big picture from Ed Miliband is even bigger, the best even bester. The former Labour leader, who succeeded Brown, says we have failed to realise the power of going large, but the pandemic has finally shown us the way. “As the justified complaints from the left-out and the left-behind grow,” says Mr Big, “Covid-19 and its aftermath will force issues of inequality onto every country's agenda.”

Or maybe it won't. I mean, why should it? Throughout both books there is an assumption that the pandemic provides a favourable climate for world peace, saving the planet, ending nasty nationalism and delivering a new social contract. But Covid has arguably led to a revival of nationalism, border closures, the breakdown of international supply chains and many other developments which do not seem to be moving history in the bien pensant direction.

Ed Miliband's big ideas will be familiar to anyone who has read Labour manifestos over the years – Green New Deal, affordable housing, devolution, social care. The Universal Basic Income is rebranded as the “Freedom Dividend”. “You Only Get the Justice You Have the Power to Compel” he says inscrutably. He means power to the people, citizens’ assemblies and votes at age 16.

Like Gordon Brown, Miliband enlists the great and the good in the cause of Bigness. Greta Thunberg, naturally, and John F Kennedy, Antonio Gramsci, Amartya Sen, Martin Luther King, Hillary Clinton. Though he does point out that when the former First Lady was first approached by the campaign Black Lives Matter (BLM) in 2016, she responded that “all lives matter”. Bernie Sanders did too, saying that “white lives matter, Hispanic lives matter” and that BLM had no coherent political objectives. That would get those icons of the Democratic Party cancelled if they said it today. Yet they had a point. But Ed uncritically endorses BLM, along with the School Strike and Extinction Rebellion – because they're there.

Both books belong to the school of political writing that stirs together whatever movements happen currently to be getting the best headlines and then applies them like a lick of paint to their own fairly conventional policy agendas. Gordon Brown also drags in Black Lives Matter, Extinction Rebellion, #MeToo, Greenpeace. George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, Sir David Attenborough like a moral chorus line in a pageant of platitudes.

Go Big could equally be called Go Small because Miliband is an advocate of community politics, of the kind the Liberal Democrats used to champion. He's all for vigorous localism: “from flexible working in Finland to the first halal Nando's in Cardiff”. Miliband has taken to heart publishers’ advice to “show not tell”. So, we get the women's strike in Iceland, flood relief in the village of Toll Bar, the “15-minute city” experiment in Paris, public sector procurement in Preston. Often interesting in themselves, these local initiatives don't always scale up to national policies. Or even make sense: why should every consumer durable be available within walking distance?

Ed Miliband's style is jokey – Go Big is based on his podcast, Reasons to be Cheerful. He does a nice line in self-deprecation and mischievous candour. He didn't learn to ride a bike until he was 50 years old. When he worked as an adviser for Gordon Brown, he used to unplug his phones on Saturday and Sunday mornings to avoid the inevitable lectures. It would be small-minded of me to say that reading Seven Ways, you understand why. There is a relentless, steam-roller quality to the writing of the Great Clunking Fist.

Which doesn't mean he is wrong. Both Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown are clearly on the side of the good and champions of the reasonable and the humane. If they were writing in the 1990s these books might have had a similar impact to Will Hutton's best-selling The State We're In. But no-one today is going to argue against combating climate change, eradicating global poverty, or challenging financial instability.

Everyone in G7 wants to see girls educated in developing countries, an end to fake news and more cycling in cities. Even Tories oppose tax avoidance, support public spending and call for “levelling up”. I don't know a single politician who would disagree with Miliband and Brown's insistence that “the market should work for people, not people for the market”. Brown's chapter on fiscal stimulus is radically out of date because a Conservative Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has boosted spending by more even than happened during the Second World War.

So, are the enemies in these books? Well inevitably there is Brexit, Donald Trump, nationalism and populism. They stalk these pages like the walking dead. Brown's section on nationalism doesn't actually mention Nicola Sturgeon but she is there in spirit. But are populism and nationalism not symptoms of the failure of the social democratic left since the 1990s to include the “left-behinds” in their diversity utopia?

There is a singular lack of self-awareness. Gordon Brown was in office in the 1990s and 2000s – precisely the period that the financial system went out of control. As Chancellor he was the champion of “light touch regulation” in the City of London. He presided over the house price spiral, the “flexible labour market”, mass immigration. Nor was he an innocent bystander to the capitalist globalisation that he now wants to see reined in. As for nuclear disarmament, which he now advocates, was he not in government in 2007 when Trident was renewed?

Ed Miliband laments the dismal state of politics and the lack of voter engagement. But he was in active politics when it got its bad name through the Iraq war, the Private Finance Initiative, political spin and so on. Both authors accept that they got things wrong. Regrets, they've had a few. But only that they weren't bold enough; weren't thinking big enough. After reading 800 pages, I'd had enough.