Brown’s premiership will be short

14 April 2007

When Brown turns to foreign policy, my guess is that he will decide to change the focus of Britain’s efforts on the world stage. The Chancellor who for a decade has starved the military of funds doesn’t believe in a primarily military solution to the war with radical Islam. Indeed, he is more Old than New Labour when it comes to allocating resources between the welfare state and the military establishment.

Brown believes that the solution to many of the world’s problems is economic development. That is why he has had Ed Balls shuttling to the Middle East to find ways to revive the economies of Gaza and the West Bank, and why he will try to use his new prestige to bolster his appeals to the World Bank to fund African regimes that the Bank is now demanding first reform their kleptocratic ways. In short, Brown would like to harness the resources of international institutions, funded in largest part by the United States, to his fight on world poverty, relieving pressure on his own exchequer. Which suggests that he will of necessity be friendlier to an American president than the anti-Americans in the Cameron–Hague faction of the Tory party, especially if the next president is a Democrat — the party with which Brown has always been most comfortable.

In his musings Brown should be considering a major problem: hyperactivity. Advice from the Left and Right comes to mind. Clement Attlee once famously advised the academic activist Harold Laski that, ‘A period of silence on your part would be welcome.’ And Ronald Reagan is said to have told his associates, ‘Don’t do something, just stand there.’ Or perhaps the Chancellor would prefer to heed a fellow finance minister. Albert Gallatin, who served Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, once said, ‘We are never doing as well as when we are doing nothing.’

If Brown is to have his entrepreneurial society of self-confident individuals, he will have to remove government from the centre of people’s lives. A period of silence, of just standing there, of doing nothing, might, just might, dissuade people from looking first to government when they have a problem. It would make No. 10 seem less important if everyone couldn’t read about its occupant every day, but it would also make for a healthier body politic, less demanding of its new prime minister.

Irwin Stelzer is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute and a columnist for the Sunday Times.