‘In a global era, we need our roots more than ever’

Gordon Brown tells Matthew d’Ancona why he is so preoccupied with national identity. In the modern world, he says, we must be explicit about what being a Briton means

‘The problems will arise if you cannot say to a young person that there’s going to be a job after the training. We’ve got to make sure that we never return to the 1980s, when young people lost hope of ever getting jobs, and you had three-generation unemployment that created a situation where many people did become unemployable.’

The question I have posed to Gordon Brown is this: how does he impress upon a teenager from an ethnic minority, living in the inner city, that the sometimes abstract debate on ‘Britishness’ and national identity applies to him as much as to those in the seminar rooms and dinner tables of metropolitan London? The first half of the Prime Minister’s answer is vintage New Labour verbiage: ‘rights and responsibilities… post-school learning… a community that values their potential… the responsibilities of citizenship’ etc, etc.

But when Brown starts talking about the danger of a generation sinking into hopeless unemployment, with all the implications for social cohesion and national confidence, the verbiage vanishes and his voice changes. In the days leading up to the G20 summit, the PM is wrestling inwardly with the impact this deep recession will have upon the nation, and what it will mean in the coming years to be a young Briton. And he returns to the connection between Britishness and hard times later in our conversation.

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