3 hours ago
5
Good morning. In every era in politics there are claims that the current generation of politicians aren’t as impressive as the ones that came before. A lot of this is just false memory warped by nostalgia, but in the UK at the moment there are eight former prime ministers and they provide a sub-set that does, sort of, stand up the theory.
Five of them were in office after 2010 – David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – and their contribution to public life at the moment is, frankly, minimal, or negative. But the three who were in office before 2010 – John Major, Tony Blair, and Gordon Brown – remain serious voices. Major is 82, he does not speak out much, but when he does, he is always worth hearing. Blair is running a thinktank actively trying to shape policy in the UK and around the world. And Brown is perpetually engaged in trying to implement change for social justice, as he has been for most of his life.
Today Brown is renewing his call for the government to abandon the two-child benefit cap. As usual with Brown, there is always a plan, and the former PM is promoting a report from the IPPR thinktank explaining how fairer gambling taxes could rase £3.2bn that would pay for the two-child benefit cap to be scrapped. He has written about this in an article in today’s Guardian.
And he was promoting this in an interview in the 8.10 slot on the Today programme.
Brown was chancellor for 10 years and Amol Rajan, the presenter, was keen to get him to talk, not just about gambling and child poverty, but the government’s wider fiscal problems. Mostly Brown tried to avoid being sucked into this debate. But at one point he could not hold back, and he suggested that some parts of defence spending should be exempt from the fiscal rules, to ensure the security budget could rise without cuts having to be made elsewhere. This was interesting not just as a stand-alone policy idea, but as an example out-of-the-box thinking could help Rachel Reeves dig herself out of the hole she is currently in.
Brown said:
Look, there’s one thing that’s happened over the last few months that has been quite unprecedented – to spend 5% on defence expenditure, as we want to spend 2030s.
But this is a Nato initiative. This is a European initiative. We should be doing this jointly.
We should have either jointly issued bonds or a Nato defence fund, and we should be sharing the cost across the continent, and that should be regarded as something extraordinary and exceptional, outside the fiscal rules, and that would create the kind of headroom that Rachel Reeves needs.
We should be negotiating with our Nato partners to do this at the moment. And I believe these are the kind of things that we can do to sort out some of the problems that we have for the future.
Reeves is on a visit where she is due to speak to the media later. Presumably, we will get her response then.
I will post more from Brown’s interview shortly.
The main event in the diary today is the interest rate announcement from the Bank of England at noon, followed by Andrew Bailey, the governor, holding a press conference at 12.30pm. Graeme Wearden will be covering this on his business live blog.
Reeves is on a visit in south Wales, and she is due to speak to the media around lunchtime. There may also be some politics coming out of the Edinburgh fringe, where Ian Murray, the Scottish secretary, and Kate Forbest, the Scottish deputy first minister, are both due to be speaking at events.
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