Gordon Brown has Franklin D. Roosevelt to thank – or to blame. As an aficionado of American politics, the prime minister will be well aware of the origins of the somewhat arbitrary milestone of 100 days by which his first three months in the job will be judged.
President Roosevelt began his time in office with a whirlwind of activity by which all his successors – and, thereafter, political leaders far beyond America’s shores – are now given an early assessment.
As the new political season begins and the prime minister’s own rendezvous with the leader writers and pundits beckons early next month, no one can accuse Brown of inaction since he took charge at Number 10.
From making a series of long-planned domestic announcements previewing this autumn’s Queen’s Speech, to undertaking early forays onto the world stage, the new prime minister has set a brisk pace for his ‘new government’.
But with three unexpected crises – a nationwide terror alert barely 48 hours into his premiership, massive flooding in parts of England, and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease which cut short his holiday only hours after it had begun – marking his first weeks in power, how exactly is Brown enjoying the job? The prime minister laughs: ‘It’s a challenge, but you’ve got to be prepared to deal with the issues as they arise.’
Brown is clearly keen, though, not to allow these unanticipated events to derail what he sees as the overriding mission of his government: ‘greater opportunity and rising aspirations for the people of this country’. All its early initiatives – increasing the supply of low-cost and social housing, setting up the health service review, improving the student grant system, and expanding both early learning and apprenticeships – have this as their underlying objective, says the prime minister.
However, there was probably no domestic goal with which, as chancellor over the past decade, Brown was more closely identified than the drive against child poverty. Indeed, in his portrait of Robert Kennedy contained in Courage, the collection of essays he published earlier this summer, the prime minister approvingly notes the assessment of one of the former senator’s aides that ‘he always saw poverty through the lens of children and young people’. Is this a trait with which Brown identifies? ‘I think it’s where I started,’ he responds. ‘When you grow up and see children in poverty, it’s something that’s unacceptable. [Eradicating] child poverty is something that is absolutely central to the belief of anybody who is involved in the Labour party or in any form of progressive politics.’
The prime minister is, however, optimistic that there’s ‘a greater sense in the country that we must do more’ to combat child poverty. And he calls for an equivalent focus on domestic poverty to that which was achieved by the Make Poverty History campaign: ‘The same campaigns that made people aware of world poverty are exactly what we need to make people aware of what’s happening in Britain and what we can do about it.’
But Brown believes both Labour and the wider left needs to change if it’s to achieve its ambitions.
‘The idea that government is about the empowerment of people holds the key to any country’s future,’ he argues. ‘If you look at every challenge that we face, each one of them requires people not only to be listened to, but to be involved and engaged.’ The challenges he cites are both local and global: from the role individuals must play in tackling climate change and building the communities in which they live, to the importance of winning hearts and minds in the fight against terrorism and the need to persuade people that they must upgrade their skills to meet economic competition from overseas.
The prime minister believes this same dynamic must also apply to the Labour party itself. Over the summer, he’s been pushing the ambitious party reforms outlined in the consultation document Extending and Renewing Party Democracy, which goes before conference later this month. It proposes to radically enhance the rights of individual members in the party’s policy-making process, including the proposal that final National Policy Forum documents will go to the entire membership for approval on the basis of One Member One Vote.
‘The national party must give up power to the local membership,’ argues Brown. ‘We’ve got to ensure that when you join the Labour party or are a member of the Labour party, you’ve got an ability to influence the decisions that we make at a local, regional and national level.’
But the prime minister is also pushing for local parties to be placed under a duty to engage and consult with the communities in which they are based.
‘We’ve got to build up the representativeness of our party in every community,’ he suggests. ‘The whole purpose of the reforms is to make the party more in touch with our communities.’
Are these reforms, though, not simply an admission that, after 10 years in power, Labour may have occupied the political centre ground but it’s failed to pull it in a more progressive direction? Brown disagrees: ‘I think we have shifted the ground and will continue to do so in a progressive way.’ He notes the manner in which the campaign for debt relief began as ‘a cause that was embraced by only a very few people and was almost seen by many as a technical issue, about something quite abstract, debt.’ But, through the campaigning of religious groups, NGOs, the Labour party and trade unions, it became ‘a vast movement, where one in three young people were wearing the [Make Poverty History] wrist band, hundreds of thousands of people were emailing, and 100,000 people turned up to the demonstration in Edinburgh’ to lobby the G8 leaders meeting in Gleneagles two years ago.
While the first 100 days assessments of Brown are likely to focus largely on the manner in which he’s stolen the domestic political initiative – and an opinion poll lead – back from the Conservatives, the prime minister has already clocked up some international successes. His meeting with George Bush at Camp David finessed the need to distance the government from a deeply unpopular US president with the importance of avoiding any suggestion that Britain wishes to distance itself from the ‘special relationship’.
More substantively, Brown worked hard to get a new UN resolution to halt the genocide in Darfur. ‘I thought it was essential that we move things forward in the way that we’ve done,’ the prime minister argues. He’s keen to stress that the Security Council vote to beef up the international force in Darfur is only one part of the plan to end the killing and displacement – an attempt to restart the political process and to assess the actual situation on the ground are already under way – but he is also adamant that ‘if things don’t get better, we’ll have to consider further sanctions’.
Back on the home front, the prime minister continues to keep the country guessing about whether he will spend the political credit he’s amassed so far in office by calling a snap election. The eve of his arrival at No 10 was signalled by a defection from the Tory benches
in the Commons to Labour – a well-timed, and apparently successful, attempt to push David Cameron off balance – so should the Conservative leader fear more of his ranks crossing the floor of the House? Brown chuckles, but won’t be drawn: ‘I think the important thing is that Labour is doing the right things by the British people … not allowing ourselves to be over confident or complacent about the future because we’ve got a job to do.’
Whatever the assessments on his 100 days in office, the one thing we can be sure of is that neither over confidence nor complacency will affect the prime minister’s reading of them.