Crises create opportunities and having two at once shouldn’t just focus the mind, it might even be seen as giving greater grounds for hope. He gave the Bank of England its operational independence, blocked Blair’s desire to take Britain into the euro and introduced the minimum wage. This livestreamed and in-person event is a unique opportunity to hear Gordon Brown talk about how we can break out of today’s permacrisis and better manage the future for the benefit of the many and not the few. Their topic is the “permacrisis” – an epithet they tell us was chosen as “word of the year” in 2022 by Collins dictionary.

Most of the rest of the Labour modernisers thought the party needed someone with more appeal to the swing voters of middle England, and that meant Blair. He makes the claim – and I think this is a highly reasonable contention – that Britain became “a fairer country” during the New Labour years in which he played such a pivotal role. On the evidence of this book, these figures are fighting the last war instead of this one, lacking the insight and imagination to properly apprehend, let alone solve, our current crises. The awful irony is that when he finally got the top job he found that he didn’t have the temperament for it. In comments released ahead of the Brown report, Starmer made no mention of the House of Lords, instead concentrating on how Labour would bring about “real economic empowerment for our devolved government, the mayors, and local authorities”.When the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the globe in 2020, it created an unprecedented impact, greater than the aftermath of 9/11 or the global financial crisis. An earlier version said that Lord McFall had been a Conservative MP; he was, in fact, a Labour MP from 1987 to 2010. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. It was observed in the past that Brown’s intellectual and political project was to unite Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (an analysis of our natural psychological tendency to sympathise with others’ suffering) with The Wealth of Nations (the founding work of liberal political economy), books that had been too often read and taught in isolation from one another.

Recognising that past mistakes had set the world on a bumpy course, they realised that a better path leading to a brighter future exists. He did the same for pensioners to the point where debate has moved on to whether older people are now getting too good a deal at the expense of the young. Progressive taxation is rarely mentioned, and neither is the expansion of state-provided social services. He should have derived huge satisfaction from being one of the most formidable chancellors that Britain has ever seen.I was very much aware that the public get fed up with politicians who have been in the public eye – and direct line of fire – for too long. Keir Starmer will on Monday join Brown for the launch of the former prime minister’s Commission on the UK’s Future, which makes recommendations on Lords reform, devolution of power and the future of the union. offers a mixture of moral arguments and policy solutions that carefully avoids political controversy. Spence served as Dean of the Stanford Business School from 1990 to 1999 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard from 1984 to 1990.

To the frustration of the casual reader (and perhaps the publisher) he resists the temptation to engage in much gossip either.

Three of the most internationally respected and experienced thinkers of our time, these friends found their pandemic Zooms increasingly focused on a cascade of crises: sputtering growth, surging inflation, poor policy responses, an escalating climate emergency, worsening inequality, increasing nationalism and a decline in global co-operation. Instead, we are held in the sheltering hand of leadership and encouraged to think that the world is run by reasonable people who respond to reasonable arguments and can be guided towards conclusions that work best for everybody. A confrontation in the prime minister’s study climaxed with Brown slamming out of the room so violently that the door lost one of its hinges.