Comment: Faith, politics and Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown spoke at St Paul's on the need for global values at the G20
Tuesday, 31, Mar 2009 12:00
By Alex Stevenson
Along the Thames, between Westminster and the City in the heart of Britain's capital, lies St Paul's Cathedral. Gordon Brown was not prepared to meet bankers halfway when he spoke there this morning.
Instead the prime minister, addressing a 1,500-strong audience underneath Sir Christopher Wren's famous dome, was happy to play to his religious audience as he vilified the financial sector's money-grabbing impulses.
In normal circumstances, of course, the relationship between religion and politics is a complicated one. Brown has personal experience of this, being a son of the manse. He explained how his father limited his expressions of political views to hymn choices after general elections ("God works in mysterious ways" if one party did well, "thank thee all our God" if another).
In the midst of economic gloom, however, things have a tendency of simplifying themselves. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins. The court of public opinion, as Harriet Harman put it, has turned against those in the financial sector who have committed it.
It must be a founding principle of Downing Street's strategy that it avoids the public pinning responsibility for the current recession on the former chancellor's soldiers.
"There is a danger of a blame game while we try and solve the problems ahead. I understand that because people feel insecure," Brown told the audience. His words suggested disapproval. His tone indicated that, as long as it wasn't him being blamed, that was alright by him.
"I take full responsibility for all of my actions. But I also know that this crisis is global, the scope is global, the solution is global." In other words, it's not all my fault.
It helps if politicians can point the finger at where it all went wrong. Brown and his Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd, who was also speaking at the event, did their best to achieve this.
Brown talked of banks becoming "speculators with people's futures". Globalisation, he said, had "unleashed" fearful forces. It was up to the government to tame them, to ensure they did not become "unbridled and untrammelled". A century and a half ago, US president Andrew Jackson talked of "killing the monster" when dealing with banks. Rudd went further. "Unfettered free markets came to be worshipped as a god," he said. "And we know that god was false."
With bankers as sinners and the market an untamed evil, Brown and Rudd's rhetoric had an unpleasant tinge of hubris to it. They may not have realised it, but they seemed to be conferring on themselves something a little far-fetched: the ability to change human nature.
The Australian prime minister was the first to mention the 1930s. He referred to a previous London conference during economic troubles – the 1933 summit when world leaders failed to agree on a course of a action.
"Let us learn from history afresh," he urged today. "This crisis will test us greatly. But if we learn from history… together we can craft a new future for all humankind, not just for some."
Brown went even further, bemoaning the 16 "wasted" years between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the post-war Bretton Woods deal.
This time, he suggested, the world was responding differently. Never again would the sinners be able to revert to type. "We've acted quickly to bring people together," he said. "What we are creating is a truly global society where we have global rules founded on global values."
In other words: where our predecessors fail we're going to stop the sinners and curb the evils of the market. That seems a little on the ambitious side, doesn't it?
It appeared it didn't matter. For it was playing directly to ordinary people's desperate desire to put this right.
Being prime minister, in this context, is about leading the blind into the promised land with words of hope. "I have an enormous faith in the kids of the world," Rudd said, apropos of nothing. He got a huge round of applause; it was an almost palpable outpouring of relief for the tense people gathered in the Cathedral as they had something positive to consider.
Brown, not wanting to miss out on a good point, got his own claps immediately afterwards with the same point. "I think we owe it to our young people to thank them for giving us this hope in the future," he gushed.
That unquestioning faith in young innocence, regeneration and a chance to change is what gets people through recessions. It may not be very realistic but that doesn't stop the PM taking full advantage of it.
Disappointing though it was, there wasn't a prayer said for the economy – or for Brown's premiership, for that matter. But Downing Street can take heart. This week's "gathering", as the Bishop of London put it, did provide an opportunity to reflect on the strange comfort offered by religion. "What conquers fear of the future is faith in the future," Brown boomed at the close of his speech. In uncertain times, perhaps there's more in common between religion and politics than you might think.