Britain is about to have a prime minister who reads books, thinks hard, can write clearly and is - hush, the word is still rarely used in polite circles in England - an "intellectual".
Or is he? Is he governed in any way by his ideas? The problem for him, and perhaps even more so for us who will after 27 June 2007 be governed by him, is that you can't be an intellectual in the full sense without being part of an intelligentsia. By this, I mean a network of peers who inhabit the same cultural milieu, know the same books and poems, or films and plays, seek a recognisably similar social improvement - and with whom you argue and debate, often ferociously.
Gordon Brown is an intellectual all right, but he comes from a Scottish intelligentsia. Not all Scots are intellectuals, far from it. John Reid, the outgoing home minister, made his reputation out of his mental brawn not brain (despite having a PhD). Alastair Darling, who is tipped to succeed Brown as chancellor, has almost certainly never uttered an original phrase in his life. Both are Scots whom the British political class can easily take a measure of. It is not that they are unintelligent, which has nothing to do with it. Cleverness, or canniness, has little relationship to being an intellectual.
Anthony Barnett is openDemocracy's founder
openDemocracy's new blog OurKingdom - a multi-voiced, multinational conversation on Britain's future - is here
Anthony Barnett's recent articles include:
"Churchillism: from Thatcher and the Falklands to Blair and Iraq"
(30 March 2007)
"What will Gordon Brown do now?"
(11 May 2007)
At the hustings held on 13 May 2007 with the other wannabe candidates for the Labour leadership, Michael Meacher and John McDonnell, the latter pointed to Brown and told the audience that he had "a brain the size of Mars". It was meant as a compliment, but unwittingly perhaps it caught the almost galactic sense of otherness that his being an intellectual induces in the English. And, of course, it is also a way of patronising Brown, turning the fact that he is an intellectual into a mere personal attribute, thus preserving the rest of us from contamination.
Is this distance reciprocated? I suspect it is. But the only evidence I can offer is an encounter with another Scot, John Smith, the Labour Party's shadow chancellor under the nervous leadership of Neil Kinnock in the late 1980s. At a time when Margaret Thatcher was at her zenith, Harold Pinter and John Mortimer formed the June 20 group to put some intellectual and cultural spine into Labour. Smith was invited to address the group at a meeting in the Groucho Club, where Mortimer extended the special compliment of welcoming him as a fellow lawyer.
Smith thanked him graciously, while quietly noting that he came from a continental and codified legal tradition. What I heard Smith saying - I remember the shock - was firmly, unmistakably, almost privately: "thank you for inviting me, but I am not a chap like you and nor do I wish to be".
Smith was Brown's leader and this spirit and attitude is part of Brown's mental makeup. However smart, fast and well-read the London political class (including its mediacrats) may be, it is not an intelligentsia. The question is whether Brown does not want to be like them, and how far he will go to make that clear.
The promise of renewal
Brown was also a socialist intellectual, when anyone of his generation came to find their socialism collapsing around them. Part of the disablement was the realisation that, as Raymond Williams argued in 1985, the right was no longer a mere representative of the past but had developed a project for the future. The conservatives and reactionaries had a commitment to their own definition of progress, supposedly the monopoly of progressives, and were putting it into action! This came to be known as globalisation. My impression is that it was Brown's thinking, and rethinking, that laid down the strategy personified by Tony Blair of embracing globalisation. He doesn't just read widely, he reads globally. (This does not mean he always gets it right, he missed the ecological imperative, which Williams did not.)
My own experience of Brown's capacity to rethink was in the final period of Kinnock's leadership in the run-up to the 1992 election. It was three years after our first encounter, at a bar in Blackpool in the days when there was no security problem about agitators from small NGOs getting a pass into the main party conference hotel. He had a pint in each hand and dismissed Charter 88 as an attempt to change the voting system. A typical tribalist, I thought.
But when I invited him to give a presentation at the constitutional convention we were holding in Manchester, he engaged. The result was to be a sweeping lecture and a process that influenced John Smith to commit Labour to a bill of rights. What lay behind all this was the Scottish constitutional convention: not a one-off event but a national process at once organic and articulated, which provided the framework and fed the intelligentsia. This, in turn, enabled Brown to do his own thinking.
Also in openDemocracy on Britain's incoming prime minister and the country's future:
Christopher Harvie,
"Gordon Brown's Britain"
(25 January 2006)
Tom Nairn, "Not on your life"
(15 May 2007)
Neal Ascherson, "Who needs a constitution?"
(22 May 2007)
Looking back, one can see the energy and breadth of Charter 88 as coming from the potential promise of creating a British intelligentsia fired by the Scots. This was snuffed out by the leadership of Blair, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell when they took over Labour's direction, exploiting the imperative felt across the political class that John Major and the Tories had to go to bring the opposition under a narrow, hollowed out form of "control".
Brown too is a politician before he is an intellectual. He does not want to speak truth to power, he wants to identify those truths that will give him power. But with the drumbeat of Scotland always in his earshot, he has not lost his understanding that a new national dynamic, currently disintegrative, is underway. His only commitment on accepting the Labour leadership on 17 May 2007 was to announce: "I will bring forward reform proposals to renew our constitution with the first draft constitutional reform bill later this year". This is an intellectual's project. So, too in a very different way, is his commitment to creating a strong sense of national purpose, of renewing Britain no less. But this needs a surrounding intelligentsia to succeed, even if in this case it may need to be one of the right. Otherwise the renewal it supposedly promises may prove to be as embarrassingly out of date as launching an analogue product in a digital age.
