The Future Starts With Us by Gordon Brown review: 'Impassioned but lacking in zip'

Gordon Brown (Photo by Duncan McGlynn/Getty Images)

The dust jacket of this volume gives endorsements for the former Prime Minister’s previous book, Seven Ways To Change The World, including those from Ed Balls, Piers Morgan and Joanna Lumley. But I was more taken by one from the New Statesman, saying “Despite its hefty subject matter, Brown’s book zips along”. That could not really be said about this book. Well intentioned though it is, and in some places interesting, the prose is ponderous.

Take this for example: “Innovations such as ‘agentic AI systems’ and ‘neuromorphic chips’ (that mimic brain efficiency) are not well known today, nor are quantum computing, nuclear fusion (which might be accelerated by AI simulations) or cell-free biomanufacturing, but breakthroughs such as these will in future be critical to delivering the higher output on which an inclusive prosperity and good public services depend, and in this new time of uncertainty, where countries feel obliged to reduce their dependency on others, give them new options for indigenous growth”. Not only is this syntactically clumsy, but some of the claims are questionable: there’s a joke that nuclear fusion was going to be viable “within in 20 years’ time for the past 50 years”.

Brown still has the cadences of the manse. The opening pages set out the key ideas as being breakup, breakdown and breakthrough. The first refers to the erosion of long-established norms in politics, and the increase in authoritarian and populist governments, increased number of armed conflicts and the ever-present climate emergency. The idea of a liberal consensus – the so-called End of History of Francis Fukuyama – in reality barely lasted from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the fall of the Twin Towers. The second is what Brown sees as the hollowing out of local communities and the disengagement from civic life. These are the most convincing parts of the book. Finally, the breakthroughs cover ways to “rebuild community, renew the global order, and set us on a more hopeful, equitable and sustainable course, and the role that every one of us, as active and engaged citizens, can play in bringing that about”. The word “citizen” is used a lot here, which I find mildly irksome given that in Britain we are subjects, not citizens.

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There is a degree of convergence between the first two. Brown catalogues the loss of institutions such as trade unions, working men’s clubs, the Women’s Institute, the kirk, youth groups and suchlike, as well as work itself being more isolated and insecure. As society atomises in this way, as well as the increase in loneliness, it makes people more susceptible to “othering”. He argues – and there is some merit here – that the more you get to know other people (even from different cultures and traditions) the less judgmental you become. But with the echo-chamber of social media rather than social life, it is easier to demonise the other. It should be said that in his analysis of “populist nationalism” Brown looks at places such as Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Taiwan as well as the more obvious figures of Putin, Trump, Xi, Orbán and Erdoğan.

But there is no mention – strangely – of Britain. Although one could argue that Reform is akin to MAGA, it is more difficult to align Plaid Cymru or the SNP to resurgent nationalisms. When Brown advocates patriotism over nationalism he does so with reference to Switzerland, Belgium and Quebec; but not Britain. But more significantly, the discussion on the move to a multipolar world and the interrelationship between the Global North and the Global South are insightful, and to his credit Brown does not recommend a wholesale “exporting” or “imposing” of values from north to south. In the transition to democracy, we would do well to remember it took us 713 years between Magna Carta and Universal Suffrage.

Parts of the book, entitled “What the Public Say (1)” and “(2)” draw on over polling over 100,000 people in 45 countries; the former covers opinions about populist nationalism, the latter the links between the global and the local. The findings may be interesting, but reading through reams of statistics is onerous (“In Japan, this measure of civic decline [participation in any civic body] stands at 80 per cent, while Germany and Italy sit at 67 per cent non-participation, France 65 per cent, the UK 59 per cent, and the Netherlands 54 per cent”).

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There are glimpses of Brown behind the reams of data, especially when he writes about Kirkcaldy. Curiously, in the acknowledgements he thanks Peter Tompkins of the Schaeffer Institute at the University of Southern California saying he was “involved directly in every part of the book’s compilation”. This might account for the uneven style and a recurrent vacillation between “I” and “we”.

There is a literary litany towards the end, where Brown is discussing hope and how it differs from optimism. In this personal canon he cites Homer’s Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings as quests, rags-to-riches in David Copperfield, Pygmalion and The Great Gatsby, “the triumph over something monstrous” (this he links to Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” which I don’t quite see) and “banishing evil” in Bunyan, CS Lewis and Philip Pullman, with honourable mentions to Browning, Angelou, Steinbeck and Emily Dickinson. Naturally, Orwell is something of a key reference point, as is de Tocqueville. Impassioned, even if lacking in zip, I suspect this book will be referred to more than read.

The Future Starts With Us, by Gordon Brown, Simon & Schuster, £25

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