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Gordon Brown

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2022-01-27

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2022-01-27

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1. “Working with you and some great Americans has been one of the joys of my life, and we continue, I hope, to have a very strong relationship across the Atlantic, to be able to deal with these common challenges. It's a pleasure both to have worked with you in the past when you were in government, but also to do this interview today. Thank you.”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Just exchange congratulations because that's not what we're about. But I think your effort to deal with investment in cures, but also treatments for a disease that probably has been underinvested in is something that I really do admire. And it's not just had an effect in America, it's had an effect right across the world.”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I hope. But, you know, one of the inspirations for us is actually the work that you and your wife have done on epilepsy. And I don't want.”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Expertise being brought to bear, and we really have to support it as a global public good as well as just what's happening in any individual hospital or in any individual country. The scope for people to live longer and live better is being enhanced every year by the medical advances, but perhaps we're not funding medicine and healthcare sufficiently for everybody to have the chance to benefit. So that's one of the things that really, I've been working with the World Health Organization over the last few months because they need, as does Gabby, the vaccination fund, the Global Health Fund, they're all short of money, they're all running out of money, and people have got to realize that if you want these global public goods and control of affection, control of infection is one of the biggest global public goods, you've got to invest in it, and we're not doing as much to do so.”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “And we've realized we can do a lot of things. I mean, I was talking about blindness the other day, and we know that the levels of oxygen that a premature baby get affects whether that child is blind or not. So you're not born blind. It's the level of oxygen if you are a premature baby that you have to get. And if it's too big, it's too high. And if it's too low, it affects your ability to see. And that's one of the things that I think is changing. But also, I think we found that you can operate as surgeons within the womb to avoid certain conditions becoming obvious when a child is born or making it difficult for that child to survive. So there's a huge number of medical advances, just as in the area where you and your wife are working epilepsy and equally in areas where we now are looking at as a result of the virus conditions like long COVID. I mean, we are going to see, as we've seen with vaccinations, massive, massive medical...”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “I think it's fascinating the advances that are now being made because people are now putting money into research that might otherwise not be done. So, I mean, infant mortality is still very high, of course, in some of the poorest countries. But it's unnaturally, I think, high in some of the advanced countries as well.”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “When my daughter died, that also made me think that family is really important. These things really touch you and you feel that the time you give to your children is really, really important. And the time you give to some good causes to try and help people in difficulty as you and your wife are doing is very important too. So I think it does bring home to you that there is something more to life than work, but it also drives you on to do some of the things that you think are important that my father or my family really believes in.”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Fail safe mechanisms. And I think obviously we should have been doing more despite all the difficulties on global health, where we clearly have an interest. And the rising powers like China and India, they're going to have to pay some of the shares of these global public goods. This is not a free lunch for these countries, but I think we are in the direction of one world, two systems. And that means... Separate trade organization, a separate.”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “I think the approach is the one that was set out by Jake Sullivan and by the Secretary of State, Tony Blinken and Joe Biden himself. And that is cooperation where possible. But confrontation where it becomes necessary. And I do think that we should be trying to find areas of cooperation. Otherwise, we will definitely move to something like One World, two systems if we don't actually find a basis on which we can work together on certain key issues. We tried on climate change not entirely successful because President Xi didn't turn up at the conference. I think we should try on obviously weaponry is absolutely critical, particularly when artificial intelligence is now being used and it's very unpredictable what might happen unless you...”

   2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “Then you'll have UAE, then you'll have Turkey, then you'll have Egypt, and then you might even go into Africa and Nigeria, all these countries will think that the only way that they can be a power in the world is by having their own nuclear weapon. And so the deal that President Obama done may not have been perfect, but we're not able to rebuild it.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “What's happened now? We could act on smallpox in the 1960s with an international levy that we agreed to do together. But we couldn't agree on sharing the burden for dealing with COVID. On climate change, we only got so far at Glasgow, but this issue that nationally determined contributions is, you know, every nation is free to set its own limits and extent of what it does and there's no sense that we're all coming together to create one point of pressure to get the climate, to get the carbon numbers down. And so when you look at all these areas, and then I look at nuclear proliferation, this is something that I think America has really got to take on board because it looks to me as if Iran is going to get a nuclear weapon if we can't get an agreement very soon. But then I do say Saudi Arabia's”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Hunger. And then, of course, you get mass migration, which is going to be a huge issue. You're going to see far more migration from Africa to Europe than from any country to America, you know. Africa, with its doubling of population, is going to become a huge source of migratory pressures. And again, from Afghanistan, people are migrating. They become an issue in the rest of Europe. And so enlightened self-interest would make you cooperate. Now, there's the moral issue about solidarity with people who are in need and a duty of care and compassion, but there's the enlightened self-interest that comes from avoiding terrorism, about dealing with migration, about preventing, for example, from Afghanistan, the heroin trade coming back into all the streets of our cities. And so I would like to make the argument that in the 1940s, we managed to cooperate in even more difficult circumstances and form new institutions.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Was born. And it's the same thing with Afghanistan. Terrorism will come back because all these groups will be saying to people in Afghanistan, now, look, we told you, these people, coexistence is impossible. They're never going to help you now. They were only doing it for themselves. They're not interested in you as a person or your lives or your...”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Even at the expense of international cooperation is the best way to present yourself to the world. And so the World Trade Organization has become effective. The cooperation on getting the vaccination to the rest of the world, I mean, this is a moral failure of huge proportions. I mean, you know, America and Britain 70% vaccinated, Africa 7%. And we've got the vaccines. We're producing 1.2 billion a month. We could get them to Africa, but there's not been the money and there's not been the pressure sufficiently strong so that we actually suffer because the virus comes back in a new form.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “I think we can rebuild the institutions. Look, I was just looking the other day at the end of the Bretton Woods conference in America, New Hampshire, where you decided with American leadership to create the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and a new system of economic cooperation. And the American Treasury Secretary at the time, and I just took this out because I thought we might be discussing it, we have come to recognize that the wisest and most effective way to protect our national interests is through international cooperation. Now, how many people believe that today? And that's why I say nationalism has become the dominant ideology of the age, that people feel that the, if you like, a narrow definition of the pursuit of national interest.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “I knew also he was planning further assassinations. So we had to show strength. And the only way I think we stopped there being further assassinations The God dropped actually a few years later was making sure that both we protected those people who were in difficulty but equally at the same time the message went out that we were going to take the toughest possible action. And you know that strength is what has got to be shown here. And that's why I think pulling together the coalition that America is now doing is really important. And I think the economic sanctions which have been proposed have got to be very tough and you've got to bring Europe together because there are obviously the people who are going to suffer most from the imposition of sanctions are not America. It's going to be European countries and they've got to be brought on board so that they are aware that while there may be some suffering they've got support from all their allies. We've got to find oil and gas from other parts of the world if necessary but we can't allow ourselves to be completely at the mercy of Russian energy in Central and Western Europe.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Perhaps belatedly, there's a great deal more cooperation, and so the issue is how can you make the strength that comes from the cooperation you can build internationally with America, obviously, the leader. And as I see the problem solver, how can you actually make that work? Now, Putin's at his time of greatest power, because he's got the oil price rising, he's got an energy shortage, he's got big reserves, he's far more self-sufficient than he was a few years ago. My meetings with Putin have always convinced me that you've got to show strength. You cannot show any weakness. He's an opportunist, you know he wants to control Ukraine, but he's an opportunist and will only do what he thinks he can get away with. And you've got to show strength. You know, we had Litvinenko was a Russian who was killed on the streets of London, as you know, assassination. I knew, I knew that Putin was behind.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “I think David, you've got to come back to where we are as a world community now. I mean, we had a unipolar age. America was completely dominant. And America generally, not with Iraq, of course, but generally acted multilaterally in a unipolar age. Now, the problem has been under President Trump, and there is still a legacy. America is still acting unilaterally in a multipolar age. America no longer wants to be the world's policeman. But it's got to be the world's leading problem solver. So America's got to be the leader of multilateral action. Now, I think that's been missing in the analysis of where American foreign policy should move over future years. And over Afghanistan, as I said, there was very little contact with the members of the 40 members of the coalition when you left Afghanistan. Now on Ukraine,”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “I think Afghanistan was subject to a whole series of different mission statements, so to speak. We went in to defeat the Taliban. The Taliban were defeated and moved out of office, but we stayed in Afghanistan. And then a number of objectives were set forward. We could make it a more democratic society. We could get rid of the heroin trade. We could build local government. We could create a central government that was effective. We could build schools. We could build hospitals. And I think we went absolutely clear. And I'm talking about the whole coalition of 40 countries that having defeated the Taliban, what actually was it possible to achieve? And of course, in the end, you've got to recognize that the support that we had expected from local people ended up not being there as the Taliban moved in in the last year.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “To go into a country and suggest that you can somehow rebuild a society from outside, you've got to be far more humble about what your ability to do that is. And I think that's what we've learned in Afghanistan, that nation building or state building, because it was really only state building, didn't actually work and that the country was not ready, partly because of its economic conditions, partly because of its medieval systems of government, partly because of the tribal loyalties. And that form of state building, which was coordination building, has got to be, you've got to be very modest and humble about what can be achieved. But that doesn't relieve you of a responsibility for humanitarian support.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “You learn lessons all the time. And one of the lessons that you learn from both Afghanistan and Iraq, and of course the Afghanistan intervention was justified and can be justified as an essential means of defeating terrorism. But you learn how difficult it is to state build or to...”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I don't know who knew there are documents that have come out of the State Department of America showing that some officials doubted whether they were giving the information about weapons and doubted whether that information that was being passed to them was accurate. But I never saw a British document saying, you know, this is all inaccurate, this is not true, this cannot be true. But I think we learn lessons from this, that you really have got to base your decisions on accurate information and you've got to test it, test it to the limits. The problem is, as you know, some people wanted the war anyway, irrespective of whether you had weapons of mass destruction or weapons that were lethal in the way that was alleged. And some of us were prepared to listen to the evidence. And of course, wanted to work through the United Nations, which was always the aim of the policy, but at least from Britain's point of view, but it never quite worked out.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “And I had to go on the information that I had at that time. Subsequently, I've seen documents that show that some people knew, but I certainly didn't know. But when you look at that intervention and you look at what constitutes a just war, I think you've got to be honest, there were other options available.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Well, it was a mistake. I'm in no doubt that you cannot justify the intervention in Iraq as a just war on all the moral criteria that are put forward because we could have done more to avoid it. And there were other options available, I think. The problem was the information that we had was flawed. And there's no doubt about it that I was given information and people told me the new exactly where these weapons that Saddam Hussein had were. They could pinpoint the street, if you like, or the place or the area. And I was given all that information and it proved to be wrong. And I think America was basing its information on exiles from Iraq who were giving a false picture. Now, the question is, who knew what? I certainly did not know that he had none of the weapons that were alleged.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Well, I think we lost the 2010 election for a number of reasons because of the austerity and the crash. But I think Iraq was very important. We'd been losing votes in 2005 and 2010. So I think public opinion did turn against the decision.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “But you know, Bonnet used to call us John and Paul, you know, like John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Look, we work together for 25 years, but you know in politics that everybody comes with their own views and their own background and their own ideas that they want to implement. I probably wanted to do more on the social policy side. But, you know, we had to work it out and we did for 25 years.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “And we fought the election in 2001 on hospitals and schools first. We wanted to create the economic environment in which social progress was possible. Now, obviously, the financial crisis was a real problem for us, but even throughout the financial crisis, we managed to maintain the expenditures on people in need. And we kept unemployment far lower than it was in America. I don't think unemployment went beyond about 7% in Britain, whereas it went beyond 10% in Europe and America. So we always had in mind that the purpose of our politics was to deliver a more just society. And to be honest, we did not do enough and no government has done enough about inequality. And we are still waiting for the sort of action that is necessary, I think, to deal with some of the worst excesses of inequality in our communities.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Our slogan at one point was prudence for a purpose that we had to get the debt in Britain down. Britain was really, you know, if you think of Britain in the, they used to say about Britain of the 1950s that we were managing decline. And then they said in the 60s we were mission managing decline. And then they said in the 70s we were declining to manage. And Britain had a huge inflation problem. And it was every time there was growth, there was massive inflation and you had to raise it.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “But look, if you work together with someone for 25 years and you are still working together until the day Tony left as prime minister, then I think that shows that we have so much in common that we introduced a national minimum wage in Britain. We doubled the expenditure on health and education. on and so forth we introduced nursery education and you know we introduced civil rights for gay people and everything else so we did a whole series of changes together and Tony deserves credit for many of them that were his personal initiative and perhaps I deserve some credit for some of them that were mine.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “I'll see Tony probably next week when I'm in London. But look, we work together for 25 years, but obviously you come to your political views from different perspectives. I mean, I came from a highly industrialized mining community that was very concerned about issues of social justice. And I was always trying to reconcile that with the needs of economic efficiency and economic progress. Perhaps Tony came from a different perspective and obviously we had disagreements. I mean, I didn't want, for example, tuition fees to be charged. I wanted a graduate tax. I didn't want to commercialize or privatize whatever you call it, parts of the National Health Service. I thought we could work within that service while using private contractors where necessary. So there were disagreements on policy issues.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Even on policies like the environment, you wouldn't have the degree of cooperation that's necessary. You know, the vaccination in Britain has been a UK-wide vaccination. It's not been a Scottish or English or Welsh effort. It's been a whole UK effort administered in the different countries. And that's the sort of lesson that I learn that if you're dealing with a major crisis, you've got to find a basis on which you can actually cooperate. And that's really the argument that's going to have to be fought out.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Complete break with England, and of course, so much of our economy is integrated, but also half Scots of relatives in England. So you've got to persuade people that in the modern world, cooperation, solidarity, empathy are necessary if you're going to run a modern society and economy. So that's what the issue is. It's easy to say, you know, Scots are a minority. Look, I was Prime Minister, I was a Scott, proud to be a Scott. five million Scots, but 65 million population of Britain. It's very unusual for someone from a small country in the United Kingdom to be the Prime Minister. And I can understand that people in England are the majority, but you've got to find a way that people can actually find to work together. And that's what's missing at the moment, that neither is the government of the United Kingdom proposing how we could cooperate better in the future, nor are the nationalists prepared to abandon a policy which is for complete separation, which means”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “At the moment, it looks as if you might not win this, and certainly the government of the United Kingdom is very, very unpopular. And the Prime Minister is very unpopular in Scotland. But you've got to win this as an argument. And the argument is not really being put at the moment. I mean, nationalism arises where you've got allegations of cultural discrimination or economic exploitation or political exclusion. And I think the nationalists want to persuade the Scots that they're in that position. I think we've got to show that cooperation, solidarity, empathy, sharing these are very important principles in modern politics. And you can't have two nations sitting side by side with each other without some form of cooperation that works. And unfortunately, the Nationalist Party want to take Scotland out of every British institution. It's not a federal state they're proposing. It's not some form of autonomy within a United Kingdom.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Numbers, yes, because five million children face death and any one child who's in danger and difficulty. There's not a parent in America that wouldn't feel that something had to be done to help a child in such distress, emaciated no hospital care because health centers have been closed. We really have a responsibility to do something about it, not to give legitimacy to the Taliban, but to actually get humanitarian aid in. We did this with Zimbabwe when we were fighting the regime, but at the same time, we didn't want people to starve. And I think it's possible to do this with Afghanistan.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Not to leave, but I think the way it was done, I think he himself would be honest enough to admit that this was not done well. And we're dealing with really huge humanitarian problems in Afghanistan that we will pay a price for later if we don't do something about. There are 23 million people who are said to be without food in Afghanistan. And even the international appeals to get money on humanitarian grounds that would go through UNICEF and NGOs rather than through the Afghan government. These are not being responded to in the way that they should. We went into Afghanistan and we said we were there to help the people of Afghanistan and you can't just abandon them completely and leave them to effectively starve, which is what's going to happen this winter if we don't take action.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Consult the 40 allies that America had in Afghanistan. And some of the policies that I think people are pursuing are too protectionist and too nationalistic and too chauvinistic. And I think we've got to fight it.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “The one immigrant I would not like to come to Europe. No, it's but it is a problem where you have these populous. So you've got protectionism now, trade protectionism. Obviously, you've got great big power competition rising, China and America, Russian America, Russia and the West, of course, with what's happening in Ukraine. And you've got these populist nationalist movements. There's about 50 secessionist movements in different parts of the world now wanting to break up the existing order of nation states. And I think people are very slow to wake up to the fact that nationalism is now the dominant ideology of our age. If you'd asked me 20 years ago, I would have said maybe neoliberalism was an economic ideology, Washington consensus, whatever you called it, I think nationalism is now the biggest political force of our times. And even President Biden, you know, I think he left Afghanistan, didn't really...”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “than the Hungarian government, for example, that are nationalist or the Polish government, very nationalist and anti-immigrant and everything else, that nationalist movements are having some effect in almost every part of Europe. The Scandinavian politics have changed. Belgium is always in danger of breaking up, Catalonia and Spain, Scotland in the United Kingdom. And these nationalist movements, Le Pen in France, they become strong. And Steve Bannon from the States has been going around Europe trying to get an international coalition of anti-internationalists, if you like. But that's what he's trying to do.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “We were not tough on the shadow banking system, which are lots of different organizations that operate as if they are banks but are not subject to banking regulation. And we've seen a lot of scandals emerge over the last year or two. And I think we will have to look at the rules governing the shadow banking system as well in future. But clearly, the public did not see that they were benefiting from global change. And because China was, in a sense, becoming the manufacturing capital of the world, where it used to be America and Europe, and because they were paying a lot lower wages, then of course the pressure on manufacturing workers, factory workers, and then on all workers who were relatively low skilled has become intense. And you can see that that is one of the reasons why populist movements have grown up in America, but also right across Europe. And I think people sometimes forget that although there's very few governments of”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “David, if honest, I think a lot of the problems have moved from the banking system to the shadow banking system. So while we were tough on some of the regulation that we imposed on the formal banking system,”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “People did not know quite what to do. America, I think Ben Bernanke said later, 18 banks might have gone under. And we met for an hour. We were talking about all the problems and how we could solve them. And I had this idea that we had to, we really had to invest in the banks if necessary to nationalize them so that they had enough capital. They had to be recapitalized. Anyway, we broke for coffee. And suddenly we had Berlusconi saying in his pigeon French, he said, amateurs, he said, amateurs. He said, C ⁇ zon, amateurs, they're all amateurs. And we think, we are all the amateurs. Berlusconi, the businessman. He's got the answer. And he said, don't they realize we've got a press conference in an hour and there's no makeup artist for any of them? And that was a seriousness with the biggest financial crisis we'd seen in our lifetimes.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “that economic activity and global cooperation can actually work. I was an IMF meeting when I was chairing it as a finance minister and there was a big demonstration outside and there was a banner that said worldwide campaign against globalization. And you know what people meant because they were fed up. And the politicians weren't always serious. I remember, I just say this because I think it sums up some of the problems in politics about taking these international issues seriously. When the financial crisis broke in 2009, we had a meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, the head of the European Union, the central bank, Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. And it was the weekend that really that Lehman Brothers had collapsed.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “See, David, as you know, a politician will never get elected if he's not or she is not a patriot, if they're not seen to be standing up for the national interest. And that's absolutely right. And I feel strongly, and Scottish and British, I mean, we're very patriotic, but you've got to show that your patriotism can be reflected in international cooperation. And it's not, there's not a choice between being patriotic and cooperating with other countries. It's a reflection of your patriotism that you can find a way to work with other countries in your own national interest. And we seem to have failed to get that message across. And certainly under President Trump, America sent out a completely different image of itself to the rest of the world. You know, and then that encourages the reaction to globalization. If you are now retreating into national silo, then you don't really think that global...”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “And so the nation is seen as a sole source of any economic initiative and international cooperation is relegated, even although it's obvious when you've got pollution, it can't be solved by one country. It's obvious when you've got a pandemic. You've got to work together. And yet that lesson has not really been sufficiently realized in what people are doing in the last year”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Was necessary and relied entirely on monetary policy. And I think you did better in the States, but I think we all could have done better. And we would have shown, I think, if we'd done these things in the next two or three years, that world economic cooperation worked, that you could manage globalization and we could manage trade to prevent protectionism, but instead what you've seen is gradually you've got the trade barriers going up, you've got the immigration controls, which is another form of protectionism, of course, which is necessary and has got to be managed, but also it's a reflection of people's demand for protectionism. And then you went to Donald Trump's America first, and you've got China first. You've got India first, you've got... Well, Brexit, Russia first. And to some extent with Brexit shows an attempt to put Britain first. And for some of these countries, it's first and only.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “But at the same time, we didn't create the mechanisms by which the public could see that the financial system was not going to get out of control in future. And the old practices were not going to come back. And one of the things we wanted was this financial transaction tax. And I'm afraid we didn't get it. And then I think one of the reasons why President Biden has done a very strong and fiscally active intervention to get out of this particular crisis is that there was probably not enough fiscal intervention in 2009 and 10. And when we left office, the mood in Europe changed almost entirely to being cutting down the deficits and cutting down the debt, an era of austerity. And that meant that Europe barely grew over the last 10 years. I mean, the growth rate of Europe and Britain has been very low, and that's because they didn't have the fiscal push there.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “Sufficiently intensive cooperation. You see, I wanted a financial transactions levy because I didn't see why the public should pay the costs for financial crises that were caused by the people who were making a huge amount of money in the financial system. Now, I could not persuade America to do this. Actually, we're persuaded France and Germany, and it's still the policy of the European Union to have such a levy. So in a strange sort of way, while the banks were really in trouble, And we nationalized three of the banks in Britain possibly doing more than you did.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Could see the system wasn't working, they weren't getting the benefits themselves, and people then were persuaded by people like Trump that the answer was to retreat into the nation state. But of course, it's never going to be the answer in a world where you're going to need greater cooperation if you're going to solve some of these problems. We had to deal with the breakdown of the banking system. And that was not just the American banking system, that was the global banking system. And it could only be solved by finding a way that we could collaborate globally to get the system back up and running. And I think possibly we saw that more clearly from Europe than was seen in America, where I think you saw it as an American problem more than as a global problem. But now I think we've got to realize that all these problems we face, the pandemic's obvious, climate change obvious, financial instabilities obvious, global inequality, these are problems that need a level of cooperation that is not against the national interest.”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “parties or progressive parties you'll see in Europe are finding it really difficult to come to terms with the fact that all the levers they said that they would be able to pool previously you just cannot pool you're dealing with an international environment you've got to have coordinated policies with other countries if you're going to make things happen and we've seen that during the pandemic we know exactly that's the problem on climate change that one country can't solve that problem alone and I think social democratic parties have found it very difficult to face up to this and I think progressive parties across the world have got to have policies for this new era which is global and you've got to manage globalization it's no use saying you know it's here and so just accept it you've got to manage it otherwise you get all the results that we've now got which is massive inequality of course we've got protectionism now arising because people don't see the globalization's work the 2008 financial crisis was a real problem because people”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “David, at an intellectual level, and you've been through this with the campaigns that you've run, you've got to reconcile your policies for economic progress with your policies for social justice. You can't have economic progress at the expense of social justice, but you're not going to get social justice unless you have policies for economic efficiency and economic progress. And that was really the challenge of the 80s and the 90s, and that led to Bill Clinton's policies at the end of the 1980s and him winning the presidency of America. Now, I think we've got an even more challenging environment because almost every political party of the left has been posing the policies that they pose in terms of the nation-state. And we've almost been oblivious to the fact that we've got a global economy. It's an open global economy. It's got to be managed better. And so most of the democratic social democrats...”

    2022-01-27 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 475 — Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source