Gordon Brown: Making

“It is time to train British workers for the British jobs that will be available over the coming few years and to make sure that people who are inactive and unemployed are able to get the new jobs on offer in our country.”

Gordon Brown

"Brown pledges 'British workers for British jobs'", Evening Standard, 5 June 2007, p. 1.
Speech to the GMB Union, 5 June 2007.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

People , Time , Training , Country

“Luckily for the world economy, however, Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense. And they may have shown us the way through this crisis.”

Gordon Brown

" Gordon Does Good http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/opinion/13krugman.html", New York Times, 12 October 2008.
Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel for Economics.
About

World , Way , Sense

“There are as many Scottish roads to Socialism as there are predictions of Britain's economic doom - but most of them demand three things: a coherent plan for an extension of democracy and control in society and industry which sees every reform as a means to creating a socialist society; a harnessing of the forces for industrial and community self-management within a political movement; and a massive programme of education by the Labour Movement as a whole.

Gramsci's relevance to Scotland today is in his emphasis that in a society which is both mature and complex, where the total social and economic processes are geared to maintaining the production of goods and services (and the reproduction of the conditions of production), then the transition to socialism must be made by the majority of the people themselves and a socialist society must be created within the womb of existing society and prefigured in the movements for democracy at the grass roots. Socialists must neither place their faith in an Armageddon or of capitalist collapse nor in nationalisation alone. For the Jacobin notion of a vanguard making revolution on behalf of working people relates to a backward society (and prefigures an authoritarian and bureaucratic state), then the complexity of modern society requires a far reaching movement of people and existing conditions and as a co-ordinator for the assertion of social priorities by people at a community level and control by producers at an industrial level. In such a way political power will become a synthesis of – not a substitute for – community and industrial life.

This requires from the Labour Movement in Scotland today a postive commitment to creating a socialist society, a coherant strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism and a programme of immediate aims which leads out of one social order into another. Such a social reorganisation - a phased extension of public control under workers' sustained and enlarged, would in EP Thompson's words lead to "a crisis not of despair and disintegration but a crisis in which the necessity for a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic became daily more evident."”

Gordon Brown

Introduction to "The Red Paper On Scotland", 1975.

Life , People , Education , Peace

“The problem we have is making sure that we do not inflict harm on ourselves, by leaving the EU with no deal.”

Gordon Brown

Jeremy Corbyn risks scuppering no-confidence vote, says Jo Swinson https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49468218 BBC News (26 August 2019)
Post premiership

Problem