"Moving Britain Forward"

One of the drawbacks of writing a book is that I’ve felt compelled to read Gordon Brown’s recent tome.
And it’s truly execrable. Pretty much everything about it is awful.
Start with the title, Moving Britain Forward.
Sadly, this is not a progress report on his efforts to winch us nearer to Iceland. What he means – and it’s the start and finish of the book – is that he wants us to have a shared national purpose, a mission:

Unlike America and many other countries, we have no constitutional statement or declaration enshrining our objectives as a country; no mission statement defining purpose; and no explicitly stated vision of our future.

But is it the job of government to act like company managers, moving us towards a common goal?
There’s an important tradition which says it isn’t. Countries shouldn’t have shared objectives, and it’s just projective identification to believe otherwise.
Instead, we all have individual goals. It’s the role of government to reduce the conflict between such goals, to set laws so we can live together in liberty. Here’s Michael Oakeshott, in On Being Conservative:

The office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule….The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.

What irks me about Brown is that he nowhere so much as recognizes this alternative, let alone argues against it.
This is a remarkable omission. Brown is, supposedly, one of our better-read and more cerebral politicians – though this is as much of an accolade as the claim that I’m a better guitarist than Abu Hamza*. And yet he shows no awareness of the most basic political question: what is government for?
Which raises the suspicion that Brown’s reading is not an expression of his curiosity about ideas, but rather the search for support for his own prejudices, a mere confirmation bias.
* But I’m not quite as good as this fella.

Comments

[AntiCitizenOne]

> what is government for?

To Brown, government is a way to get more power for Brown.

[james higham]

Chris, you amaze me. I thought you were anti-managerialist left and here you appear to be espousing small government and liberty. And what book are you writing? When's it come out and can one buy it?

[dearieme]

Managerialism again. How d'ye like this, from the NCI website (the US National Cancer Institute)?

"NCI CHALLENGE GOAL 2015
Eliminating the Suffering and Death Due to Cancer"

[Alex]

I believe he is working on a screed entitled "New Labour and the Death of Politics".

[MARK T]

Gordon Brown spent 10 years completing a PHD on the history of Scottish Socialism. That this qualifies him to talk on anything is remarkable, that it marks him out as an intellectual? Positively alarming.