Gordon Brown sounded like a Victorian headmaster — all high moral tone and hard work. To judge by the deluge of initiatives in the Pre-Budget Report and the weight of documents, Brown’s Britain is going to be a very serious, and busy, place.
Brownism has two main strands: social injustice and inequality, and Britain’s place in a globalised world. Noting how every year Britain adds 75,000 engineers and computer scientists, while India and China add half a million, he argued: “Economies like ours have no choice but to out-innovate and outperform competitors by the excellence of our science and education, the quality of infrastructure and environment, and by our flexibility and our levels of creativity and entrepreneurship.”
There are echoes of the debate a century