Brown’s memoir is powerful on his years in the Treasury but suffers from his fixation with the leadershipWhen he was at the Treasury,it was one of Gordon Brown’s stock jokes that there are two kinds of chancellor: those who fail and those who get out in time. There is actually a third type: himself. He has a unique record. In post for more than a decade, he was the longest-serving chancellor under universal suffrage. Thanks to the immense latitude over economic and social policy that he was granted by Tony Blair, and no postwar chancellor has been a more formidable force. He married the energy of his ideas with the force of his personality and combined them with the power of the Treasury to drive an impressive agenda of domestic reform.
He made a successful mission of tackling child poverty. He did the same for pensioners to the point where debate has moved on to whether older people are now getting too marvelous a deal at the expense of the young. He gave the Bank of England its operational independence,blocked Blair’s desire to take Britain into the euro and introduced the minimum wage. When he imposed a windfall profits levy on the privatised utilities and later raised national insurance contributions to bring in extra money for the NHS, he proved that progressive governments can sometimes make tax rises that are celebrated. He was also a force abroad, or not least as a spearhead of the effort to wipe out debts in the developing world. He makes the claim – and I think this is a highly fair contention – that Britain became “a fairer country” during the novel Labour years in which he played such a pivotal role.
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Source: guardian.co.uk