Why Blair’s latest revelations make Brown just a little, tiny bit of a hero

It hardly needs saying that I don’t have a lot of time for Gordon Brown. To put it simply, I am a socialist and he is most certainly not. Yet Blair’s latest revelations suggest that we do owe a debt of very partial gratitude to our former prime minister.

In the memoirs that Blair has just vomited out, he reveals how he would have dealt with the recession:

We should have taken a New Labour way out of the economic crisis: kept direct taxes competitive, had a gradual rise in VAT and other indirect taxes to close the deficit

Now, at its worst unemployment reached 2.5 million during the current recession. That so many people should have been reduced to destitution, in this land of plenty, is certainly an indictment of the Liberal economic order over which both Blair and Brown presided. Yet it could have been a lot worse: for many years under the Tories unemployment had been 3 million (out of a smaller workforce), as indeed it was in 1998 just after Labour came to power. And it was due to the serious deficit speding during 2008-2009 – the eye of the economic storm – that unemployment didn’t reach this height. Whatever you think of Brown and Darling, they did attach a certain priority to keeping people in work, at least once the recession had hit.

That Blair would have closed the deficit through higher indirect taxes, while keeping income tax and corporation tax “competitive” (low), suggests an especially grim scenario awaited us, had Brown not tormented him out of office. Such tax rises would have hit the poor disproportionately hard. And they would therefore have also cut demand, and therefore jobs, more substantially than increases in direct taxation. This is because the poor – who would have been hit – spend a higher proportion of their income than the rich who save more, and thus every pound taken off somebody on a low income reduces aggregate demand more than each pound taken off a rich man.

Anyway the point of all this, is that all of Brown’s “bullying”, all of his “maddening” behaviour that forced Blair out, is somewhat sanctified by the fact that it helped us avoid this especially awful scenario. Even if Brown had started shitting in Tony’s bed as part of the effort to harass him out of office, this too would have been justified given the number of people Blair’s departure saved from the job centre.

The point is that deficit spending in a recession is not merely a technical issue related to the size of the national debt etc. It is also a political issue that is contingent on what priority we place on unemployment, relative to other catastrophes that come with a recession. If getting into debt now means substantially higher taxes in the future then so be it. For little compares with the horrific personal, social and communal consequences of mass unemployment. And given that unemployment affects the working class so disproportionately, it is the least we can expect for a Labour prime minister to place a premium on keeping it low.