It is a long way from the Houses of Congress to the Caird Hall and it was a very different Gordon Brown who addressed the Labour Party faithful in Dundee yesterday from the one who drew 17 standing ovations in Washington two days before. This was an altogether more muted performance from a clearly fatigued Prime Minister.
It is a long way from the Houses of Congress to the Caird Hall and it was a very different Gordon Brown who addressed the Labour Party faithful in Dundee yesterday from the one who drew 17 standing ovations in Washington two days before. This was an altogether more muted performance from a clearly fatigued Prime Minister.
Much of this sermon would not have been out of place in his father's pulpit. There were three oblique references to the Bible: being my brother's keeper (from the Cain and Abel story), not passing by on the other side (from the Good Samaritan) and the moral imperative of the strong helping the weak (from Paul writing to the Romans). The underlying message was that when the going gets tough, everyone must pull together, a thesis he attempted to apply to both the global financial crisis and the SNP's ambition to dismantle the UK. As ever with such set-pieces, the challenge was to appeal both to the rows of delegates before him and the world beyond.
As promised, we learned a little more of the big agenda Mr Brown intends to bring to the G20 meeting of world leaders and international financial institutions in London next month. There was a repeat of the call for a crackdown on tax havens and an end to the bank bonus culture that has incentivised short-termism. He talked of shoring up the banking system of poorer countries and building a global framework for international financial supervision. Mr Brown understands the nature and dynamics of this crisis better than most, and he is right in his insistence that global problems demand global solutions. Whether he can muster the authority to drag the world's leaders along with him is another issue. Critics can fairly claim that the model he created to regulate banking in Britain - the Financial Services Authority - signally failed to prevent Britain's banks behaving more like casinos. "Saving the world" is easier said than done.
The Prime Minister was on safer ground ridiculing the SNP for basing its case on a broken arc of prosperity, the devalued mantra of Scotland's oil and the discredited Edinburgh financial services sector. Yesterday's £250bn government underwriting of the "toxic" assets held by Lloyds TSB - largely as a result of its acquisition of HBOS - underlined his contention that an independent Scotland would have lacked the capacity to save Scottish banks from going to the wall.
Labour is still in a parlous state in Scotland, with membership down to 15,000, but what mattered yesterday was the perceived direction of travel. After the nadir of losing Glasgow East, holding on to Glenrothes with a decent majority suggested recovery was possible. And, since the election of Iain Gray as leader at Holyrood, Labour has begun to find its feet again, inflicting significant defeats on the Nationalists over local income tax, apprentices and the independence referendum.
Mr Brown is right to maintain that "what scars Scotland is not its border but poverty". However, he may find that saving the Union is easier than saving the world.
