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Seven Ways to Change the World
How To Fix The Most Pressing Problems We Face
Gordon Brown
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eBook - ePub
Seven Ways to Change the World
How To Fix The Most Pressing Problems We Face
Gordon Brown
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About This Book
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER
'Hisvision, ideas and passion shine throughon every page' Ed Balls
'Compelling, challenging, inspiring and very timely' Piers Morgan
'Immensely powerful and persuasive...I found itexhilarating throughout' Joanna Lumley
When the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the globe in 2020, it created an unprecedented impact. But out of such disruption can come a new way of thinking, and in this superb book, updated to include the latest events in Ukraine and at COP26, former UK prime minister Gordon Brown offers his solutions to the challenges we face now and in the future. In the book, he states that there are seven major global problems we must address: global health; climate change and environmental damage; nuclear proliferation; global financial instability; the humanitarian crisis and global poverty; the barriers to education and opportunity; and global inequality and its biggest manifestation, global tax havens. Each one presents an immense challenge that requiresan urgent global response and solution.All should be on the world's agenda today. None can be solved by one nation acting on its own, but all can be addressed if we work together as a global community. However, Brown remains optimistic that, despite the many obstacles in our way, we will find a path to regeneration via a new era of global order. Yes, there is a crisis of globalisation, but we are beginning to see the means by which it might be resolved. Crises create opportunities and having two at once shouldn't just focus the mind, it might even be seen as giving greater grounds for hope. In Seven Ways to Change the World, Brown provides an authoritative and inspirationalpathway to a better future that is essential reading for policy makers and concerned citizens alike.
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PART ONE Learning From Our Past
INTRODUCTION
In late 2019 an invisible virus, thought to have surfaced from a wet market in a huge industrial Chinese city, spread round the world in fewer than eighty days. COVID-19 has already done more damage than any economic downturn or military conflict in recent history. At time of writing, in spring 2021, COVID-19 has infected more than 127 million people – more than any epidemic since the Spanish flu of 1918–19. This microscopic parasite, 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt, has caused more deaths – in excess of 3 million – than any war in the West since 1945. And it has wrought more financial havoc, disrupted more trade, killed off more jobs, led to more lost production and caused more company closures than any modern recession.
COVID-19 has not only attacked our human bodies and shattered our economic fabric, it has also undermined the cultural and social foundations of our lives. As individuals, we have come face to face with our own vulnerability and mortality. Each of us has been sharply reminded of the sheer precariousness of life and the fundamental fragility of the human condition. And the pandemic has called into question much of what we know about disease, technology, economics and human behaviour, to the extent that our pre-COVID-19 world is simply no more. Across the board, well-established paradigms about the role of individuals, markets and states have been challenged and long-held assumptions about the nature of the social contract, the openness of our societies, the responsibilities of governments, the reach of the state and even the very idea of progress have been called into question. All these issues require investigation. In this book, we will interrogate our prevailing ideas, ideologies and institutions and ask why they proved so inadequate in their response to the challenge of COVID-19; and how we can now take the crisis as an opportunity to create a better world.
As unprecedented as what has been variously called the Great Lockdown and the Great Virus Crisis has been, it has shone a new light on age-old problems: oppressive poverty; the unequal distribution of opportunities; and what the economist J. K. Galbraith referred to sixty years ago as the contrast between public squalor and private wealth – the inequalities and divisions that arise from the way our economy is run, our resources are allocated and our environment is managed.1
It has accelerated changes already in train, not least the flight from the physical to the virtual. Even before the pandemic, a profound transition was already under way, taking us from the old, industrial, workplace-based economy to the more recent information and technology revolution – The Fourth Industrial Revolution – and on to an as-yet undetermined future. So, even when the pandemic is over, it is unlikely there will be a return to ‘business as usual’. Indeed, the very idea of a ‘normality’ is now little more than a fiction, and in no sense a guide to the future in a world continuously reshaped by radical uncertainty.
For the crisis is also forcing onto the agenda new ways of thinking that may otherwise have taken years to emerge; what was previously unimaginable suddenly becomes imaginable, making it possible to begin discerning more clearly what is wrong and what needs to be reconsidered and reset. And, slowly, more and more of us are coming to realise that there is an underlying problem that goes beyond the way we deal with one virus: namely, our failure as an international community to organise ourselves and to prevent and manage crises that affect us all. Quite simply, in order to address global problems that need global solutions, we have to find better ways of working together.
At the start of 2020, we were slow to understand that a pandemic knows no boundaries and has no respect for political frontiers, and that if a pandemic crosses borders, so must the response. But in 2020 people and states still stuck rigidly to a system of national rules, borders and frontiers – which the virus did not. As a result, nation after nation lost control of the spread while our international institutions failed to command sufficient support or authority to coordinate successful interventions. All countries faced the same virus (which soon demonstrated its intrinsic capacity to produce new variants) and the same economic recession, required the same medical supplies in response and needed prompt and explicit cooperation to get the virus under control, starting with a mutually beneficial exchange of information. And yet in nations across the world governments failed to draw the logical conclusion: that to protect ourselves locally, we had to act globally.
A year on, political leaders have yet to act on the knowledge that we will not be able to finally eliminate the disease in each of our own countries until it is fully eradicated in all countries. They have failed to conclude that we have no alternative but to act together. And it is only when one stands back to reflect on the scale of the disaster – the hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths and countless avoidable hospitalisations – that one can begin to truly understand the colossal scale and impact of our failure to work together to protect lives; the yawning gap between the need for cooperation and our failure to deliver it; and the underlying crisis of our international order.
Now, with COVID-19 still raging across the planet, we must confront this failure. Because while the virus stands out as the most obvious example, the truth is that every single one of the key challenges facing humanity today, many of which threaten to destroy our way of life and the planet with it, requires a similar internationally coordinated response. A view of the world made up of competing nations and empires, each of them self-contained and ploughing their lone furrows, had outlived its relevance in the last century, never mind this one. It is a simple fact that in a world that has become increasingly interconnected and globalised, the seven challenges discussed in this book – from pandemics and pollution to nuclear proliferation and poverty – cannot be fully addressed without cross-border cooperation.
Yet, as the pandemic has shown, the tragedy – both in lives lost and the trillions squandered in lost economic activity – is that we still, too often, see a resolution to these challenges primarily through a nationalist lens, to be solved within the confines of the nation state acting on its own. As the popularity of nationalist slogans like ‘America First’, China First’, ‘Russia First’ and ‘India First’ remind us, much of the world retains a nationalist mindset, often dances to jingoistic tunes and can all too easily march under chauvinistic and sometimes xenophobic banners. Instead of uniting people in a common cause, the ‘my country first and only’ zealots subdivide the human species into exclusive tribes structured around ‘insiders’ (‘us’) and ‘outsiders’ (‘them’), and when nationalist passions blind us to the possible benefits of international cooperation like this, the inevitable consequence is that global problems remain unaddressed.
But we cannot respond by wishing away the inevitable tension between, on the one hand, the realities of global interdependence and the pressures of global economic integration and, on the other, the instinct to retain one’s national sovereignty and to bring decision-making closer to home. In no way do I seek to abandon the nation state and offer the utopian impossibility of some global government. But the practical task before us is to end the mindset which sees the competing rights of national sovereignty and international cooperation as a zero-sum game, and to dispel the notion that any gains enjoyed by one country will always come at the expense of another. We can, and must, do better than that.
In summary, the challenge of our times is to reconcile the demands of globalisation, sovereignty and democracy, and achieve an optimal balance between the responsibilities borne by our international institutions and by nation states. Whether the challenge is battling a pandemic, tackling the looming threat of climate change, or preventing a new nuclear arms race, it can no longer be ignored or held over to another day. Instead, we are called upon to act with what Martin Luther King Jr called ‘the fierce urgency of now’. Indeed, as King also observed, ‘In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.’2
Some might argue that it is already too late. More than sixty years ago, Albert Schweitzer, the renowned Nobel Prize-winning doctor, warned us that ‘man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.’3 Similarly, the reason given by the inventor and space entrepreneur Elon Musk for his breathless rush to fly a spaceship to the moon and then Mars is not his curiosity or competitive desire to be the first there. Nor is it a natural instinct to explore the unknown and ‘go where humankind has never gone before’. And nor is it a longing to bequeath a scientific discovery or even – as was famously cited by George Mallory as his explanation for persevering in his ultimately fatal efforts to scale Mount Everest – ‘because it’s there’.4 Musk’s quest is born not of that positivity or optimism, but rather of fear and pessimism: to insure against our planet’s possible destruction, he says, we need to become a multi-planet species. Earth has seen five extinctions, he tells us, and, while we may be able to develop the technology to shield the planet if an asteroid hits, it is important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars in the event of a climate disaster or a nuclear war. Mars is ‘far enough away from Earth that it’s more likely to survive than a moon base’, he explained. ‘If there’s a third world war, we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages.’5
That fatalism was shared by the late Stephen Hawking, who – to improve the chance of human survival from planet-wide events, such as global thermonuclear war – consistently argued for the colonisation of other planets within the solar system. Only a few years before he died, he prophesied that humanity faces two options: either we colonise space within the next 200 years or we face the prospect of extinction.
Hawking and Musk paint quite apocalyptic visions of our planet’s fragile future, specifically – in their eyes – due to climate change and the potential for nuclear war. I reject this pessimism. But I accept that the future of our planet is fragile and that it is not science fiction to believe that the world could be laid low in a number of ways, even going beyond climate change or radioactive fallout as a result of open nuclear conflict. The planet could be disrupted by a financial crash even more devastating than that of 2008–09; it could be disrupted by the mass exodus of millions of people fleeing from war, poverty, lack of opportunity or global warming; or it could be disrupted by our failure to address glaring injustices and unacceptable inequalities.
In this sense, the pandemic has not just been a crisis in its own right, but also a salutary warning of what may be to come. It tells us that we are as unprepared as an international community to face these challenges as we were for 9/11 or for the global financial crisis or for climate change itself. And it warns us that, if we do nothing to alleviate environmental issues, financial challenges, poverty, inequality and ignorance, we will split asunder. But, if we can address these issues – and if we do so this decade – I believe that it is not too late to turn things around. However, in order to do so, we will need to work together.
Global problems need global solutions
I remember being asked during the 2009 financial crisis how I would sum up what I had learned from the storm that engulfed us. ‘It’s the economy, stupid – isn’t it?’ I was asked, as many repeated back to me the oft-quoted Bill Clinton campaign slogan. ‘No,’ I said, ‘what I have learned is that global problems need global solutions.’ Even then, it was clear that, in our ever-more interdependent world, we would not achieve success by working in isolation; we would have to come together to deal with global problems that we cannot not solve on our own. And, in this crisis, I have learned something more: there are such things as global public goods, like a good climate and a healthy, disease-free environment, that we all need, so it makes sense for all countries to work together to make sure we all have them.
But yet, running almost parallel, nationalism has been on the rise. We have found that the nation state – which has, for centuries, been able to command outsized political loyalty and exercise coercive power – is resurgent as the only real centre of political gravity. And we see it not only in the UK’s rejection of the EU, or in China’s national security law repressing free speech in Hong Kong, or in the Russian president’s opportunism and aggression both at home and abroad, but in almost every region of the world. In India’s revocation of the special status of Kashmir; in Ethiopia’s internal war and its fight with Egypt and Sudan over the damming of the Nile; in the Iran–Saudi and Qatar–UAE conflicts; in Turkey’s military aggression in the Middle East; in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict pursued by Azerbaijan.
But there has been no greater demonstration of the damage nationalism does than the protectionism that has characterised the nativist responses to the pandemic: national leaders desperately trying to corner the global market in vaccines, with no thought for others, and refusing to supply their neighbours with essential drugs, protective medical equipment and vaccines themselves, even when they have a surplus that exceeds what they can use. At the very time they have been needed most, international institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN) have been bypassed and undermined, with cross-border cooperation set aside in favour of go-it-alone responses.
For years, we have prided ourselves in the development of global supply chains for goods like medical equipment and in the circuits of mutual dependence these supply chains created. So important did they become, in fact, that they were dubbed ‘solidarity chains’ as testament to the inability of anyone anywhere to opt out of the world. But, during 2020, they were at breaking point, their disarray providing a sharp corrective to all those who assumed that progress would inevitably produce an open, not closed, world of trade and commerce.
We can, however, take heart from the willing international collaboration that, in defiance of populist nationalists, emerged across the world of medicine in response to COVID-19. Scientists and projects that could have been competing against each other commercially actually united in an altruistic communal response to a global threat. In one triumphant week in November 2020, three international groups of researchers and three multinational companies, all of which had been engaged in non-stop rounds of laboratory research and field tests and trials, announced a vaccine breakthrough after only eight months of intensive work. This success alone should be a rebuke to those who challenge science and threaten to undermine reason as the basis for decision-making. The new vaccines draw on collegiate work by scientists across Europe, the US and Asia. Nothing better sums up the interdependent nature of our economy than a US company employing scientists from Turkey to create a vaccine in laboratories in Germany, with many of the doses to be manufactured in India. The speed at which new cures and new solutions have been explored and discovered through this cross-border collaboration shows that we have the technological capacity on a global scale to confront the challenges we face and that decent-minded people of different nationalities are keen to cooperate across borders to find solutions.
So we have to address the mismatch between this current medical and scientific cooperation and a lingering failure on the part of our political leaders to come together to ensure this happens quickly and universally. Seemingly unanswerable scientific breakthroughs – those that could, for example, vaccinate the entire world or decarbonise the planet – are at risk of being torpedoed by powerful vested interests. Or sidelined by bureaucratic indifference. Or undermined by weak and incompetent political leaders. Or sabotaged by geopolitical rivalries and by nations clinging to old-fashioned and absolutist views of national sovereignty – or by hostility to new thinking.
‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones,’ the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes concluded. As a result, the multilateral cooperation that is necessary to deal with a global problem does not happen and the very real tensions between economic and environmental priorities and between the developed and developing world go unresolved. Perhaps no one could have anticipated how unequal to the task of chaos prevention world leaders would have been in 2020, but their failures are a salutary reminder that the best ideas can be rendered worthless by bad political decisions.
These and other global problems seem more intractable today because we trade, travel, holiday, study and invest across borders at a rate and at a level far greater than ever before.7 We can communicate instantaneously and continuously with anyone in almost any part ...