Former PM Gordon Brown: UK at risk of becoming ‘failed state’
As more and more evidence accumulates on the perilous state of the union, former Labor Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has seen fit to intervene by sending a warning shot across the bows of the government and the broader British establishment.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph (January 24), Brown, who was PM between 2007 and 2010, claims the Covid-19 pandemic has “brought to the surface tensions and grievances that have been simmering for years” between London and the UK’s outlying regions.
The former PM wrote starkly that: “The choice is now between a reformed state and a failed state”.
Separately, in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today program (January 25), Brown complained that at a time “when all should be pulling together and intensifying co-operation across the UK”, the leaders of Scotland, Wales, in addition to English regions, were not being adequately consulted.
“I think the public are fed up. I think in many ways, they feel they are being treated as second class citizens, particularly in the outlying areas, that they are invisible and forgotten”, Brown told the BBC.
The former PM added that “something has broken down in trust and has to be repaired”.
Brown’s intervention comes on the heels of successive opinion polls showing that the majority of people in Scotland and Northern Ireland desire referenda giving them the option to secede from the UK.
In the case of Scotland, a majority of respondents say they would opt for independence if a referendum was held tomorrow.
In addition, the Welsh independence movement is also resurgent and mobilizing resources ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for May.
Brown’s solution to the insidious breakup of the UK is hardly original for he is merely calling on Boris Johnson to respect the Tories’ own election manifesto by setting up a commission on democracy to review how the UK is governed.
In his Telegraph article, Brown proposes a vague plan revolving around the creation of a “Forum of the Nations and Regions”, in addition to “Citizens’ Assemblies”, to address the UK’s chronic democratic deficit.
This is not the first time the former Labor PM has waded into the UK’s constitutional crisis by offering vague and some might argue impractical solutions.
Writing in the Observer on August 10, 2019, Brown claimed the union was facing its most “serious constitutional crisis since the 17th century”.
Furthermore, in separate interviews with the BBC and Sky News in January 2020, Brown warned that absent “sweeping constitutional changes”, the UK is at risk of “disintegration”.
Most recently, speaking to the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show in November 2020, Brown firmly sided with British unionists by describing a proposed referendum on Scottish independence as a “distraction”.
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