Gordon Brown

James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 until 2010. He previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour Government from 1997 to 2007. Brown has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1983, currently for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

Brown became Prime Minister in June 2007, after the resignation of Tony Blair and three days after becoming leader of the governing Labour Party. His tenure ended in May 2010, when he resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. Brown was one of only three people to serve in the Cabinet continuously from Labour's victory in 1997 until its defeat in 2010, the others being Jack Straw and Alistair Darling.

Brown has a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh and spent his early career working as a lecturer at a further education college and a television journalist. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1983; first for Dunfermline East and since 2005 for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. As Prime Minister, he also held the offices of First Lord of the Treasury and the Minister for the Civil Service.

Brown's time as Chancellor was marked by major reform of Britain's monetary and fiscal policy architecture, transferring interest rate setting powers to the Bank of England, by a wide extension of the powers of the Treasury to cover much domestic policy and by transferring responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority. Controversial moves included the abolition of advance corporation tax (ACT) relief in his first budget, and the removal in his final budget of the 10% "starting rate" of personal income tax which he had introduced in 1999.

After initial rises in opinion polls following Brown's selection as leader, Labour performed poorly in local and European election results in 2009. A year later, Labour lost 91 seats in the House of Commons at the 2010 general election, the party's biggest loss of seats in a single general election since 1931, giving the Conservative Party a plurality and resulting in a hung parliament. On 10 May 2010, Brown announced he would stand down as leader of the Labour Party, and instructed the party to put into motion the processes to elect a new leader. On 11 May 2010, Brown officially resigned as Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by David Cameron, and on 25 September 2010, he was succeeded as Leader of the Labour Party by Ed Miliband.

Early life and career before Parliament

Gordon Brown was born at the Orchard Maternity Nursing Home in Giffnock, Renfrewshire, Scotland. His father was John Ebenezer Brown, a minister of the Church of Scotland and a strong influence on Brown. He died in December 1998, aged 84. His mother Jessie Elizabeth Souter, known as Bunty, died on 19 September 2004, aged 86. She was the daughter of John Souter, a timber merchant. Brown was brought up with his elder brother John and younger brother Andrew Brown in a manse in Kirkcaldy — the largest town in Fife, Scotland across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. In common with many other notable Scots, he is therefore often referred to as a "son of the manse".

Brown was educated first at Kirkcaldy West Primary School where he was selected for an experimental fast stream education programme, which took him two years early to Kirkcaldy High School for an academic hothouse education taught in separate classes. At age sixteen he wrote that he loathed and resented this "ludicrous" experiment on young lives.

He was accepted by the University of Edinburgh to study history at the same early age of sixteen. During an end-of-term rugby union match at his old school he received a kick to the head and suffered a retinal detachment. This left him blind in his left eye, despite treatment including several operations and weeks spent lying in a darkened room. Later at Edinburgh, while playing tennis, he noticed the same symptoms in his right eye. Brown underwent experimental surgery at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and his right eye was saved. Brown graduated from Edinburgh with First Class Honours MA in history in 1972, and stayed on to complete his PhD in history (which he gained ten years later in 1982), titled The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–29. In 1972, while still a student, Brown was elected Rector of the University of Edinburgh, the convener of the University Court. He served as Rector until 1975, and also edited the document The Red Paper on Scotland.

From 1976 to 1980 Brown was employed as a lecturer in politics at Glasgow College of Technology. In the 1979 general election, he stood for the Edinburgh South constituency, losing to the Conservative candidate, Michael Ancram. From 1980 he worked as a journalist at Scottish Television, later serving as current affairs editor until his election to parliament in 1983. He also worked as a tutor for the Open University.

From : www.wikipedia.org

Gordon Brown

Scottish-born Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister of the United Kingdom in 2007, after having served under Blair as chancellor of the Exchequer. He stepped down in 2010 amidst waning popularity of the Labour party, which was due in part to the worldwide financial crisis.

Profile

Gordon Brown (born Feb. 20, 1951, Glasgow, Scotland) Scottish-born British Labour Party politician who served as chancellor of the Exchequer (1997–2007) and prime minister of the United Kingdom (2007–10). At the time of his elevation to prime minister, he had been the longest continuously serving chancellor of the Exchequer since the 1820s.

Early life and early political career

Brown was the son of John Brown, a Labour Party-supporting Church of Scotland minister, and Elizabeth Brown. At age 16 he won a scholarship to the University of Edinburgh (the youngest student to enter the university since World War II), where he immersed himself in student politics, eventually becoming chair of the university's Labour club. Having earned a degree with honours in 1972, he served as a university lecturer, first at Edinburgh (1975–76) and then at Glasgow College of Technology (now part of Glasgow Caledonian University; 1976–80). Brown left academia for an appointment at Scottish TV (1980–83), where he was a journalist and editor in the current affairs department. In 1982 he completed a doctorate in history at Edinburgh; his dissertation was titled The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland, 1918–29.

In 1974 Brown had helped organize the parliamentary campaign to elect Robin Cook, who would later serve in government with Brown as foreign minister (1997–2001) and leader of the House of Commons (2001–03). Brown himself unsuccessfully stood for election to the House of Commons in 1979 for a seat representing Edinburgh before winning a seat in Parliament in 1983 as MP for Dunfermline East. He became friends with Tony Blair, another new MP, and the two soon found themselves at the forefront of the campaign to modernize Labour's political philosophy, replacing the goal of state socialism with a more pragmatic, market-friendly strategy. From 1987 he served in Labour's shadow cabinet, first as shadow chief secretary to the Treasury and then as shadow trade and industry secretary. In 1992, following Labour's fourth successive electoral defeat, Brown was named shadow chancellor of the Exchequer by John Smith, then the Labour Party leader.

Brown was widely regarded as the senior half of the Blair-Brown partnership and the one more likely to eventually become party leader. When Smith died in 1994, however, Blair had overtaken Brown as the favoured candidate of party activists and the wider public. Brown reluctantly stepped aside, reportedly after Blair agreed to support Brown as his eventual successor. Speculation that a deal had been reached was confirmed by Brown in a 2010 interview, though he stated that the decision had not been made at a meeting in Granita, a London restaurant, as previously thought. In 1994 Blair won the party's leadership, and Brown was subsequently reappointed by Blair as Labour's shadow chancellor.

Chancellor of the Exchequer

In the 1997 general election, Labour won a landslide victory, and Blair became prime minister. Brown was subsequently named chancellor of the Exchequer, and he swiftly took control of almost all policies concerned with the United Kingdom's domestic economy. He immediately made his mark by ceding the power to set interest rates to the Bank of England, and in October 1997 he announced a set of five key economic tests that would have to be met before Britain adopted the euro (he was generally considered more skeptical than Blair regarding Britain's joining the euro). Brown disappointed many Labour supporters by largely retaining for the first two years the strict public-spending policies he had inherited from the Conservatives, but by July 1998 he had drawn up new plans that allowed for significantly more spending on health, education, and overseas aid, starting in 1999. In October 1998, as chairman of the Group of Seven's subgroup of finance ministers, Brown extended his influence and played a key role in helping to establish new international mechanisms to stabilize world financial markets. In 2000 Brown married Sarah Macaulay.

Under Brown's leadership, Great Britain experienced a period of relatively steady economic growth, but increased public spending and government borrowing became growing concerns. Brown had a strong interest in international economics; he served as the United Kingdom's governor of the International Monetary Fund and as chair of the organization's primary decision-making committee and was instrumental in brokering a European agreement in 2005 that would double foreign aid to developing countries. He also set out a policy aimed at environmental sustainability, arguing that for too long economic priorities and environmental protection were seen as mutually exclusive and that instead “economic objectives and our environmental objectives now increasingly reinforce each other.”

The relationship between Blair and Brown had grown somewhat strained, with many loyal to Blair claiming that Brown's supporters had been undermining Blair's leadership for several years (indeed, in June 2007 a leaked document surfaced showing that Blair had considered removing Brown as chancellor of the Exchequer after the 2005 election). In September 2006, shortly after the Labour Party fared poorly in local elections—blamed in part on the party's support of the Iraq War—Blair announced that he would step down as prime minister within a year. Brown subsequently pledged his support for Blair, and Blair in turn later backed Brown to succeed him as Labour Party leader and prime minister.

Prime Ministership

Brown faced no opposition in the campaign to succeed Blair as Labour Party leader, and on June 27, 2007, three days after he officially became Labour Party leader, Brown became prime minister. He pledged to make reform of the National Health Service a major priority, to retain the various public-sector reforms that had been implemented by Blair, and to “wage an unremitting battle against poverty.” In foreign policy Brown argued that the global fight against terrorism “involves more than military force,” and, though he had close ties with the United States and had been seen as somewhat more skeptical than Blair of many aspects of the European Union (EU), it was anticipated that he would pursue a course that focused British policy on British interests rather than on developing a closer relationship with either the United States or the EU.

Brown's government was severely tested in 2008–09 when a worldwide financial crisis and ensuing recession hit Britain hard. His problems multiplied in the spring of 2009, when against a backdrop of growing unemployment a political scandal erupted, involving the widespread abuse of expense accounts by members of Parliament, including members of Brown's cabinet, some of whom resigned (a major cabinet reshuffle followed). Largely as a result of the scandal and the recession, Labour's popularity plummeted, and the party performed very poorly in local British elections and in elections for the European Parliament.

Following the particularly disastrous European elections on June 4, 2009, when Labour secured only 15.7 percent of the vote across the British mainland, there were efforts once again to oust Brown as party leader. James Purnell, the secretary of state for work and pensions, resigned from Brown's cabinet and claimed that Brown's “continued leadership makes a Conservative victory more, not less likely.I am therefore calling on you to stand aside to give our party a fighting chance of winning.” Brown's allies worked furiously to ensure that no other minister followed Purnell's example. None did, but Brown's authority was visibly weakened. To avoid a challenge, he met with Labour MPs and promised to change the way he led.

Also in 2009 Brown's efforts to stimulate the economy produced an ever-increasing budget deficit, which weighed down the prime minister's poll ratings as a general election loomed. In January 2010 two former cabinet members called for a secret ballot on Brown's leadership, well in advance of the parliamentary election required by law to take place by June 3. Though support for Brown was slow in coming and lukewarm, no vote was taken, and he held on to the party leadership heading into the election. Brown agreed that before the election was held he would testify before the most recent and extensive inquiry into the conduct of the Iraq War. In 2010 the prime minister helped facilitate a deal between the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin that would devolve justice and policing power to Northern Ireland by April 2010; stalemate over the issue had threatened possible suspension of devolution and the reimposition of direct rule from London.

In the British general election on May 6, 2010, the Labour Party lost its majority in the House of Commons, finishing second to the Conservatives, but no party achieved a majority. Shortly thereafter Brown announced that he would be stepping down as Labour leader. On May 11, after negotiations to form a coalition government with the third-place-finishing Liberal Democrats failed, Brown tendered his resignation as prime minister.

Brown wrote several books, including The Politics of Nationalism and Devolution (1980; with H.M. Drucker); Maxton (1986); Where There Is Greed (1989); John Smith (1994; with James Naughtie); and Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization (2010).

From : www.biography.com