Gordon Brown insists Keir Starmer's Labour government 'will be even better than 1997'
Gordon Brown joined forces with Angela Rayner to make one last plea for your vote - promising the next Labour government would do "even better things" than New Labour did 20 years ago.
"The best is yet to be," Mr Brown, Labour's last PM, said. With just four days to go before the polls open, Britain’s last Labour PM met the deputy leader in Kirkcaldy, the town in Fife where Mr Brown grew up. They spoke to this newspaper at St Bryce Kirk, where Mr Brown’s late father was the minister.
Mr Brown urged voters not to pass up a chance to elect a “life-changing government” this Thursday. He said: “We have got to persuade people who, maybe are reading the Sunday Mirror on Sunday morning and think, well, is it worth voting? We've got some football matches coming up. And we've got to persuade them.”
“This is a life changing election. This election can change lives. And to vote is really important. We've had Labour governments in the past that have changed things - but this could be the Labour government that makes a huge difference to the rest of the century, to be honest, with the changes it's about to make."
Gordon Brown and Angela Rayner spoke to the Mirror in Kirkcaldy where the ex-PM grew up
He added: “I’m so confident that if we have a Labour government - and it’s obviously ‘if’, because nobody's complacent - that the Labour government coming in can make even better changes than we were able to make 20 years ago.”
Ms Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, said: "People often say to me, ' Well, Angie, Gordon Brown's government was criticised for this', or 'Tony Blair's government was criticised for that. But they changed my life." She added: “If you want change, if you want to see a Labour government that can change your life like the last one did for me, you have to vote for it."
Mr Brown, who has campaigned vigorously to end child poverty in the years since leaving government, hailed Labour’s manifesto as a solid foundation to build on. During his 13 years as Chancellor and Prime Minister, the policies Mr Brown shaped as part of the New Labour project lifted millions of children out of poverty.
And countless families were supported through the minimum wage, tax credits and Sure Start centres for parents. He said: “I do think that the manifesto sets out the way forward - because you’ve got breakfast clubs, you've got to help with kids, because dental decay is a huge problem. You've got a review of the Universal Credit, which is which needs review because there's some very bad elements of it.”
He added: “You've got obviously a whole series of different initiatives that is going to start to make things better, and then to be able to build on that as you get growth in the economy, means this will be a life changing government. And Angela, having had the experience of seeing things change at the beginning of the century, is going to be the person who's making the changes."
Gordon Brown says his tax credits policy was aimed at people like Angela
Mr Brown and Ms Rayner have known each other for decades - first meeting at Labour Party conference in 2005 - then again in 2007, when Ms Rayner visited him in Downing Street as a union official. The meeting remains the only time Ms Rayner has ever been inside No10.
“I’m so excited about Angela hopefully becoming a minister,” Mr Brown said. “Because Angela was one of the people who we had in mind when we devised tax credits. She wanted to work, she had childcare responsibilities. Could we make it worth a while to to to have a job? Could you hold down a job with childcare responsibilities and everything else?"
Ms Rayner said the policy - which topped up low wages to encourage people off benefits and into work - had been a “massive game changer”. “Not just for me but for a lot of the mums on my estate, it enabled us to go to work. It gave us self-worth. And it's really hard to put that into words. The confidence that it gave us young mums to be able to go out there and earn for ourselves and not have to rely on a guy or somebody else to do it for us... I wouldn't be sat in front of you today if it wasn't for what Gordon did when he was in government."
Ms Rayner said Sure Start had delivered generational change in her own family
Ms Rayner said Sure Start, the network of family support centres pioneered by New Labour and mothballed under the Tories, had made generational change to countless families - including her own. "My mum was one of 12,” she said. “She didn't learn to read and write. And my mum had bipolar so she wasn't... her mum didn't give her skills of how to be a mum and she didn't know how to care for me.
“It wasn't that she was a bad mother, she just didn't know how to care for me. So when I had my son, I was ...unwittingly...I love him and I want to give him everything...but I wasn't giving him the affection and the emotional support. And it was only when I went to the Sure Start programme and went on the parenting course, said that I realised that, oh, I'm neglecting this bit of important parenting because I didn't know. My mom didn't know. her mum didn’t know.”
She beamed as she told us how she’d passed that support on to her son, and to her granddaughter. I see my son with my granddaughter, and it gives me such a smile on my face,” she said. “Because I had to learn how to give cuddles. It wasn't natural to me. How do you out a price on that?”
Ms Rayner is set to follow in Mr Brown’s footsteps - delivering the eve-of-election speech for Citizens UK in London tomorrow. Mr Brown blew the doors off Westminster’s Methodist Central Hall the night before the 2010 election, in one of the most powerful moments of the campaign - but it wasn’t enough to secure a Labour victory.
“When you put it that way... you're piling on the pressure,” Ms Rayner laughed. She said she’d been taking tips from the former PM ahead of the speech. “Angela will speak from the heart,” he said. Ms Rayner said: “I’ve been asking Gordon for tips because obviously his speech at Citizens UK was absolutely barnstorming. And so there's a lot of pressure. The TV debates are nothing compared to going after Gordon Brown."
"I think Gordon's advice is right. And to be honest, it's what I've always tried to do, and people know that I've always kind of said it how i see it. And just speak from the heart" Mr Brown said: "And tell them what you're going to do, because people want to know what you're going to do. And there are so many things in the manifesto that allow you to say, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this. We may not do it in the first day, we can do it in 100 days or do in the first year. Angela showed great courage and ability in getting to where we are. But the best is yet to be."