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Gordon Brown - Source: Reuters -
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The United States should seize the moment and lead the world out
of recession but other countries need to play their part too,
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told US lawmakers.
In a speech to the US Congress, Brown urged America to resist
protectionism, fight climate change and take advantage of the huge
goodwill toward it after the election of President Barack
Obama.
"You now have the most pro-American European leadership in living memory. A leadership that wants to cooperate more closely together, in order to cooperate more closely with you. There is no old Europe, no new Europe, there is only your friend Europe."
Brown is the first European leader to visit Obama, a Democrat who took office on January 20, succeeding Republican George Bush. Bush antagonized many European countries with foreign policies that were viewed as failing to take allies' views into account, in particular the US-led Iraq war.
The prime minister said that while America could take a lead, it and a few other countries could not shoulder all the burden of restoring growth to the world economy, which is facing its worst crisis in decades.
"So let us work together for the worldwide reduction of interest rates and a scale of stimulus round the world equal to the depth of the recession and the dimensions of the recovery we must make," he said.
Brown, whose Labour Party is trailing the opposition Conservatives by some 20 points ahead of an election that must take place by June 2010, is hosting a G20 summit in London next month.
He is eager to get agreement for coordinated action to boost the world economy, involving not just the European nations but also countries like India and China.
"Just think how each of our actions, if combined, could mean a whole, much greater than the sum of the parts - all and not just some banks stabilized; on fiscal stimulus, the impact multiplied because everybody does it," he said.
Such global action could give Brown some cover to ramp up government spending to fight Britain's first recession since the early 1990s at a time when the public finances are already in bad shape, with borrowing projected to hit 8 percent of GDP next year.
'New and different battles'
While the recession has battered his reputation at home, the British leader, who met Obama for talks at the White House on Tuesday, got 19 standing ovations during his speech to the Democratic-controlled Congress.
Brown peppered his speech with appeals to the special relationship between Britain and the United States. He is likely hoping that the speech and his meeting with Obama -- who has strong public approval in the United States - will burnish his credentials as a world statesman in comparison with his rivals at home.
"Past British prime ministers have traveled to the Capitol building in times of war to talk of war. I come now to talk of new and different battles we must fight together; to speak of a global economy in crisis and a planet imperiled," Brown said.
"I believe that you, the nation that had the vision to put a man on the moon, are also the nation with the vision to protect and preserve our planet earth."
Obama has quickly marked a different course from the Bush administration on climate change, with proposals that include a market-based cap on US carbon polluting emissions and large-scale investment in renewable energy.
Spreading contagion, not risk
Brown said there were lessons to be learned from the economic crisis, particularly that the financial instruments that were designed to spread risk, spread contagion instead.
"Today's financial institutions are so interwoven that a bad bank anywhere is a threat to good banks everywhere," he said.
"So should we succumb to a race to the bottom and a protectionism that history tells us that, in the end, protects no one? No. We should have the confidence that we can seize the opportunities ahead and make the future work for us."
Brown's words on protectionism were delivered to a Congress that last month unnerved some of its trading partners by including a "Buy American" provision in a massive $787 billion economic stimulus package, requiring public works and building projects funded by stimulus cash to use only US-made goods, including iron and steel.
But the bill also requires that it be done in a manner consistent with US trade pacts - giving Canada, the European Union, Japan and a short list of other major traders some comfort that they could share in the expanded US public works market created by the stimulus bill.
Obama had urged Congress to push through the stimulus package rapidly as one of his first moves in office to try to jolt the US economy out of recession.
