We must have a soul, new leader tells party

The fact that Gordon Brown was elected to be the new Prime Minister without having to fight anyone else for the crown has meant that for the past six weeks - whilst Blair was holding on to power doing his farewell tour - that attention has moved on to the Deputy Leadership election and away from the man who is now set to lead the UK.

Yesterday for the first time in six weeks, all that changed. Harriet Harman was named as Brown's deputy and the attention moved firmly back towards Brown.

In Manchester, he made a speech that introduced him to the British people and attempted to set out his values.

He set out the party's commitment to the NHS:

"I grew up in Kirkcaldy, the community I now represent in parliament ... I went to my local school and was one of the people in my class to get to university. When at 16 I suffered an injury and lost the sight in one eye, I was fortunate to have the NHS which saved the sight in my other. It is for me a matter of fundamental principle that the best education and health care I received should be there ... for all families in all parts of Britain.

And then he set out to show why this personal experience was the rock on which all of his values were built:

"All I believe and all I try to do comes from the values I grew up with: duty, honesty, hard work, family and respect for others. I am a conviction politician ... My conviction is that everyone deserves a fair chance in life ... that each of us has a responsibility to each other ... that when the strong help the weak it makes us all stronger. Call it the driving power of social conscience, call it the better angels of our nature, call it our moral sense, call it a belief in civic duty. I joined this party as a teenager because I believed in these values. They guide my work, they are my moral compass. This is who I am.

"And because these are the values of our party, too, the party I lead must have more than a set of policies - we must have a soul."

He then promised that housing would have a new urgency under his administration:

"Housing will be a priority. The housing minister will attend cabinet. This time the promise of a property-owning democracy must be open to all those wanting to get on the housing ladder. We need to build homes not just to own but to rent ... We can make affordable housing for all one of the great causes of our time."

He spoke of the scandal of child poverty saying that such a thing was unacceptable within the fourth largest economy in the world.

He hinted that he would not be withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan, although he did emphasise where he thought the most important area was for tackling international terrorism:

"In Iraq, which all of us accept has been a divisive issue for our party and our country, in Afghanistan and the Middle East, we will meet our obligations, we will learn lessons that need to be learned, and at all times be unyielding in support for our dedicated armed forces.

"To isolate and defeat terrorist extremism now involves more than military force - it is also a struggle of ideas and ideals ... An essential contribution to this will be what becomes daily more urgent - a Middle East settlement upholding a two state solution."

I happen to agree that a Middle East solution between Israel and Palestine would do more to tackle international terrorism than any other action that we could take. But then, to be fair, even Tony Blair recognised the truth of that but had scant chance of making it reality based on the intransigence of the Bush administration on the subject.

Brown has had a passenger seat view for the past ten years of where Blair has succeeded and where Blair has had less success. Blair's greatest mistake was to tie himself to the tail of the tiger, making Bush's foreign policy his own and reducing his ability to influence the American's in any significant way.

Brown now gets a chance to begin that relationship anew, tying the British presence in Iraq and Afghanistan to movement on the Middle East peace plan. Threatening to leave the US isolated should Bush not make some real and substantive attempt to bring about peace between Israel and Palestine.

I have no idea whether or not Brown will have the courage to attempt to do this, but the goalpost is in front of him.

What I do suspect is that Britain's relationship with the United States is about to subtly change. Brown is well aware of the price that Blair paid for his close relationship to Bush's White House and to how badly that White House repaid Blair for all his loyalty.

He is unlikely to repeat those same mistakes.

A new era begins.

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Tags: Brown, Blair, new era, New Labour, Britain, United States