Building a ‘New Jerusalem’
Building a ‘New Jerusalem’
Chapter 4 focuses upon the institutional framework that Gordon Brown and his chief economic advisor, Ed Balls, put in place to make the Treasury the pilot agency of New Labour’s political economy. Insofar as the newly established Department for International Development (DFID) was concerned, this would ensure that it was the Chancellor, rather than the Secretary of State for International Development who would design New Labour’s international development policy. Yet the role that the Treasury played in ‘internationalising’ New Labour’s domestic political economy went beyond the conquest of other Whitehall departments. Brown took the macroeconomic blueprint – the ‘new economic architecture’ – that he had mapped out at home, to a number of key international financial actors abroad. This blueprint would create, in Brown’s mind, ‘a new Jerusalem’, a biblical phrase that the Chancellor used to describe the vision that he had of a world free from poverty, debt and disease. Embedding this vision into the orthodoxy of the ‘post-Washington Consensus’, Brown wanted to maintain not only a clear transmission of policy but also a distinct institutional ‘lock-in’, and a set of global governance arrangements that would provide the framework for the policies explored in the following three case study chapters.
Keywords: DFID, HM Treasury, Globalisation, Global governance, ‘Post-Washington Consensus’
Edinburgh Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.