Iain Scott

Is Gordon Brown a closet entrepreneur? Now there’s a topical question. And the answer seems to change from day to day with regard to Mr Brown. What I can tell you is that entrepreneurship is very close to Gordon’s heart (something that – despite the importance he places on new firm creation – many of our political commentators and economists have failed to pick up on).

I think the origins of Brown’s love affair with entrepreneurship lie back in the 1970s, when the Labour government under Harold Wilson commissioned a report on the British economy. The subsequent Bolton report said something very straightforward: that without new business creation, your economy is finished.

That’s why Brown’s stewardship of the Treasury has been so intriguing – because he has used it to drive the economic policies that he wants. The tentacles of the Treasury have extended very, very far and into most departments. Look at what’s happened in education and the work he’s done to get entrepreneurship onto the core curriculum.

Then there was money going into the DTI for the Phoenix Trust, to help deprived areas regenerate themselves through entrepreneurial activity. There has also been more funding for Women into Business.

But most intriguing of all is the local enterprise growth initiative. This is the £100m that’s being made available to councils to promote and encourage entrepreneurial activity as a way to regenerate some of the most deprived areas in England.
Whatever way you look at it, entrepreneurship and new firm creation is key to Brown’s economic policy. But does that make him a closet entrepreneur?

If not quite that, Brown could well be a closet Schumaker fan. Most people know economist E F Schumaker as the ‘small is beautiful’ man and a champion of intermediate technology. But Schumaker was also convinced that strong, buoyant economies could be achieved, not by large scale companies, but by hundreds of thousands of small, micro businesses – ones that just hit the VAT rate or were slightly over.

With the advent of internet marketing, Google and different ways of selling things, there are outstanding opportunities in Britain now for businesses to go from relatively small to massive in a matter of years.

On a personal level, Gordon Brown once revealed that his mother’s experience of starting a business sparked his own entrepreneurial enthusiasm many years ago. But on further examination, he backed off from setting up a company (we do know, however, that as a youth, this dedicated Raith Rovers footie fan used to sell match programmes so he could get in to watch the games).

Brown’s great hero, incidentally, is Andrew Carnegie. Why is Brown’s great hero Andrew Carnegie? Because Andrew Carnegie made millions, billions of pounds – more than Bill Gates – and gave it all back to the community.

Gordon Brown, then, is a man who is committed to entrepreneurship as a key driver for the economy and for the social fabric of the country. A lot of money has been ploughed into this. So he may well be an entrepreneurial ‘groupie.’
But he’s not an entrepreneur. Why? Because he reads and thinks too much and one of the differentiating factors of an entrepreneur is that they go out and do something. There comes a point when you just have to go out and have a go at it.
Nevertheless, Brown is a very competitive, driven man who learns very quickly and it would be fascinating to see what would happen if he was told to go out and start his own business. I’d love to get him on an Enterprise Island Challenge – as a competitor!

Gordon Brown may not be a closet entrepreneur but he is certainly a real friend of entrepreneurial Britain. He has already indicated that he thinks we’re on the verge of becoming a massively entrepreneurial society and it will certainly be interesting to see what Britain will look like under prime minister Brown.

Iain Scott is the founder of Enterprise Island, a company which runs programme and events designed to help people become more enterprising, www.enterpriseisland.com