Gordon Brown Warns Only 29 Liberal Democracies Remain as He Pushes UK Reform

2 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Aug 29

Gordon Brown used an interview around his new book, The Future Starts With Us, to argue the postwar rules-based order has broken down and that liberal democracies have fallen to 29, their lowest level in three decades.
Brown blamed a shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world for empowering zero-sum nationalism, saying leaders such as Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump now act as if power overrides law and morality.
On Britain, the former prime minister backed constitutional and economic change, urging abolition of the roughly 800-member House of Lords and arguing growth must rise from about 1% through innovation-led policy.
He also defended a North Sea transition strategy that keeps jobs while shifting oil-and-gas skills into hydrogen, wind and carbon capture, and said stronger local communities are the best defense against extremism.
Brown, 75, said he would have resigned had he known before the 2003 Iraq war that the US believed Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, revisiting one of the defining errors of his career.