Britain's Ex-PM Gordon Brown Urges Economic 'American Marshall Plan'

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown launched his book tour here for "Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization," with two grateful observations about Washington: "It's not snowing" and "there are no students rioting."

The recent protests -- including an attack on the royal Rolls Royce containing Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles -- began after the Conservative-Liberal Democrat ruling coalition announced plans for deep spending cuts and steep tuition increases.

But Brown, who left the top job in May after stunning Labor Party election losses, was focused Saturday night on global, not domestic finance, and the role of the United States in worldwide recovery.

Brown told senior White House adviser David Axelrod that people want leadership, "like the American Marshall Plan," which helped put Europe back on its economic feet after World War II. "If America leads, they will follow," Brown said. "You have to make it big, not a small initiative." And he offered to help the Obama administration "in any way I can," at a book party thrown by media impressaria Tammy Haddad and Jefferson Hotel owners Connie Milstein and J.C. de La Haye Saint Hilaire,

In brief remarks, Brown -- among the first world leaders to rescue troubled banks at home in 2008 -- warned that "for the time in 200 years, America and Europe are being out-produced, out-invested, out-traded and out-exported" by other nations, and that the solution to the global crisis was to tap into a billion middle-class consumers in Asia who in 10 years will have twice the buying power of Americans.

Brown repeated that same message on the ABC News program "This Week," saying that while Asia and China had to consume more, "Europe's got to reform its markets."

"America is prepared to invest in the future, while doing its fiscal consolidation," Brown said. "And that would mean, in my view, that you would have this exit strategy from a crisis based on high growth and high employment and not low growth and what I fear is high unemployment for a decade."

The former prime minister -- who earlier in his career spent a decade as finance minister -- warned that the immediate danger "is that people cut back in education, which is vital for the future, that people cut back on their international contacts, because they think the solutions lie in national answers to their problems, when they lie in global cooperation."

"And," he said, "I think the danger is, you have a '30s-style protectionism where people relapse into currency wars, as we're seeing, or trade wars or banning takeovers that have got cross-border ramifications, or simply a protectionism in of the mind, where anti-immigrant sentiment gets to the point that we're not really talking to each other in a way that means that we have a coordinated world."

After a day in Washington, Brown headed to New York to continue hyping the book. But those seeking dishy gossip of the sort that Brown's predecessor, Tony Blair, and other New Labor memoirists have offered up recently, will have to look elsewhere.