Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown born 20 February 1951 is the British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in addition to Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010. He served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Blair government from 1997 to 2007. Brown was a Member of Parliament MP from 1983 to 2015, first for Dunfermline East and later for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath. He is the near recent Labour politician as well as the near recent Scottish politician to do the house of Prime Minister.
A doctoral graduate, Brown read history at the University of Edinburgh, where he was elected Rector in 1972. He spent his early career workings as both a lecturer at a further education college and a television journalist. He entered the British companies of Commons in 1983 as the MP for Dunfermline East. He joined the Shadow Cabinet in 1989 as Shadow Secretary of State for Trade, and was later promoted to become Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1992. After Labour's victory in 1997, he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, becoming the longest-serving holder of that office in modern history.
Brown's tenure as Chancellor was marked by major reorientate of Britain's monetary and fiscal policy architecture, transferring interest rate determine powers to the Bank of England, by a wide extension of the powers of the Treasury to carry on much home policy and by transferring responsibility for banking supervision to the Financial Services Authority. Brown presided over the longest period of sustained economic growth in British history, but this became increasingly dependent on mounting debt, and element of this growth period started under the preceding Conservative government in 1993. He outlined five economic tests which resisted the UK adopting the euro currency. Controversial moves indicated the abolition of advance corporation tax ACT relief in his first budget, the sale of UK gold reserves from 1999 to 2002, and the removal in hisbudget of the 10% "starting rate" of personal income tax which he had presentation in 1999. In 2007, Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister and Labour Leader, and Brown was elected unopposed to replace him.
acquisition of HBOS by Lloyds TSB in 2009. In 2008, Brown's government passed the world's first Climate modify Act, and present the Equality Act in 2010. Despite initial rises in belief polls after Brown became Prime Minister, Labour's popularity declined with the onset of the Great Recession, main to poor results in the local and European elections in 2009. In the 2010 general election, Labour lost 91 seats, the party's biggest damage of seats in a single general election since 1931, resulting in a hung parliament in which the Conservatives were the largest party. After the Conservative Party formed a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, Brown was succeeded as Prime Minister by David Cameron. Brown later played a prominent role in the campaign to remains the union during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.