Moving Britain Forward: selected speeches 1997-2006 Gordon Brown Bloomsbury, 288pp, £9.99 ISBN 0747588384

Step forward Nelson Mandela, Alan Greenspan, Jonathan Sacks and J K Rowling - these are some of the deified people who introduce this selection of Gordon Brown's speeches. Only the Pope is missing from this list of elevated public figures.

Their glowing tributes to the Chancellor make those that are delivered tearfully by winners on Oscar night seem like malevolent onslaughts. The godly superstars hail the Chancellor's vision, humanity and, when they lapse into more mundane matters, his management of the economy. Sadly, the economist Adam Smith is not with us to deliver his own tribute. But in one of his speeches, the Chancellor claims him as a supporter anyway.

The names on the cast list are more illuminating than what they say. Together they represent a broad church made in heaven: the thoughtful rabbi, the bestselling children's author, America's most successful banker and South Africa's global saint. They sound like characters in a joke. Have you heard the one about the rabbi and the saint? In this case, the purpose is more serious. The book contains most of Brown's past speeches, but is in effect his manifesto for the future. With such glittering endorsements, safe ly excluding anyone controversially positioned on the centre left, Brown seeks to illustrate his capacity to have broad appeal. It is the ultimate put-down to the extreme Blairites who portray Brown as an old Labour figure who would, in the wearily meaningless metaphor, "turn back the clock". Could any of them command such an array of supporters?

In spite of the international cast list, and the global economy that forms the wider backdrop, several of the speeches take Britishness as their theme. Brown's critics assume that he has contrived this obsession because he is a Scot seeking to rule from London with the support (or at least the acquiescence) of Middle England. I sense a different political calculation, the same one that produced the array of politically safe endorsers. Brown wants to build his own big political tent, but for freshly ambitious objectives.

In one speech, the Chancellor offers a brief guided tour around the current highly charged debates about national identity, and in doing so notes some common ground between writers who span the political spectrum. From the left to the right, he discovers a search for a "British identity . . . shared values . . . strong enough to overcome discordant claims of separatism and disintegration". He defines the values in a way that has wide appeal: "fair play, decency, social improvement that has animated left and right".

These are conveniently vague terms, but Brown deploys Britishness as a tool for moulding his much-vaunted progressive consensus. The speeches suggest a pattern. First Brown seeks to build an army of support around values that are vaguely defined; he then leads the troops on to terrain that some would normally view with reactionary horror. In Brown's view, the flag is held aloft by Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, David Goodhart of the slightly left-of-centre Prospect magazine and some more firmly rooted on the centre left. Together they head in the direction of decency, fairness and social improvement wrapped in the Union Jack. Brown claims the flag for values that could move Britain very slightly in the direction of the centre left.

Each speech in this book is densely argued yet delicately orchestrated. Sometimes Brown tiptoes on to recognisably left-of-centre terrain, but takes a look back to make sure that the army is still with him. The most controversial, in terms of its superficially misreported impact at the time, was his address to the Social Market Foundation in 2003. Delivered at the height of a ferocious battle with Tony Blair over reforms in the National Health Service, Brown outlined the limits of markets in public services. The ultra-Blairites cite the speech as proof that Brown is "old Labour". It proves nothing of the kind. Much of the speech calls on the left of centre to embrace markets. Yet he makes clear that markets do not always work in complex services that are universal and provided free of charge. In the case of the NHS, he points out that there is a need for a guaranteed security of supply and for mutually reinforcing specialist health services within different parts of the country. He points out that, as the private sector seeks maximum profit, patients are at risk of being overcharged and being given inappropriate treatments for financial rather than medical reasons.

Instead of offering a forensic refutation, his critics condemned the speech as a "return to the past". Those who read it will recognise the progressive cadences. Written at the height of a bleak political storm, it is one of the most insightful speeches composed by a Labour figure for many years. Yet, in the current perverse internal debate, Brown is under more pressure to disown this speech than any other. I am surprised he dared to include it in the book.

Oddly, for an anthology of speeches, the book conveys a sense of Brown the political operator. The model, implicit throughout, is the way the Chancellor built up the case for tax increases in the NHS. First, he used a respectable Middle England banker, Derek Wanless, to put the case for higher spending on the health service and then to advocate tax rises as the most efficient means of delivering the expenditure. Once this became a widely accepted view, Brown acted. In this book, on issues ranging from poverty to security, Brown builds up a consensus with the backing of Greenspan, Mandela et al, and hopes that he will acquire the space to be more progressive. He will not take risks. He will act only when he has the support to do so. But he will make an attempt to build support to make Britain more socially just.

The more immediate question is not what the mighty Greenspan and Mandela think of Brown, but whether the Chancellor's more timid new Labour colleagues will give him the chance to have a go. I hope they are bold and radical enough to do so.

Steve Richards is chief political commentator for the Independent

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