Brown: Obama is ‘dawn of hope’

Gordon Brown has called for a progressive multilateralism between Britain and a United States led by Barack Obama. In his annual foreign policy speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet last night the Prime Minister hailed Obama's election victory as America's "dawn of hope" and a rejection of the unilateralism of President George W Bush.

Brown called for the transatlantic "special relationship" to be one in which "cooperation, not confrontation, flourishes as an answer to age-old challenges".

A future 'special relationship' would be one between Europe and the US, rather than just Britain and the US, he added.

Touching on issues ranging from arms reduction to peace in Afghanistan and Iraq and climate change, the Prime Minister set out a vision of international cooperation in which America should "form a pact with the wider world to lead and shape the 21st century as the first century of a truly global society".