Posts Tagged → public services
The past is prologue
The Labour leadership contest continues. So far, despite the best efforts of a few, there has been far more attention paid to the past than to the future.
There has been much too much effort, by some candidates, to find a route to reshape their record – as senior advisers, MPs or ministers – and too little effort in developing some definition on the issues which will determine Labour’s and Britain’s future.
It ill-becomes those who seek to lead the Labour Party for them to spend so much time trying to distance themselves from our collective record.
With the possible exception of the BBC’s Diane Abbott, none of the candidates can reasonably pretend to have been absent from Labour’s leadership for any significant period or any significant decision over the last 13 years.
But that does not mean any or all of them have to pretend that they agreed with every last dot and comma of what was done. I spent eight years as a special adviser to the Labour government. I am extremely proud of that government but I did not agree with everything.
I disagreed with Gordon Brown on his decision to raise the pension by just 75 pence. I disagreed with Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for joining the Euro. I was always sceptical about the PFI programme because turning capital investment into revenue expenditure is only ever a short-term solution to a long-term problem. I always viewed the internal opposition to foundation hospitals, modernising student financial support and school academies as about political positioning rather than political philosophy.
The point is though, that now none of this matters. Having an analysis of other people’s decisions isn’t the same as making them yourself. The past is only ever prologue in politics.
This Labour leadership election is not some sort of entry exam for Oxbridge. It is not about getting the history questions right. It is about getting the future questions right.
Where people stood on one issue or another – whether they thought Hans Blix should have been given more time or given the sack – does not matter a jot.
If you want to be Prime Minister it is not the calls you did not have to make that matter now but the calls you might have to make next time.
Tomorrow David Miliband is making a speech in Bristol which must be about the future or it will fail. His website says it will reflect on Labour’s record in government and set out his thoughts on the next stage of the party’s agenda to use the power of education to transform children’s lives. We lost the education debate at the last election to the Conservatives because we failed to have a vision for the future. We cannot ever allow that to happen again.
It is time this election started to come alive. Time it began to fizz with new policy ideas and an understanding of the future challenges a Labour government will face and the vision we have for public services in the new economic reality.
Because if it doesn’t there might not be a Labour government for a very, very long time.
Time to walk and chew gum at the same time
Sitting in my hotel room in Washington DC on Wednesday evening I managed to catch a speech President Obama was making to a town hall meeting in Orange County, California. It was, as usual, an inspirational speech from an inspirational president. Within it, President Obama set out some important contrasts with how the British government is handling the current political and economic crisis.
First of all, the President began by stressing that when it comes to economic problems and mistakes made in how to handle them he stressed that ‘the buck stops here’. The specific issue he was referring to was about bonuses paid to AIG executives. Of course, the Obama administration isn’t really to blame for the bonus payments – any more than Gordon Brown is responsible for big bonuses paid to bad bankers – but President Obama didn’t try to shift responsibility he took it. He knows that that’s what leaders do. The town hall meeting lapped it up. This is what Gordon Brown should have done to defuse the apology issue: to take responsibility for the situation rather than try to shuffle off the blame to others. By doing so, Obama looks in control, rather than the victim of events.
Secondly, the President made a vitally important point about priorities. He said that whilst he was facing criticism for dealing with more than one problem at a time, he believes that it is vital to address the economic crisis and to reform healthcare, improve schools, reduce reliance on carbon fuel and win the war in Afghanistan. He said that he wouldn’t choose between dealing with the economic crisis and reforming public services because people didn’t get to choose between dealing with their personal economic circumstances and the quality of the schools their children use and the healthcare they rely upon. It was, he said, time to chew gum and walk at the same time.
This is absolutely the right analysis and one which the Labour government would do well to emulate. As I have said here before, the government’s standing with the electorate is suffering from its failure to set out a radical and challenging reform programme for health, schools, energy and the wider public services. The Labour government too often looks like it has forgotten how to be radical reformers; that the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time is beyond them. 
If Labour is to have any chance of winning the next election it is vital that Gordon Brown and the Labour government learns some lessons from how President Obama is communicating on the economic crisis: taking personal responsibility even when it isn’t his fault; and making radical public service reforms even whilst dealing with the economic crisis. Labour has to show it can walk and chew gum at the same time.
New Labour: not dead just sleep-walking
Tony Blair famously told the 1997 Labour Party conference that the Conservatives were “not dead. Just sleeping.” To make such a comment when the Conservatives had been so throroughly thrashed at the general election only four months previously was remarkable. Equally memorable though should be Blair’s next line in that speech: “Let their fate serve as a warning to us.”
Today, with Labour looking becalmed at around 30% in the polls, with the Parliamentary Labour Party looking ever more fearful of having to make bold and radical reforms necessary to improve the public services, with the economic crisis so crushing and with some Cabinet ministers – who should know better – preening themselves and posing in public like peacocks for a potential leadership position, it looks like Labour has failed to heed Blair’s warning. In this context, it is not surprising commentators are saying: ‘New Labour is dead’
I do not believe new Labour is dead but I do believe it is sleep walking to defeat. Incumbent governments win elections when they are capable of showing the electorate that they have more to offer than they have already delivered: that they can be both continuity and change; not just that they haven’t run out of ideas but that their ideas are right for the times.
The economy of course, is taking the lion’s share of the resources and the reporting at the moment. That is only right. Unfortunately, too much of the rhetoric continues to be anti-market and anti-city – both positions which will come back to haunt Labour in the future; partly, because Labour will need both the market economy and the City to recover and prosper if Britain is to grow our way out of recession and partly, because anti-free market sentiment will be used by those on the left to call for a re-allignment of Labour politics which is actually about trashing the government’s record and moving Labour leftwards.
I appreciate scope for action on the economy is limited but where are the ideas and radical reforms from elsewhere in government capable of making the case that Labour has more to offer in the future? Sadly, they currently appear absent.
Take the publication on Tuesday of the government’s ‘vision for the future shape of public services’. Much of what was in the paper was fine, harmless stuff. The fast-track teacher training is OK. But frankly, the idea that the way to make the radical leap required in public service provision is to ape TripAdvisor by having internet reviews would be laughable if it did not signal so surely that New Labour is sleep walking to defeat.
Or take the loss of David Freud, the welfare reformer, to the Conservatives. I do not believe Freud is a natural conservative. He believes in progressive reforms. He appears to have walked because, despite his excellent work, the government as a whole (probably not James Purnell himself) just does not look interested in pursuing them.
Or take the government’s overall legislative programme. Of course, the Marine and Coastal Access Bill is necessary but, with the exception of the Royal Mail Bill the government’s legislative programme seems to be rather empty. Watch the Parliament Channel any evening (as sadly I do) and there just doesn’t seem to be anything much going on.
Where are the policies to raise standards in schools, to drive choice and contestablility in healthcare, to reduce and remove our reliance on carbon power generation, to address anti-social behaviour and increase personal security, to show Labour are as radical after 12 years in office as they were after 18 years in Opposition?
I believe New Labour isn’t dead. Just sleepwalking to disaster. Labour has just months to put that right. To heed Tony’s warning.
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