No man is an island, except maybe Blair
simon jenkins
timesonline.co.uk
Tony Blair’s speeches have vastly improved since he abandoned Labour. Yesterday he demolished pacifists, lefties, backsliders and wimps alike. His key ingredient was a definable enemy, the Labour Party. Mr Blair is emerging as a Tory radical in the style of Disraeli. Abroad he offers the glamour of moral commitment and military conquest. At home he enlists the new capitalism to improve the condition of the people. I cannot see how a Tory could fail to vote for this man. There is no trace of socialism in him.
Mr Blair is tearing up the template of British politics. With the security of a parliamentary majority and continued public approval, he can go anywhere he likes. He is a lawyer with his own brief, a soldier with his own rules of engagement. He glories in being the darling of the American Right. He positions himself beyond the wildest Thatcherism on public sector reform.
Watching him yesterday, I wondered if this Prime Minister might be a practical joke played by history on the British electorate. The three cardinal virtues proclaimed in his speech were war on Iraq, privatised public services and getting tough on crime. All were based on what advertisers used to call “selling a weakness”. A war on Iraq requires Mr Blair to claim that President Saddam Hussein is a “real and present threat”. He is not. Privatisation requires there to be “no alternative” to the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). There is an alternative, called public finance. As for tough on crime, even the Tories might have balked at that political cliché.
What is remarkable is not that Mr Blair espouses these policies but that he still struggles to fit them into an ideological framework. The audience gulped yesterday when he said “We on the Left . . .” It sounded most odd. Mr Blair may have been a child of Sixties socialism, of unilateral disarmament and public sector omnipotence. But as Prime Minister, he bids the Labour Party bed down with the Pentagon’s most hawkish adventurers and the City’s most grasping financiers.
This is not wholly novel for a Labour Prime Minister. Harold Wilson had trouble with Washington over Vietnam. James Callaghan had trouble with the unions over public spending. Hugh Gaitskell is said to have winced at the mere words Labour Party. But they did not seem so completely detached. Mr Blair has sidelined Labour from his premiership, as he has sidelined Parliament. He incants a list of continuing social evils — poverty, illiteracy, bureaucracy — with the intensity of a Prince of Wales letter. Yet he champions the “Great Push Forward” of modernisation with the cry: “Caution is retreat and retreat is dangerous.” He would have made a good Red Guard.
The Blair Government is now committed to the United Nations route in Iraq, which is how it narrowly won the Blackpool vote on Monday. Time has been bought. But UN inspection seems likely to end in a morass, after which only armed conflict will satisfy the White House. At this point Mr Blair will be expected by his party, and the public, to go to Washington and play his much-vaunted card of restraint, and risk it being trumped. He will have to choose between the White House and the Labour Party, between his closest ally and his once-closest supporters. Wilson never sent troops to Vietnam. Mr Blair clearly means to send troops to Iraq, though he dared not say so yesterday. His party can get lost.
On the domestic front Mr Blair’s cry of “partnership not paternalism” was born not of ambition but of a different emotion, frustration. Nothing in modern politics is more curious than Labour’s adoption of the most radical privatisation in Europe. On Monday Gordon Brown claimed yet again that there was no alternative to the myriad public service subcontracts that pass for the PFI. Yet the postwar housing programme was financed by public bonds. So was hospital modernisation. So was university expansion. The new Network Rail is to have cheap money backed by public guarantee.
Mr Blair and Mr Brown talk as if the PFI was free cash, a capitalist cargo cult from their friends in the City. It is not. It is very expensive. The choice is between the taxpayer meeting annual interest on government stock and the taxpayer meeting annual rent to a private contractor. The capital comes from the City in both cases. It precludes other investment in both cases. The public pays in both cases. The difference is that private money costs more over time, but the Treasury regards public spending postponed as spending averted.
The real gain that PFI offers Mr Blair was apparent yesterday. It was not financial but cultural. When Mr Blair and Mr Brown exchange notes about public spending the theme is always the same, so much extra money spent and so little to show for it. (The ghost of Margaret Thatcher echoes Amen.) To them, public sector management is institutionally at fault. It is irredeemably hopeless. Labour’s god is hollow. The answer does not lie in decentralisation, in trusting managers or local councils with discretion and building up competence and morale. Last week Mr Brown humiliated the Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, by squashing his plan for hospital delegation.
Mr Blair has been sold on there being only one salvation for public services. It lies in the complete reversal of Labour dogma, in subjugating the public service ethos to the “daring” incentive of private profit. The future lies in bankers and lawyers, not public officials and do-gooders. That is the way to crush union opposition and break the professions. It has a wonderful simplicity. It is pure Thatcherism, except that even Mrs Thatcher did not apply it hospitals, schools or trains.
To any student of Britain’s welfare state, privatisation is a useful innovation, long overdue. But its virtues are pragmatic and often risky. Private prisons have been successes. Hospitals have been built but have mostly been more expensive than in the NHS. Railways have been a disaster, since it costs twice as much to lay a mile of private track as it did under British Rail. Road maintenance, like teacher vetting, has been shambolic. That born-again capitalist, John Prescott, claimed this week that PFI was “just like taking out a mortgage”. It is more like taking money from a loan shark.
The Labour Government has imposed a large burden of debt on the next generation, on a staggering £35 billion of private investment in public services. Some of these contracts, such as the London Underground, are going to be hugely expensive from day one. The Treasury claims to have reduced “public borrowing” but it has not done so. It has redefined it and rescheduled its cost. This is all smoke and mirrors.
On Monday the Labour Party asked the Government only that this form of core service privatisation should prove its case. What sort of contract works and what does not? How can risk really be transferred while continuity and security are assured? What happens as service declines towards the end of a 30-year cycle? Yet to Mr Blair and Mr Brown these questions were impertinent. They showed a lack of faith in the Great Push Forward.
Mr Blair talks big on privatisation. Yet he still acts small when courage is needed. There has been no talk from his office of hiving off the fire services to the private sector, or the BBC or the universities. He and his ministers have proved anything but daring when under political pressure from farmers, tanker drivers, doctors, railwaymen or the police. If public sector management wants for courage, it is usually courage at the top not the bottom. Recipients of yesterday’s message might shout back, physician heal thyself.
If the Prime Minister’s radicalism is an attractive quality it is as yet a weak and ill-formed thing. He seems dimly aware that state centralisation is now the biggest obstacle to an improved welfare state. He pleads for less bureaucracy, more local responsibility, more competition. Yet he must know that the chief opponent of these pleas is his friend and colleague, Mr Brown. He may claim to dislike “an all-purpose, one-size-fits-all, mass production” welfare state. Yet he has an all-purpose, one-size-fits-all government machine running it. This he has yet to master.
Mr Blair has already run one election against his own party. Perhaps he can be induced to run the next against his own Government. It did Mrs Thatcher no harm. |
