In its death throes, this Government is combining the worst aspects of Old Labour (like class war and the politics of envy) with the worst of New Labour (such as spin and deceit).
Take for example this new announcement, "Councils to reveal bosses pay". The Government, we are told, is planning to make local councils publish the salaries of their chief executives. Now, I have some sympathy with the sentiments here. I for one have been saying for years that local authority senior officers in general are overpaid.
But why are they paid so much? And why have their pay rates hugely accelerated under this Labour government, especially in the period when the majority of Councils were also Labour controlled, in the years 1994 - 2004? Now that most of these Councils are Conservative-controlled, Labour thinks it has a ready-made campaign on its hands - effectively to throw stones and envious glances at senior officers in Tory-run Councils.
Locally, in Hammersmith & Fulham, we have seen the local Labour Party attack individual Council officers for their pay rates - even though these in most cases are the very same officers who were appointed by the Labour Council under similar if not identical pay conditions! But why let that hinder an Old Labour style campaign to 'stop the Tory Council fat cats'?
So that's the Old Labour side to this policy.
The New Labour part comes in its essential dishonesty. Councils have actually had to publish for many years the pay rates of their senior officers. They appear in a public document, easy enough to find, called the Council's "Statement of Accounts". I have more than ten years of these records from my local council in front of me as I type this. The last four years are even available online, like HERE (2007/08 - see page 41 of the PDF, which I picture above), and you can even see each and every year neatly laid out, easily found on the Council's website, HERE. Now, I agree that the listing I have pictured above from the most recent year available (2007/08) doesn't actually say explicitely what the Chief Executive gets paid, but one doesn't need to be a Mastermind minister like David Lammy to work out that the one person in the £180,000 - £190,000 bracket - who is paid more than £50,000 than the next best paid officer - is likely to be the Chief Executive. I don't have the time to check every Council, but just looking at Wandsworth reveals a similar table HERE (go to page 28 of the PDF). Go to your Council's website, put "accounts" in the search engine, and see what turns up.
Nevertheless, Government Minister, John Healey, tells us in the Labour announcement that he is going to pass new legislation, proclaiming that: "I think the public need to know the full picture. That's why I'm going to change the rules." Is this an honest statement, when one can easily show that the public knows 99% of the picture and that the rules don't appear to need changing? In fact, it is far easier to find out the pay of our Chief Executive than it is to find that of Mr. John Healey.
So, there you have it, envy and duplicity rolled into one in this new Government announcement. Doubtless we will now see an online campaign from John Prescott called something like 'stop the Tory fat cat Council bosses'. Or maybe the Recess Monkey blog door-stepping Council chiefs asking them for some of our money back? I fear there will be much more like this to come over the next 14 months as Labour leads us to rack and ruin, and searches high and low for scapegoats. Our job now is to not only win the election, but to make sure that Labour is out of power for a generation or longer.