CentreRight

Reasons for getting rid of Labour: Ten on Health

It's PBR day today and as we await details of the BBB [Brown borrowing binge], it's timely to remind ourselves of how Labour have squandered the NHS - the people, our money and it's reputation. The NHS is now on a life support machine and here are some of the reasons why:

1. Wasted Investment - a Naive assumption that money alone will raise standards. Cumulatively hundreds of billions extra have been spent on the NHS since 1997 but we still can't access the latest medicine or innovative technology; most hospitals are understaffed; delays in diagnosis means poorer prognosis; community nurses are becoming a rare breed; transaction costs are ludicrously high and simple business paradigms are not applied. Labour have been appalling stewards of the public purse.

2. NHS IT fiasco - Labour thought it was about IT when it should have been about improving care. Mind boggling belief that the Centre should control supply of IT through firms with no products to hospitals with existing systems while ignoring the workforce. At a predicted total cost that rivals the Olympics, the NHS IT Programme has so far cost us at least £2Bn [there is dispute over actual spend to date] and delivered precious little other than increased costs and decreased efficiency, now being counted in million pound deficits by hospitals such as the Royal Free.

3. Consultation Shams - insulting charades that purport to draw on frontline expertise. What is the point of spending millions on round Britain 'consultations' with hand picked audiences who simply endorse and consolidate the proposals? Result - the most disillusioned workforce [clinicians and managers] in the history of the NHS.

4. Healthcare Acquired Infections [HAIs] - death by neglect. The knowledge of HAIs has been growing particularly since the 1990s when the incidence of MRSA exploded. Hospital responses have varied but there is no doubt that the ability to deal with HAIs has beens significantly hampered by the huge burden of innumerable, centrally imposed mandatory targets...

Reasons for getting rid of Labour: Attacks on Civil Liberties

For all their previous talk in opposition about being civil libertarians, the Labour Government since 1997 will surely go down as the most authoritarian administration in history.

Its natural instinct has always been to nanny, intervene, regulate, legislate and ban in the face of whatever challenge or problem with which it it has been presented - and often there was not really a "problem" to start with.

There are obvious examples of freedom-restricting bans: the banning of hunting with hounds and of smoking by consenting adults in private clubs, to name just two.

Then there are the ways in which it has restricted peaceful protests and the right to freedom of expression: remember how Walter Wolfgang was unceremoniously thrown out of the Labour conference just for heckling a Cabinet minister and how Maya Evans was arrested and convicted of an offence merely for standing by the Cenotaph and reading out the names of those who had been killed in the Iraq War?

Reasons for getting rid of Labour: Machine. Politics.

There's a man lives down the road from me, he's psychotic, a paranoid sufferer from a schizophreniform disorder. How I know is this, that whenever I walk past his flat, his road-facing ground-floor window is pasted over with imprecations against a universe he knows is conspiring against him. How dare they use my words against me rails the one I saw on Sunday evening. In the pit of despair myself (a cat had gone missing - at least that adventure in human existence had a happy ending) for the first time I stopped and read, fully, this man's public account of his fantasy. He was complaining about a freesheet from the council which, to his tortured psyche, appeared to be mocking his fears about the world. Common enough among the mentally ill, this delusion.

Now. Why did this memory come to mind when the email from Esteemed Editor arrived in my inbox on Monday morning, as it did in those of all Centre-Right contributors: please write about what good shall come from ending Labour's period in government. Not sure why I thought of my disturbed Hackney neighbour at first, so I probed at it, poked it with my tongue like you do a shoogly tooth, because it certainly was the first image which floated into view, and it's stayed with me 48 hours now, locked up in this dump of a hotel outside Heathrow. In the pool this evening I kept wondering about my neighbour's life, and it's only 14 metres long this pool, so that was 120 lengths required, and I had the place to myself, which is both bliss and torture for a swimmer: a lot of tick-tocking for a captured mind. Tick-tock. Captured minds. A good enough subtitle to the ten rotten years of this rotten government.

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So you start with an idea and you build a system to operationalise that idea: anyone can see you need a machine to make the idea a reality, to furnish it with a corporeality, so that the idea can become flesh, can become a plastic simulacrum of flesh at least, can take hold, can deliver the New Jerusalem. One idea is We Will Abolish Child Poverty and to meet this estimable objective you build a machine, you give it a friendly-like name, like, like, Sure Start, and as with all machines, it takes inputs - children - and gives outputs - the abolition of child poverty. Only the thing is, with machines, that you need engineers to look after them. And by the nature of their task, it's not impossible, in fact it's highly probable, in fact it's a certainty, that the engineers will soon enough professionalise their work, that the smooth operation of their machine will take on a greater importance to them than any of the actual inputs to it. Boxes have to be checked (there's an analogy here with another recent systems failure of such horror I can't bear to think about it). Failures are within tolerance limits. Another input will be along in a minute anyway.

Reasons for getting rid of Labour: Foreign policy

It is difficult in a few hundred words to be fair and accurate in describing an entire government's foreign policy, but let me start by saying I like some of what this Labour government has done in foreign affairs. When it came to be tested, Britain proved her commitment to the Special Relationship in a way that shamed much of the rest of NATO.

But I look forward with hope to a government that will look at the world and our policies towards other countries with more respect for national sovereignty and with more conservatism.

Perhaps the greatest consistency shown in Britain's foreign policy since 1997 has been its lack of concern with the national interest. Look at the rhetoric and the reality of what have been our foreign policy priorities. From ethical arms sales to peace between Israel and Palestinians to combating global warming to advancing Europe as a superpower to democratising the Middle East, there has been precious little sense that advancing Britain's interests has been top priority. It's not so much that the goals themselves were unworthy. It's more that these are values others around the world will all share in and benefit from if achieved. But most other countries think of their own interests, rather than always making the general good the issue.

Reasons for getting rid of Labour: Economic mismanagement

I never believed that Gordon Brown was a wonderful chancellor.  I have written before about what I saw as the seven key planks of Gordon Brown's economic policies:

1. Operational independence of the Bank of England
2. A modification of the previous inflation target to include a specific value as well as a band
3. The use of various "fiscal rules" to guide fiscal policy
4. The concentration of all financial regulation into one super-regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA)
5. A Tripartite framework for promoting financial stability including the Bank of England, the FSA, and the Treasury
6. A "taper relief" system for capital gains tax whereby investments kept in a business for a longer period were subject to less tax that those extracted quickly, as soon as capital gains were made
7. The abolition of the previous "surplus Advance Corporation Tax" regime, a reform intended to encourage longer-term investment and discourage over-payment of dividends

None of this has, in the end, worked well.

Reasons for getting rid of Labour: Defence

Throughout this week I'm inviting CentreRight contributors to each briefly identify one big reason why Labour deserve to be voted out of office.

I'll start with Labour's record with regard to our armed forces.  The defence of the Realm is the first duty of any government but Labour have not provided our servicemen with the quality of support that they deserve.  Money meant for procuring new hardware hasn't been spent well, too many warnings about inadequate equipment have been ignored and with deadly consequences, servicemen's families have had to put up with substandard housing and medical services.

Throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq our troops have fought as bravely as previous generations but they have been poorly directed.  In southern Iraq, Britain withdrew from Basra before the job was done, in Afghanistan the mission has never been clearly defined.

Brown allowed Blair to send troops to Iraq but he never provided proper funding.  He sent Britain to war on a peacetime budget.  The world has changed considerably since Labour came to office but there has been no strategic review of defence priorities to reflect upon the new global situation.

Failure on defence would be my top reason for Labour to go.