Unsettling New Labour

Peter Riddell has a thought provoking piece* in the The Times today in which he asks whether history will regard Tony Blair’s premiership as a ‘settlement’ or just another government. He argues that it is the Conservatives that will settle the question:

“The key stage is when the Opposition accepts, however grudgingly, that it cannot reverse the big changes.” Of course, first of all you need enough big changes. According to Riddell these are as follows: “…making the Bank of England responsible for setting interest rates; the reductions in long-term and youth unemployment; the minimum wage; the big cut in pensioner and child poverty; Scottish and Welsh devolution; the Human Rights Act; and improvements in the performance in parts of the public services.”

Let’s take a look at each of these in turn:

Bank of England independence certainly won’t be reversed by the Tories. Indeed, by dint of rejecting the euro, they’re the only big party committed to the Old Lady’s continued control of our interest rates. So the next Conservative Government won’t reverse something that the last Conservative Government should have done anyway.

Reductions in unemployment? A function of a trend well underway before 1997 and underpinned by the supply-side reforms of the Thatcher years. As for the largely superfluous New Deal, this has long been marked for the chop by the Tories. It won’t be missed.

The Minimum Wage is a different story. Not only will a Conservative Government keep it, they will, if they’ve any sense, increase it. Jobs that don’t pay a living wage require job subsidies through the benefits system – and free marketeers shouldn’t subsidise jobs that lock-in the dependency culture.

For the same reason Conservatives should knockdown Gordon Brown’s tax credit labyrinth. By all means reduce poverty, but not at the expense of increasing dependency. It remains to be seen whether the Tories have the imagination to tackle poverty without recourse to means testing – but their pension plans are good start. If they can do the same for families with children then the Brown era would be truly dead and buried.

Scottish and Welsh devolution, being devolved, are up to the Scots and Welsh. If it works out in the long run, the credit will lie with those nations, not with New Labour.

Of course, constitutional change isn’t really that hard – you sign a bit of paper and it happens (if only it were always that simple). Thus signing us up to the Human Rights Act was a doddle, so getting us out shouldn’t be impossible either – an option which the Tories are already toying with.

That brings us to the public services, where New Labour reforms shouldn’t be that hard to reverse because they haven’t really made any. Plenty of targets, indicators and the like. But very little deserving of the term ‘reform’. Not only are the Tories determined to sweep away Labour’s obsessive tinkering, but their ‘right to choose’ policies would make a much bigger difference then anything Messrs Blair and Brown have attempted. Yes, there have been some patchy improvements, but on a scale that hardly measures up to the additional expenditure of the Labour years. But merely spending more money doesn’t make for much of political programme. It is just a function of how well the economy is doing at the time. And that in the end is just about all that New Labour amounts to – a stack of cash they were lucky to have and did little to earn – and even less to spend wisely.

Blair and Brown had the money to reform the public services, but they didn’t. Therefore, there’ll be no New Labour settlement -- whatever the Tories decide on the little that remains.

Comments

[Jon]

Agree totally.

[Jenny]

I agree with all of it but cannot agree that Labour have cut pensioner and child poverty. The poor have got poorer under Labour and just putting pensioners and families with young children into the means tested benfits system does not take them out of poverty. It often takes away self respect at having to accept government hand outs and prolongs the dependency. I agree that this is something that the Conservatives have made a start on but have to work hard at tackling but do they have the imagination to do this. While I believe that the Conservative Party does care very much about the more vunerable in our society it seems almost reluctant to speak out on these matters. Their manifesto is also short on social issues. I have not yet heard any of the Conservative team say for example anything about the diabled.

Apart from this one issue I think that when history looks back on the Blair years they will agree that there is not an awful lot of substance or reform there. Typical Labour they think that the solution to problems is to throw money at it together with 5 or 10 years plans and centralising everything, which has failed time and time again.

[Editor]

The Times' Peter Riddell kindly emailed with this feedback to our posting about his article:

"Many thanks. The trouble with trying to encapsulate a complicated argument in less than 1,000 words is that, with hindsight, you feel that you have left out many points. Just a couple of thoughts. I think the Conservatives need to think about the constitution- not just denouncing what Labour has done, and then accepting it as with devolution- but considering what sorts of checks and balances are needed to produce a pluralist constitution, limiting the power of the central state. This should be a positive, not merely a negative, reactive, agenda. On public services, I think that if, still a big if, there are many more academies and all secondaries become specialist schools, the balance between leas and individual schools will have changed substantially- largely, of course, taking on the agenda started pre-97. The same is true in health if the private/voluntary provision rises to 15 per cent, as John Reid talked about on Wednesday. That sits more easily with the Tories than with much of Labour. I always believe the most ephemeral part of any Government's achievement is on the economy since successes, however significant at the time, can so easily be reversed, as we saw in the early 1990s following the gains of the 1980s, and possibly now after the general election. That is in a sense why Bank of England independence remains the Government's most important, and lasting, achievement since it constrains the scope for folly."

All best wishes

Peter"

[Edward]

Am I not right in thinking that it was the Labour party that nationalised the Bank of England in the first place, so to describe it as an achievement is inaccurate. It is in fact the rectification of an earlier mistake.

[Peter]

The article mentions 'reductions in unemployment' and attributes this to supply-side economics initiated in the Thatcher/Reagan era. That's all to the good as far as it goes, but the real fall in unemployment since 1997 has been due to the immense growth of non-jobs in the state agencies. The ever expanding army of quango jockeys, box tickers and flipchart flappers not only creates 'employment' in the public sector but creates demand for the researchers, consultants and strategists in the private sector who feed their insatiable appetite for waffle.
(For example, one of my neighbours has just been made redundant at Rover. The Jobcentre gave him two forms to fill in - one of 42 pages and one of 20 pages. Next he has to complete a 'Strategic Plan, another 20 odd pages, to get him back to work.)
All this bureaucracy has to be funded by the taxpayer and one day it will all come crashing down. Problem is that the government (probably Conservative) that will eventually have to find the guts to face this will be the government which gets blamed for the resultant rising unemployment.

[JEROGatch]

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[bbn]

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