New Parliament, same old Labour
Liberal Democrat News, November 2006
The Lords has settled down to its new parliamentary term and the Liberal Democrat team are just getting on with job of holding the government to account, despite the damoclean sword of reform hanging over us.
It’s all pretty dispiriting – in its tenth year the Blair administration has run out of steam and the new legislative programme is full of the same stuff as the old. In the true spirit of sustainability ,they are even recycling bills nowadays – the mental health legislation and jury trial proposals have been thrown out before.
In the vacuum of a discernible ideology there are consistent threads now which are defining new Labour as it enters its second decade of government.
Firstly, authoritarianism. Despite the failure of the immigration system to deal swiftly and justly with the people coming through it, the crisis of prison overcrowding and the breakdown of law and order in many areas, the government keep offering more of the same – 57 pieces of criminal justice legislation and 3500 new criminal offences, and more to come. Mark Twain defined madness as doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result. I rest my case.
Linked to policy authoritarianism is the engendering of fear and threat – only we can save you from the bogeyman. There’s no real risk analysis to back up their decisions on security and safety. The airline industry was brought to a halt earlier this year whilst security services were confiscating our shampoo, whilst apparently one can carry polonium across Europe without detection. We are about to be bounced into an early decision on trident replacement on the basis of unquantifiable threats when we all know that the impact of climate change in some areas would be catastrophic and will change the world profoundly. And after WMD we are all supposed to believe them and fall in line.
We see personal authoritarianism on a grand scale. Phil Woolas told the local government association to “stop whingeing” when they had the temerity to warn of the growing crisis in social care. Peter Hain keeps telling politicians in Northern Ireland that he’ll stop their pocket money if they don’t start talking to each other – doesn’t he understand that he’s practically pushing them into delay so that they can prove it isn’t the money they are interested in? And our beloved home secretary – the most demanding job in Government where the need for intellectual rigour is the greatest, and they give it to those bastions of rationality, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Reid. It’s a pretty pass when the Prime Minister talks about a “clunking fist”.
It’s this authoritarianism which leads to the other great bane of our times, centralisation. We have the most centralised system of local government in Europe – with the exception of Malta. Recent years have seen a steady but largely hidden transfer of taxation from central to local level , taking council tax to unsustainable heights. No other country in the world attempts to run a health service for 60 million people – everyone except us has realised that population centres of around 5 million people are the right sort of size for strategic direction and funding, with providers working at the local level.
This is the explanation for Labour’s obsession with targets, indicators and numbers of all kinds, even when they are utterly meaningless or counterproductive. It’s soviet style tractor production quotas for the modern era. A few weeks ago we heard the defence minister in the Lords asserting that morale in the armed forces was up by 14.5% - he was bewildered by our amusement that morale is something which can be precisely measured like widget in a factory.
It’s a consequence of this authoritarianism which leads to the utter contempt for the checks and balances of government, whether it involves a properly functioning cabinet, a parliament which takes seriously its responsibility to hold government to account, or one which allows a mature relationship with local government which is at the forefront of much of government policy.
So when we look closely at New Labour, when we strip out the rhetoric and the management consultation jargon what are we left with? Centralist, authoritarian, stubborn, number obessed – my goodness – it’s Old Labour.