Brown to Britain: "Crisis? Which crisis?!"

8 December 2007

When Jim Callaghan, the last Labour Prime Minister to lose a British general election, returned from an overseas summit in sunny climes to widespread winter turmoil back in Blighty, he was reported to have asked: “Crisis? What crisis?”.

In the past few months, Mr Brown has set about neutering these reforms, replacing them with the previous status quo. Take City academies, which were meant to be independent state schools that charged no fees. They were doing significantly better than the national average in terms of contextual value added; of the 42 that were open last academic year, all but three were over-subscribed. Yet in his first speech as Secretary of State for Schools, Children and Families, Mr Balls took away their freedom to manage their own curriculum and gave local authorities an effective veto over the establishment of new academies.

Equally, modest efforts at diversifying the supply of healthcare have been stamped on. Mr Brown’s changes are not being motivated by some grand, over-arching blueprint; they are merely about reversing changes introduced by Mr Blair and go back to the failed policies of the 1990s, predicated on the assumption that monolithic, unreformed public services are the answer.

One of the few radical policies announced in recent weeks is really a reversal of one of Mr Brown’s best ideas when he was Chancellor: for the sake of waging class war on private equity, Mr Brown has chosen to reverse the ultra-low rate of capital gains tax on long-term business investment and business creation which he introduced. The good news is that a panicky Mr Darling told the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) this week that he would present a review of the policy before Christmas; the fact that a policy announced in October was put under review in November and will probably be changed in December shows just how confused Mr Brown’s government has become.

Mr Brown was meant to breathe fresh life into the government with his speech at the CBI on Monday, but all he delivered was those Reheated Brownies. We were offered commitments on planning, energy security, immigration, deregulation, so-called “upskilling” of the workforce and welfare reform, all of which had already been announced and never amounted to much in the first place.