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?”.

Even though health spending is now around the European average, the quality of care remains sub-par. In terms of patient satisfaction, Britain scores 17th out of 29 European countries. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) records Britain is suffering from a worse than average incidence of heart disease; it also suffers from poor five-year survival rates for breast and colorectal cancers. On top of this, the period between 1993 and 2005 saw a 30-fold increase in deaths caused by the superbug MRSA.

Conservative policy is completely unequal to the challenge of introducing new structures to start shifting the NHS closer to a European mixed-economy model. Instead of standing up for consumers, the Tories have been captured by producer interests, already the great winners from the expenditure increases of the past decade. Not only are they refusing to think the unthinkable on health, they remain obsessed with matching Mr Brown’s spending while repeating meaningless mantras about trusting the professionals and tearing up the targets culture. It is time for a radical change of tack from the Tories.

The past few months have seen politics played out in fast forward. The Blair-Brown transition was followed by a period of Labour ascendency and self-inflicted Tory wounds. Mr Brown’s honeymoon is over and the deep structural flaws in the government machinery, the economy and public services built up over the past decade of Labour rule have come together into the chaos of the past few weeks.

For Mr Cameron, the name of the game is to produce an alternative vision of society to appeal to a jaded electorate disillusioned with all politicians. For Mr Brown, the challenge is even more pressing: unless he urgently regains a grip on the agenda, he will end up sharing the same verdict history served on the hapless Paul Martin, the erstwhile Liberal Prime Minister of Canada: an over-promoted finance minister who was never really cut out for the top job.