Milburn Watch
Peter Hoskin 9:12am
So what's going on? As Matt blogged last night, and details in his cover piece today, Labour leadership plots are certainly a-brewing; most probably involving Charles Clarke. While Dizzy has unearthed signs that the 2020 Vision project - founded by Clarke and Alan Milburn back in the pre-Gordo era to, ahem, offer "direction" to the Labour party - may not be dead after all. And now, stage right, we have Milburn advising against a wholesale return to the "policies of state intervention" in today's Independent:
"Meeting the challenges of the modern world calls for a different sort of state: one that empowers, not controls. Faced with the new challenges of global warming and global terror, of mass migration and community insecurity the old top down approach to governance will no longer work.
It is not just that the public have reached the limits of what they will pay in taxes, although they have. Nor is it just that in the next decade fiscal pressures will compel governments – whether of right or left – to be far clearer with their electorates which areas of state spending need to rise and which areas need to fall. But it is also that, just as the global credit crunch and its consequences have exposed the limits of untrammelled free markets, so the new problems politics must confront – how to improve health, beat crime, regenerate communities, safeguard the environment – simply cannot happen if we have to choose between either having an active state or having active citizens. It is not either/or that is needed. It is both."
Given Brown's statist creed, it's hard not to see this as some kind of dig at his premiership. But, even if it's not, it will be worth keeping an eye on Milburn over the next few months. He's someone unusually suited to the Age of Austerity; strongly in favour of public service reform, and far from reluctant to cut back on civil servants and bureaucrats. And he's even managed sidle back into the inner circles of government, through his work on social mobility.
Besides, Milburn is one of those people whose career and policy agenda was trampled upon by Chancellor Brown on his way to becoming Prime Minster. You've got to wonder how hungry he and others are to drag our Dear Leader back down again.
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John Wilkes
May 7th, 2009 9:25am Report this commentI'm a Tory - it sounds like he's one too. Wouldn't he do better just swapping sides. It would certainly make the debate clearer.
Roger Thornhill
May 7th, 2009 9:51am Report this commentI have been watching Milburn, even before he slid below the radar around the last election, and consider him a contender in the leadership and have openly said so.
He has absolutely no trace of the Brown regime and also no grudge from being openly sacked (which is CC's cross).
The skeletons in his cupboard need to be dealt with. however.
Vulture
May 7th, 2009 9:56am Report this commentI'd like to raise the horrifying ( to me) but seductive ( to his fans) possibility of a Second Coming for Bliar himself rather than his spokesman on earth Milbum. If I were a betting man I'd say there's now an evens chance that Bruin will quit in June after the Euro/council polls meltdown. He is clearly not a well man and could cite health grounds to save himself from utter humiliation. Bliar's mission to bring peace to the Middle East doesn't seem to be going too well - what if some uber-Bliarite stepped down to present the king over the water with an easy by-election (if ANY by-election is easy for Liebour just now) and returned him to Westminster. Are there enough Liebour MPs who would snatch at this straw rather than the other Straw in order to save their seats?
Pete Hoskin
May 7th, 2009 9:58am Report this commentVulture: while you're on this thread, I got your comment this morning. Would you mind sending me an email (on phoskin @ spectator.co.uk), and then I'll be ably to reply more easily?
drakes drum
May 7th, 2009 10:02am Report this commentMilburn ran a Trotskyite bookshop prior to becoming a born again Blairite! He could cross to the Lib Dems- and I do expect him and Clarke, and the other Blairites still in Parliament after the General Eelection to join the Lib Dems!
I am of the very strong belief that the Lib Dems will form the Official Opposition after the General Election.
RayD
May 7th, 2009 10:07am Report this commentJohn Wilkes,
"...global credit crunch and its consequences have exposed the limits of untrammelled free markets"
You think he's a Tory?
I long for untrammeled free markets. I've yet to see any.
The Preston Park Panther
May 7th, 2009 10:18am Report this comment'Phoskin', eh, Pete? A most unfortunate email address.
Steve.W
May 7th, 2009 10:27am Report this commentIt's hard to imagine Nulabour under Alan Milburn being better than that it is now. When Secretary of State for Health during a debate on problems with availability of flu vaccine he described winter flu as -
“unwarranted influenza activity”
A man with a mind like that etc.....
Nicholas
May 7th, 2009 10:31am Report this comment"I am of the very strong belief that the Lib Dems will form the Official Opposition after the General Election."
Good. It's about time parliament returned to a proper debate over the middle ground from parties representing the reasonable and reasoned right and left, rather than the extreme ideological lunacies, abuse of authority, un-Britishness and rabble-rousing that have permeated New Labour's 12 year reign.
A parliament of Clegg and Cameron, decent men, without the scowling, scheming, unpredictable Brown and his arrogant, out-of-touch, weight-throwing and extremist henchpeople would be too wonderful to contemplate. Perhaps it might signal a return to gentler, less intrusive politics and a population unfettered by the default assumption that everyone is either a criminal or a socialist reformer.
drakes drum
May 7th, 2009 10:44am Report this commentNicholas, That is my view exactly!
I think the people woke up to decent politics when Clegg allowed Cameron to join him with the Ghurka press conference. It was a new dawn for British Politics and I do pray that both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats- whilst fighting each other in a General Election- can show that even in that hot house atmosphere their parties can show respect for each other whilst killing off this labour party for all time!
We can only hope.
Perhaps they can enter into an agreement to eradicate this evil party?
The Bellman
May 7th, 2009 10:51am Report this commentMr Milburn could do something to address 'community insecurity' - I think I know what he means - by not talking up marginal threats like 'global warming', and sticking to the problems where the state has a legitimate claim to primacy: upholding the rule of law and controlling our borders. And that means something more than bribing Islamists not to blow people up and proscribing harmless US radio performers.
Lovely riah, though.
John Wilkes
May 7th, 2009 10:54am Report this commentRay D - fair point but it's a broad church and we can't agree about everything. That said I'm not sure we really want "untrammelled" free markets - my old marxist pals used to say the natural tendency of capitalism was monopoly and there is an element of truth int that. Freedom and responsibility of the individual and as little control as possible are more like it.
Ian C
May 7th, 2009 11:14am Report this commentVulture,
not likely. Iraq and being in cahoots with Broon for 20 years has destroyed any credibility he had left. And why would he want to get off his gravy train for a lost cause; posterity? I don't think so.
drakes drum and Nicholas; it's certainly looking likely but how we get there will depend on how the likes of Milburn and Clarke play it. They do not have a strong hand.
More likely they are simply depeserate to see the end of Broon, at whatever electoral cost to the current party as they will see that as they means to a permanent Blairite remake. In that I hope they are mistaken although I yearn for anyone to end this gov't.
Prodicus
May 7th, 2009 11:17am Report this commentBring back Tony Blair, Vulture?
What a splendid idea, for a thousand reasons, not least for the rejoicing which would break out at Order-Order and Private Eye -- and here, of course.
It would destroy not only the Labour Party, once and for all, when an enraged and insulted electorate tore them to shreds.
It would destroy the last vestige of Gordon Brown’s sanity, ensuring that the rest of this very bad man's life was as terrible as he has made the lives of countless others.
The Tories would be in government and the LibDems the Loyal Opposition for a century.
Love it.
Tom Pride
May 7th, 2009 11:58am Report this comment“just as the global credit crunch and its consequences have exposed the limits of untrammelled free markets,”
Fraser blew that one away with The truth about conservatives and laissez-faire –
http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/3526696/the-truth-about-conservatives-and-laissezfaire.thtml#comments
More a problem of government policy errors, poor regulation, inappropriate interference, and inadequate legal framework. But, apart from that and despite his youthful indiscretions, I like the guy. Comes across as sincere and decent. I have time for someone who acknowledges and worries that a child of today from his background has less chance of achievement and who wants to correct the errors which have brought it about. Far better than the normal spiteful socialist / statist trick of pulling up the ladder as a consequence of worshipping at the alter of the false god – Equality.
Denis Cooper
May 7th, 2009 12:03pm Report this commentIf you said that the quoted passages were from an article by Cameron then I would have believed that, and I would have been just as dissatisfied with their tenor.
My legal status is that of an adult British citizen, which entitles me to both leave this country and return to it, and to reside and work here, vote here, and so forth - my "civil rights", my special rights as a citizen.
But while that legal status I enjoy is indispensable to me, it isn't my totality. I don't feel that I have to spend every waking minute being "a citizen".
Of course I will refer to and rely on that secure, fundamental, legal status when it is relevant; but otherwise I am a human being, a person, an individual, and I don't want every detail of my everyday life to be constantly shaped by my legal relationship with the state.
Let alone with what Milburn refers to as "politics", by which he really means "politicians".
So when I read that we need a state which "empowers, not controls", I ask whether he's forgotten that ultimately the state has no power except that derived from the individuals who are its citizens, and if the state "empowers" it is doing no more than returning direct power to those individuals, direct power which in many cases it should never have removed in the first place.
And then when I read that we must have both "an active state", and "active citizens", it seems to me that this could be a euphemism for a totalitarian state.
Soft totalitarianism, perhaps, at least initially, but nevertheless totalitarianism.
Personally I would prefer "a limited state", a state which limited its involvement in the lives of individuals to those matters where such involvement was genuinely necessary for the common good - when it would be active, and if necessary it would control - and I would prefer individuals within the state to be active, not always as "citizens", somehow owned by the state, but as free individuals.
Heironymous Bosch
May 7th, 2009 1:47pm Report this commentMilburn has the demeanour and uses the words of nothing more than a management consultant.
An opportunist; and not to be trusted.
Nicholas
May 7th, 2009 2:11pm Report this commentDenis - good post. When socialists talk about "empowering" it usually means only empowering certain societal elements rather than individuals or communities as a whole. Those elements are assumed to be both representative and leftist, and are more often than not strident minorities with dogmatic views about how communities should behave.
I saw it with rural improvements (a Labour euphemism for urbanising the hated countryside) where the people who got involved and began to take over were leftists with a leftist agenda. What James Delingpole characterised so aptly as "smugly consensual", with an arrogant assumption that everyone thinks like they do and wants to participate in imposing their particular solutions. This is a microcosm of government and the one party state Labour aspire to. If you dissent, rather than attempting to understand, compromise or accommodate your views, you quickly find yourself demonised as any one of a number of anti-social stereotypes with "unacceptable" views who can then be conveniently marginalised. The advantage to them is that like the politics of academia and the BBC all manner of injustice and inequality may be practised in the name of the complete opposite, unregulated by any codes, safeguards or independent adjudication. This has happened and is happening through all walks of life where socialists, even in a minority, have seized the "narrative" and frozen out true debate and true diversity. They politicise everything.
The idea of any benign element in socialism is pure fantasy contrived to deceive. The analogy is a rabid dog promising not to bite you too hard.
David Lindsay
May 7th, 2009 4:39pm Report this commentWhy does the Speccie insist on covering Alan Milburn as if he were a serious figure? How about looking into his Trostkyist past, and the break-up of his first marriage, just for a start?
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