Milburn withdraws the Blairite seal of approval

Andrew Fletcher

And he's dead right! forests, nhs, welfare cap....

Steve Griffiths

Funny that no-one mentions Milburn's interest in this: he is an advisor to Bridgepoint Capital, a venture capital firm heavily involved in financing private health care firms moving into the NHS, including Alliance Medical, Match Group, Medica and the Robinia Care Group. So no agenda there then. The boy's come a long way since his Days of Hope / Haze of Dope radical bookshop in Newcastle.

John Steed

"Passion" and a distaste for focus groups aren't a substitute for solid policy-making. Hilton's a disaster and should walk.

normanc

He is beginning to sound dangerously like the loon wing of the Party - better check his family jewels after each visit to the headmasters office!

commentator

Milburn's article struck me as spot on apart from the bit when he said that only the left can reform public services. The 13 years to 2010 showed as vividly as possible that the left (which includes Old Labour for the Shires aka the Lib Dems) is utterly incapable of reforming public services. The left is the hostage of producer interests and egalitarian mediocrity, on which it will spend unlimited sums of public money, if given the chance.

Steve Griffiths seems to think that somehow the BMA and the Royal College of Nurses, not to mention Unison, are not "vested interests."

Thomas Kydd

Millstone has a very convenient memory: the financial collapse under Broon was the greatest 'car crash' in recent times - a disaster from which we have yet recover.

He was a quondam member of the NuLab gang until he got wise and left 'to spend more time with (his) family'.

Tiberius

After Blair himself, Milburn represented the biggest danger to the Tories in the run up to the 2010 election. Thankfully, Brown purged him.

Whatever his personal motivations for doing so now, I'm surprised it's taken him so long to have a pop at Cameron's government. He is after all a New Labourite who's relished jackbooting the Tories throught their wilderness years.

This is one enemy that Cameron would do well to keep very close.

Dimoto

Well, rather Milburn's rant, which has some coherance, than the latest desperate piece of attention seeking from the Balls monkey.

BTW, what does Milburn mean by "Labour", the Brownite gang presently locking down the Labour party, the dispersed and defeated remnants of the Blairite old regime, or the back-bench, unreformed fantasists ?

alexsandr

another failed politician. Who cares what he thinks. He should spend more time with his family.

Richard

Alan Milburn is correct to state that wholesale reform of public services and welfare is most easily accomplished from the left. What he fails to mention however, is the failure of NuLabour, elected by a landslide in 1997, to enact the necessary reforms when they had the chance.

Of course, the eminence grise in all this was Gordon Brown, who was a very effective roadblock to reform. It is to Blair's shame that he did not have the courage to sack Brown at the earliest opportunity.

Rich

As far as NHS car crashes go, how about the negotiations that led to a massive rise in GP pay for less work?

Who negotiated that? Mr Milburn!

Another failed politician from a failed era. Why Cameron continues to kiss Blairite butt is beyond me.

REPay

I think some of us share Hilton's concerns. The public sector is gradually winning out - and of course, now in power the reformers are becoming part of the system that makes the rest of us merely funders of salaries and pensions. The producer perspective is triumphing and when the producers strike their victory will be total. All aboard for Coalition 2 - Labour/TUC.

Nicholas

No surprises except for the very stupid people in Cameron's inner circle. Labour are doing exactly what they do best - propaganda. Consistently repeating the same lies using carefully chosen and memorable soundbites over and over (aided and abetted by the BBC of course). Pure Alistair Campbell and if he is not involved somewhere I'd be surprised.

This coalition is lumbering, punch drunk around the ring whilst the bantamweight blows are being delivered,one two three. And of course the public sector is playing their part. The British Left Wing don't like this government and are doing whatever it takes to make sure it falls. It's not opposition - it's just part of the same old long march and cultural revolution.

The coalition are just thick in not understanding what is happening or responding to it properly.

Nicholas

I detest that phrase "keep your enemies close" - it is redolent of the whole corporate British, back-stabbing, wonk slime "ethos" seen in The Apprentice. Aggressive, ambitious, nasty pieces of work doing what it takes and ruining this country's best qualities to boot.

Sir Everard Digby

and driving through many PFI schemes for hospitals was not a car crash? Progressive reform? More like a major transfer of taxpayer funds and borrowed money to the private sector.

As he has not held office since 2003,may I ask why his views carry any more weight than those of the average citizen,who seemd to be being ignored?

Publius

Perhaps it would help if Cameron did not appoint wet left-wing advisers who seem to spend most of their time apologising for not being more left wing.

Not so much keeping-your-enemy-close as the enemy within.

If Labour has the gumption to outflank the gov't on the right (tax cuts, Europe), then Cameron is done for.

It doesn't matter that Labour won't mean a word of it. They always lie. They think that is politics.

Frank P

Caption for picture:

"That shade of lipstick just doesn't suit me - and I must try again with my eyebrow plucker. Other than that, I'm lovely - mirror, mirror and the wall ... "

David Lindsay

It did not take Jeremy Vine three minutes before he was quoting at Ed Balls that undelivered speech which can only have been leaked by David Miliband himself. Clearly, that speech - never delivered, because the man who would have delivered it had lost the election - is definitive of acceptable Labour policy in the BBC's view.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph has given over valuable space to Alan "Haze of Dope" Milburn - no longer a member of either House, and not a Minister since 2003 - to denounce the betrayal of the true Blairite faith by the abandonment of the deranged scheme to flog off the English Health Service to various companies that, as he does not mention, are now his employers.

For all its pretence to be the organ of provincial Toryism, unlike The Times, it is obvious that the unquestionable correctness of Blairism is as "self-evident" to the Daily Telegraph as it is the BBC.

Woody

David Cameron needs some advisors who live in the real world.

TrevorsDen

I think Milburns interests have been effectively debunked by others.

And just what did HE ever actually do?

And meantime - who actually elected Hilton? Who is he? He may be a good chap, I do not know, and he may be right to be hacked off by civil servants.
But the last time someone like him was allowed and encouraged to run amock all over civil servants it was Alistair Campbell. And we all know how that ended.

strapworld

Milburn was a highly effective Secretray of State for Health. Many, here, forget that. They also have a shocking memory blaming Milburn for the sins of others.

Believe me I am no leftie but Milburn is worth listening to. I was impressed when I read that he was advising the coalition and people can dismiss him as an 'old leftie' etc or in the words of that great thinker on these paes, TrevorsDen "Just what exactly did HE ever actually do?"

The truth is as most people are waking up to is the awful mess now facing us. More quango's, more beauocracy, more money. The vested interests within the NHS have won hands down and, I fear, the Unions will win the battle over pensions.

Cameron is proving to be totally out of his depth. He has a close cabal of people with no experience of real life and the thoughts of ordinary people. He is taking the conservative party to another place. Oblivion.

Tim W

Hilton may be a terrible campaigner and useless at coordinating election strategy but he's important to the government. They need someone there who comes up with often mad ideas and thinks the unthinkable. If Downing Street loses him and is left with a bunch of realists then the reforms get diluted, the creativity is lost and ultimately you get stale government with no purpose. I don't think Hilton is amazing but Cameron has maybe jumped too much on the bandwagon of U-turns. Osborne and Cooper are equally important but a balance is needed and the government could lose its purpose.

Nicholas

"They need someone there who comes up with often mad ideas and thinks the unthinkable."

You mean like Adolf Hitler? Yeah, good plan.

eyesee

Why is it then that the NHS kills so many people these days? Could it be the rampant managerial, top down target driven stupidity of the Labour years? I think it could. What is it they say? The NHS is like a train crash every day. Milburn, you and all your crew ought to shut up really. No-one could possibly make as big a mess as you lot.

TGF UKIP

One of these days it's going to dawn on the Speccie teenagers just what a self-i nflicted morass their beloved Tories are sinking into. What's an even more difficult reality for them to face up to is that most of their difficulties both pre-election and now are rooted in Dave's pusillanimity. Never one to face up to a confrontation and always the one to shirk an argument, he now has so many u-turns to his name that both the public sector unions and the LibDems now know they have carte blanche to overturn any aspect of CameronTory policy they don't care for.

As for their current NHS mess it just goes to underline what absolute folly it was for Dave to attempt to identify himself and the Tories with an institution that was politicised from top to bottom by Labour, though getting Dave into a mess is what his Director of Strategy for a Labour Victory exists for. However, having made sure they beat all the odds by failing to win last time, he'll be wanting to ensure a massive Labour majority next time so forget the gossip my mate Steve H is going nowhere.