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Thursday 21 August 2008

The ghosts of the past

The ghosts return as Brown fights to escape the Blairite past

At the Labour party conference in Bournemouth, Tony Blair was airbrushed out of the picture. But this week Blair’s ghost has returned to haunt Gordon Brown with a new biography of the ex-PM, sniping from the disaffected and the evidence of Yates of the Yard on cash for honours. The challenge now for Gordon Brown is to lay out an agenda that allows new Labour to move beyond its past.

The Blair–Brown clash was so bitter, because it was, in the end, much more ideological than personal. True, the origins of the rivalry lay in the 1994 Labour leadership contest. But, as the years passed, it became clear that personal bitterness was more than matched by differences of principle. Mr Blair increasingly came to the conclusion that state control and one-size-fits-all policies were hampering Labour’s goals, especially in public service reform. Bureaucracies, he argued, are inherently hostile to such reform, and tend to give the best service to the rich who are best able to complain and work the system. So his market reforms would transfer power or ‘choice’ to the users, and drive standards in schools and hospitals by forcing them to compete for custom. The more radical Blairites argued for ‘co-payment’: encouraging the affluent to chip in for a better service. No, said the Brownites, this is divisive and wasteful. The machine needed to be better-funded and properly run. Too much personal choice, Gordon’s gang argued, would mean ruinous fragmentation. Blair trusted the invisible hand of the market. Brown, despite his occasional protestations to the contrary, always preferred the clunking fist of the state.

It was obvious enough that the old Blairite order was at an end when Alan Johnson, the health secretary, announced that there would be no more ‘permanent revolution’ in the NHS, and when the definition of City Academies was changed to bring them under local authority control. The Brownite way is one of which Bevan would have approved, orders from on high to the rest of us: letters sent to the parents of overweight kids, reminding them of the child’s waist measurements. Parents being asked by the government to read to their children for ten minutes a night. In so far as it’s possible to discern a Brown ‘vision’, it is a montage of such edicts.

More articles from: Fraser Nelson | this section

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