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Leading article

The vision thing

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

The Spectator on the Queen's speech

On ‘flexible working’, it is hard to reconcile Brown the self-professed champion of low-regulation capitalism with the Prime Minister now suggesting that employees should have the right to demand time off work to help 17-year-old children with examinations. ‘Work-life balance’ is threatening to become a tyrannous slogan rather than a desirable objective. Employers in any decent society have responsibilities to their employees, especially regarding childbirth and the period immediately afterwards. But there is a difference of kind, rather than degree, between a parent’s duty to a newborn and to a 17-year-old preparing for A-level media studies. It debases the language of rights to suggest that anyone has a right to time off work to help a swotting teenager.

John Wright, the chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, was, of course, right to warn that ‘the reality in a business is that the employees need to be at work to enable the firm to make money, pay their wages and grow to employ others’. Yet it is alarming that the point has to be spelt out at all — a measure of how far Britain is drifting towards a Continental culture where employees’ ‘social rights’ trump all else. Mr Brown, supposedly a believer in Atlanticist free enterprise, must be explicit about whether he wants this drift to continue.

Another unsettling thread weaving its way through the package of measures is the proposed deployment of new agencies and quangos: the Care Quality Commission to oversee failing hospitals; the Homes and Communities Agency to supervise council housing, brownfield development; and the Independent Infrastructure Project Commission to take major planning decisions. These and other quangos are at the very heart of this Queen’s Speech. Mr Brown speaks often of decentralisation and the ‘personalisation’ of public services. But his centraliser’s instinct is still with the gentleman in Whitehall and Nye Bevan hearing the clatter of every bedpan.