It wasn’t all bad

The Labour party typically disembowels itself after an election defeat, but this time it hasn’t waited to be beaten.

The Labour party typically disembowels itself after an election defeat, but this time it hasn’t waited to be beaten. The party which gathers in Brighton next week is already at war, and many of its brightest prospects have already left the field. The likes of John Hutton and Alan Milburn have despaired, and are quitting parliament altogether. The trade unions, who have long dreamed about capturing Labour, may soon buy it for scrap.

This magazine sheds few tears for the demise of a party which is now as bankrupt morally as it is financially. But it may fall to us to deliver a brief elegy, a tribute to what Labour got right. Its failures have been so spectacular and costly — from our defeat in Basra to Gordon Brown’s staggering economic incompetence — that it is easy to forget the sporadic but significant successes. Rewriting recent political history has become standard practice in this era of spin. Labour brilliantly misrepresented John Major’s seven years in power as one long Black Wednesday. But the Conservatives would be doing themselves no favours if they were to do the same. To succeed, David Cameron must first identify Labour’s achievements and then build on them.

Chief among these is Tony Blair’s introduction of a functioning internal market to the National Health Service. The pace of liberalisation has been slow, with independent providers muscled out by a system anxious to protect its own privileges. But the Blair reforms established an important principle: that the NHS should not be seen as a provider of health services, but a means of paying for them. The Tories, whose sole health policy seems to be giving independence to the NHS bureaucracy that Blair was trying to fight, should learn from this.