When disabled activists converged on the House of Commons this week to protest against welfare reform, they wanted to remind the Tories of what happened the last time a reforming government tried to tackle disability benefits. That was December 1997, when Tony Blair was talking as fervently about welfare reform as Iain Duncan Smith does now. But once he saw men in wheelchairs chaining themselves to the Downing Street railings wearing placards saying ‘Blair doesn’t care,’ he panicked. The reform agenda was quietly abandoned. As a result, millions lived through Britain’s boom years in a state of welfare dependency. By the time Blair tried again, years later, he had lost his political authority and he made little progress.
This time, the protestors face a government with firmer resolve — one which has learned from Blair’s failures. The tragedy of the Labour years is that so many good ideas were mooted but never properly implemented. The coalition has made progress in office because they have picked up where Blair’s pro-market reforms left off. Michael Gove’s school reforms simply accelerate Blair’s academies agenda. Chris Grayling’s welfare reforms, so successful in weeding out able-bodied incapacity benefits claimants, were started by James Purnell three years ago. On health, Andrew Lansley’s plans to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy simply continue the trend he inherited. He should have had the humility to admit this and buckle down to work — rather than publishing a massive and unnecessary Health Bill.
Unwilling to fight for intellectual custody of the Blair reform agenda, Ed Miliband is attacking it with relish. And in so doing, he is taking his party back to where it was in the mid-1980s. Take the academies programme, which gives state schools the same freedoms as private schools, with stunning results. When Labour left power, one in 16 schools had this coveted status. Last month, we reported that it had reached one in six. Now, it is one in five. Andy Burnham, the shadow education spokesman, describes it as a ‘whirlwind’, and he does not mean this positively. In a recent address to the teachers’ unions, Burnham warned that ‘an attack has been launched on state education in England’. The attack was started, of course, by the New Labour government. The free schools agenda is, Burnham added, ‘designed to break a successful school system and turn it into a free-for-all’. One could hardly ask for a better example of the difference between the two parties. David Cameron and Gove regard freedom as the object of their government: freedom for the poor to have the same choices as the rich. To Ed Miliband’s Labour party, freedom is anathema.
Which side would Tony Blair be on? This week, The Spectator has learned of an application for a new free school in the London Borough of Newham. It is being set up by Peter Hyman, formerly Blair’s chief strategist, who is being advised and encouraged by Lord Adonis, the architect of the academies agenda. According to one of those involved, Hymans’s project has the ‘full blessing’ of the former Prime Minister. Hyman, Adonis and Blair seem to sense an opportunity in this Tory ‘free-for-all’ — not for themselves, but for pupils in a deprived borough where good schools are so desperately required. As George Bridges argues on page 14, the need for new schools is urgent.
Hyman is no hypocrite. He left No. 10 to train as a teacher, and rose to become a deputy headmaster. In setting up a free school, he is practising what the Blairites preached. The problem is that this is now viewed as heresy by the Labour party, which apparently sees no virtue in educational diversity.
In the end, Blair did not change his party for ever. The New Labour years can now be regarded as a blip in Labour’s history, a moment of clarity when the party’s leadership grasped that the market is the surest route to social justice. If Gordon Brown buried New Labour, then Ed Miliband’s task seems to be making sure that the tomb remains sealed.
A party that does not recognise its past failures is bad enough. But Miliband seems unable to recognise Labour’s successes, and that is worse. He was made Labour leader by the trade unions. They always loathed Blair’s reforms. The nursing unions despise the idea of NHS patients being given the choice of a Bupa hospital. Teachers unions hate the idea of letting pupils choose schools — and sacking bad teachers in order to improve things. In Ed Miliband, they have a champion. The Tories are the radicals now, and they are joined by the more reform-minded members of the Liberal Democrats.
Nothing remains of New Labour. A political force which won three landslide victories in Britain has been dismantled, its best ideas sold for scrap to the Tories. For all the mishaps of its first year, the coalition inherited a reform agenda which is thrilling, radical and real. Lucky Cameron.
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