Podcast - Brown yet to reveal his hand

Script for Paul Linford's Week in Politics, Episode 47, December 11 2006.

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Over the years, as Gordon Brown has built himself up from a promising young Labour politician into a Prime Minister in waiting, we have become accustomed to seeing him pull rabbits out of hats.

The Chancellor is a past master in the art of conjuring up last-minute surprises that wrong-foot the opposition and leave his own side cheering.

In his Budget statements, he’s done it with the 10p starting rate of tax, direct payments to schools, and winter fuel payments for pensioners among other things.

Most memorably, perhaps, he did it on his fourth day in the job by announcing Bank of England independence, the single most important and far-reaching reform of his Chancellorship.

But if the aim of Mr Brown’s Budget and pre-Budget statements has normally been to procure a headline-grabbing announcement that seizes the political initiative, Wednesday’s pre-Budget report was different.

The Chancellor was under no pressure to produce a big surprise. He has moreorless cemented his position as the next Prime Minister, and only a political earthquake can now deprive him of it.

Far from producing a rabbit from the hat, the aim was to keep the rabbit firmly inside it – ready for the day when Brown finally moves next door to No 10.

So Wednesday’s statement was by and large a steady-as-she-goes package, with a few token announcements thrown in to keep the media wolves at bay.

One change that certainly falls into this category was the decision to double air tax to £10, no more than a cursory nod to the green lobby that will do little or nothing to reduce carbon emissions.

Potentially more significant was the extra £8.3bn for education, posing a difficult challenge for the Tories who have pledged to split the proceeds of future growth between new spending and tax cuts.

Likewise, the extension of child benefit payments to women in the later stages of pregnancy is a populist move set to come on stream just before the next election is due.

But these are mere hors d’oeuvres. The real meat will come next summer, once Mr Brown can unleash his own agenda without fear of it being purloined by Tony Blair or, worse, David Cameron.

The question on the lips of many Labour MPs at the moment is what the first 100 days of the Brown premiership are going to look like, but there are already plenty of clues.

We know, for instance, that Mr Brown is eager to complete the unfinished business of Mr Blair’s constitutional reforms, moving to an elected Lords and maybe even a fresh look at proportional representation.

There are also strong rumours that he has also decided to make major changes to the machinery of government, including the dismantling of his existing department.

The Department of Trade and Industry may be abolished and folded into the Treasury, which could itself then be demerged into a finance department and a ministry of economics and trade.

But I would anticipate something much more eye-catching as Mr Brown’s “Big Bang” announcement to define the start of his premiership and draw a line under the Blair years.

Here’s my prediction, for what it’s worth. He will repeat the trick he pulled with Bank of England independence – but this time with the National Health Service.

Mr Brown will remove the NHS from political control, establishing it as a standalone BBC-style trust at arms length from government and enshrining it as free at the point of delivery.

Although it will mean having to give up a certain degree of power, it will put the NHS permanently beyond the reach of Tory privatisers and cement Mr Brown’s long-term legacy.

In previous podcasts, I have also predicted that Prime Minister Brown would seek,
in some way, to draw a line under the Iraq War, perhaps by beginning a phased withdrawal of British troops.

As it has turned out, events have moved faster, and it is now entirely possible that such a withdrawal could commence under Mr Blair.

This week’s critical report by the Iraq Study Group, coupled with the admission of the new Secretary for Defence that the US is losing the war, shows how quickly the ground has shifted.

Mr Blair was himself forced to concede yesterday that a new approach is needed, thereby absolving his successor of the need to do so.

Either way, one thing of which I am very certain about Mr Brown’s first 100 days is that there will be plenty for people like me to write about.

Some even argue – though I don’t necessarily agree – that he will call a General Election, to secure his own mandate independent of Mr Blair and cut off the Tory revival in its tracks.

In the meantime, we will have to be patient, as Mr Blair tries to string out his premiership in the increasingly vain hope that something will come along that will enable him to leave on a high note.

It is hard to see what he has left to do, other than to achieve the milestone of ten years in office and, perhaps, to see off the “cash-for-honours” inquiry.

For now, British politics has entered a bizarre state of limbo, with Blair in office but not in power and Brown in power but not in office.

It’s Brown who is the man with the plan – but it’s the plan for his first few months as Premier, not his last few months as Chancellor, and the name of the game this week was to give as little of it away as possible.

To put it another way, we are now in a situation in which Mr Blair has almost no cards left to play, while Mr Brown is still playing his very close to his chest.

Until he is ready to put those cards on the table, all we can do is simply watch, and wait.

Podcast - Why Blair should ditch Trident

Script for Paul Linford's Week in Politics, Episode 46, December 4 2006.

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OVER the course of his nine years in power, there have been many issues on which Prime Minister Tony Blair has found himself at odds with his party.

Cuts in benefits for lone parents and the disabled. Foundation hospitals. University tuition fees. And of course, the War in Iraq to name but a few.

But there is no issue that is as potentially more explosive within the Labour Party – if you will excuse the pun – as that of nuclear weapons.

The party may have abandoned unilateral nuclear disarmament long ago. But an instinctive hatred of “the bomb” still lingers in many a Labour breast.

Prime Minister-designate Gordon Brown has already lobbed a metaphorical hand grenade into the debate by pledging to renew the British nuclear deterrent if he makes it to No 10.

In a Commons statement next week, Mr Blair himself will endorse that position, although he will make clear there will be a whipped vote of MPs on the issue in the New Year.

The outcome is not in doubt. The Conservatives have already pledged their support, so it would take more than half of Labour MPs to rebel to threaten Mr Blair’s majority.

But a rebellion there will be, nonetheless, and, with heavyweights such as Charles Clarke in the camp, it could well become a very sizeable one.

Former Home Secretary Mr Clarke’s intervention in the debate this week is intriguing on more than one level, especially given the forthcoming leadership vacancy.

He said on Thursday he is "extremely sceptical" about the value of any replacement for Trident, which is due to become obsolete by around 2024.

“Trident was an expensive weapons system developed in the Cold War to meet the conditions of the Cold War, which ended 17 years ago, and it is still capable of functioning for about another 15 years,” he said.

“I think we have to take our security decisions on the basis of what are likely to be the main security threats in the future, rather than building weapons to fight the last war."

In the light of recent events in London, some might view Mr Clarke’s comments as rather naïve.

The Cold War may indeed have ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but the poisoning of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko might lead some to suppose it is on its way back.

But whether or not the Kremlin was involved, there is a fairly crucial distinction to be drawn between the men in charge of Russia then and the ones running the show now.

It is that their aims are primarily defensive, to protect their regime from potential external threats, rather than engaging in an ideological struggle for world supremacy.

So Mr Clarke is right, in my view, to argue that the danger in the next few decades will come not from those countries that possess nuclear weapons, but from those that do not.

It is hard to dispute his claim that nuclear weapons will be no deterrent against the modern-day threats of terrorism, people-trafficking and organised crime.

It also, to my mind, changes the terms of the debate about what “multilateralism” and “unilateralism” actually mean in today’s world.

If “multilateral nuclear disarmament” now primarily means preventing rogue states from acquiring such weapons, why should we “unilaterally” exempt ourselves from that?

Earlier this year, North Korea shocked world opinion by testing a nuclear weapon underground, and Iran is known to want to follow suit.

What moral authority do we have in seeking to dissuade them from that potentially catastrophic course if we are planning to spend £20bn on ensuring we remain a member of the nuclear club?

Mr Blair will get his way, of course, just as he did over all those other issues that I listed at the start of this column.

But it will not stop the debate raging until well after he, and possibly even Mr Brown, have left Downing Street.

Podcast - Can the Tories be the caring party?

Text version of podcast entitled "Can the Tories be the caring party?" which went live today.

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LAST week, I wrote that Tory leader David Cameron’s lack of a clear policy agenda currently makes him a sitting target for Labour’s charge that he is all style and no substance.

Broadly speaking, the Cameron camp’s response to that charge has been to say “wait and see,” stressing that the provision of actual policies constitutes “Phase Two” of his plan to transform the party.

For the time being, the Tory leader is still in “Phase One,” which consists essentially of a repositioning exercise designed to convince the public that his party really has changed.

Sure enough, this week came possibly the biggest repositioning exercise so far – an attempt to persuade the voters that it is the Conservatives, not Labour, who care most about the least well-off.

In the broad sweep of history, this is not so outrageous as it may initially appear. It was, after all, Benjamin Disraeli who first drew attention to the “Two Nations” of rich and poor.

The term gave rise to the tradition of paternalistic or “One Nation” conservatism which has continued, in one guise or another, right up to the present day.

However that tradition became steadily marginalised after Margaret Thatcher seized control of the party in 1975, with the One Nation Tories witheringly dismissed by the Iron Lady as “wets.”

Concern for the poor as an aspect of Conservative thought more or less went out of window during the “Greedy 80s” as social and regional inequality re-emerged with a vengeance.

So Mr Cameron’s attempt to reverse all this represents perhaps the most decisive break so far with the party’s recent past.

In a headline-grabbing move, he adopted left-wing commentator Polly Toynbee’s image of society as a caravan moving across the desert in which the “stragglers” get left further and further behind.

In a sense, this is merely an artful piece of spin, a clever use of imagery designed to convey a positive impression rather than set out concrete policy objectives.

Judging by some of the reaction, you would think the Tories had signed up to Ms Toynbee’s entire redistributive taxation agenda, which is emphatically not the case.

Nevertheless, there is a serious point to all this, and that is to signify a change in the Tories’ definition of what poverty actually is.

The old image of welfare as a “safety net” ensuring that people did not fall below subsistence level assumed the idea of poverty as an absolute concept.

Ms Toynbee’s caravan image, by contrast, is about relative poverty, the idea that what matters is not whether you have enough to survive on but how far you are behind the rest of society.

It’s a crucially important distinction – not least because by accepting this new definition, the Tories are playing a pretty difficult ball into Labour’s court.

Why is that so? Well, quite simply, because throughout its period in power, New Labour has invariably adopted the old measure of absolute poverty.

When, for instance, the Government talks about having lifted 1m children “out of poverty,” it is claiming that it has lifted the incomes of those 1m children’s families above a certain, fixed level.

What the Government is not claiming, and could not claim, is that those 1m children are now less poor, in relation to the rest of society, than when it first came to power.

The same arguments could be applied to regional disparities, which are, after all, no more than a measure of the extent to which poverty is concentrated in particular regions.

In that context, a recent report by Cardiff academic Robert Huggins showing the North-South divide might actually have narrowed in the past year.

But what that report did not show was that the gap still remains considerably wider than it was when New Labour came to power in 1997.

If the Government has had a strategy for tackling the divide in recent years, it appeared to be based on the relocation of thousands of public sector jobs from London.

But this, too, has been laid bare by the revelation that any gains will be offset by the current civil service job losses, just as some of us had predicted all along.

What all this serves to highlight is that the Government has a lamentable record on the issue of equality, whether social or regional.

And if the Tories take their argument about relative poverty through to its logical conclusion, they will be able to ask some pretty hard questions of Labour come the next election.

Some will doubtless be repelled by this new move towards the centre ground, a tactic which Mrs Thatcher’s former PR guru Lord Saatchi this week claimed reduced politics to a “commodity market.”

“Voters always suspected that politicians would 'say anything to get elected'. Now they know it's true,” he said.

Perhaps. But other voters might well be impressed by the fact that the Tories now appear to be taking seriously an issue which New Labour has neglected for far too long.

I have posed the question before in this column whether Mr Cameron’s Tories might end up to the left of Labour, and this week’s events have again highlighted that possibility.

Could the next election really see the Tories as the party which pledges to do more for the poor while Labour defends its economic record on the basis of appealing to the better off?

That such a question could even be asked is a measure of what strange yet interesting political times we are living in.

The Lost Enquirer Column

Or should that be last Enquirer column? Anyway, here in full is the column that won't be appearing in tomorrow's North West Enquirer because sadly the paper has gone into receivership.

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This weekend, amid huge fanfare as well as unprecedented security, the Labour Party Conference will open in Manchester, the first time the event has been held in a non-seaside venue for more than a generation.

With Tony Blair having already announced that the gathering will be his last as leader, it is likely to assume something of a valedictory air, with a certain amount of focus on his Government’s “achievements.”

And doubtless there are some. The minimum wage, devolution to Scotland and Wales, and the huge increases in overseas aid are all things you could not have imagined a Conservative government doing, for instance.

But a dozen or so miles away, the fate of a local hospital casualty department tells a different story about the history of New Labour, a story of bright hopes that have turned to disillusionment.

Last Saturday, NHS North-West decided to downgrade the Accident and Emergency Department in Rochdale, one of a score of proposed hospital closures and cutbacks across England as a whole.

According to various reports, NHS managers in Lancashire are also considering axeing acute facilities at the Westmorland General Hospital in Kendal, and maternity services at Fairfield Hospital in Bury.

The proposals are part of a nationwide “reconfiguration” of the NHS, closing some small centres and expanding accident and emergency facilities in “regional centres,” including Salford, Great Manchester.

There couldn’t possibly be a connection, of course….but it doesn’t necessarily help Labour’s case that Salford is held by the Labour Party Chairman, Hazel Blears, while Rochdale is now a Lib Dem seat.

Either way, the prospect of hospital closures in the tenth year of a Labour Government – as Neil Kinnock might have put it – offer a stark illustration of the gulf between the hype and the reality of Mr Blair’s administration.

Two days before the 1997 General Election, Labour produced a Party Political Broadcast under the theme of “24 hours to save the NHS.”

The general aim of this masterly yet wholly disingenuous piece of spin was to convince the public that if the Tories won again, the NHS would be privatized, ignoring the fact that even Mrs Thatcher had fought shy of such a course of action.

But no matter. For its first few years in power, Labour was as good as its word, pumping billions of new money into the service from 1999 onwards, once the initial decision to stick to Tory spending plans had been lifted.

The trend continued after the 2001 election. Mr Blair committed the Government to reaching the EU average of 8.7pc of national income spent on health, and national insurance went up 1p specifically to fund the rise.

It was to be allied to “reform” in the form of greater use of Private Finance Initiative schemes for hospital building, and the creation of “foundation hospitals” which were allowed to borrow on the open market.

This so-called “marketisation” of health care led to much soul-searching among Labour MPs and supporters, but that is not really the issue at stake in relation to the current closure plans.

The point is this. That if your local hospital is forced to close, all the sparkling new “regional” facilities in the world will not alter the impression that the Government has broken its promises when it comes to health.

And of course, it is not the only area where hope has turned to disillusionment. For some the advent of the Blair Government signalled a new, cleaner style of politics following the “sleaze” of the John Major years.

In another PR masterstroke, orchestrated by Alastair Campbell, Labour’s candidate stood aside in Tatton, allowing “white knight” Martin Bell to take on and beat that symbol of Tory decadence, Neil Hamilton.

But in truth, Hamilton was no more than a bit part player in the Major years, a maverick junior minister whose influence in the party counted for less than zero.

The sleaze that has since engulfed Labour, by contrast, has gone right to the top of the Government, with Downing Street itself now under police investigation for the sale of honours.

So is there anything Labour can do as it gathers for what seems certain to be a seminal conference? Can the party successfully renew itself in office – or has the New Labour brand been irretrievably sullied?

Well, it is clear that it is no longer just about having a new leader. There was once a time, when the main issue was very much trust in Mr Blair personally, when that might have done the trick, but not now.

Tory leader David Cameron’s positioning of his party in the political centre ground coupled with the evident drift of Labour’s third term has asked much more fundamental questions of the party.
There is now a growing realization, even among Gordon Brown’s supporters, that the debate about a new leader has to be accompanied by a debate about the direction of the party, post-Blair.

But this brings its own difficulties. For instance, former Health Secretary Alan Milburn made a speech last week which was bursting with ideas about how to devolve power to local communities, although this sits oddly with the policy of closing local hospitals.

Mr Brown could probably use a few of those ideas, but because Mr Milburn is identified with the uber-Blairite, anyone-but-Gordon wing of the party, the speech was inevitably seen as divisive.

Similarly, Mr Blair’s desire to hold the debate now, and settle some of the “big questions” ahead of his departure from office, is seen as an attempt to tie the hands of his successor.

There is no easy way in which Labour can resolve these tensions without tearing itself apart - and as they know only too well, divided parties lose elections.

And in the electoral context, there is a further lesson for the party, one that is specifically related to the hospital closures issue.

Back in 2001, the sitting Labour MP in the West Midlands constituency of Wyre Forest was ousted by an independent candidate campaigning on the single issue of saving his local hospital from the axe.

Set against Labour’s huge victory that year, Dr Richard Taylor’s triumph was no more than a little local difficulty, but in a tight contest overall - and everyone expects the next election to be tight – a few Wyre Forests could make all the difference.

There are few more emotive issues to a local community than the future of their local hospital. The Government would be well advised to tread carefully.

Blog on hold

I created this blog earlier this year as a means of linking out from my main blog to some of my newspaper columns that did not have a web presence at the time. This issue has now been resolved so this blog is on hold for the time being. I am thinking about possible new uses for it, and any suggestions are of course welcome.

Main bloggage as ever will continue to be at my main blog, Paul Linford.