A rising new Labour star recently asked me whether agreement between the
parties was bad for politics. Did it mean that the public was robbed of
choice? Was consensus a dirty word?
On Thursday two spokesmen from the government and the Conservative party
staged a love-in at a conference sponsored by Civitas and the Smith
Institute, a right and a left of centre think tank respectively. And, no,
sick-bags were not passed round. In fact most of the tenderness was
expressed by the shadow education spokesman, Michael Gove, who applauded the
education minister Lord Adonis for his city academies programme. As the
latter wryly observed, it was “the empathy of a crocodile to his lunch”.
Lord Adonis is the brave soul who, backed by Tony Blair, forced Labour to
swallow new state-funded secondary schools in which headmasters are free to
get on with the job without local authority interference, so unlike our
notorious “bog standard” comprehensives. He is also, incidentally, the man
who told primary schools to teach reading once again by the “cat makes cat”
method, or phonics as it was known to the trendy 1960s educationists who
banned it from classrooms. Old Labour also hates his guts for advocating
university tuition fees.
The Tories now like Adonis’s academies programme so much they want to buy the
company. Their man, the happily married Gove, lusts after a Swedish model.
In that not so socialist Scandinavian paradise, parents, charities and
businesses can set up “free schools” funded by the state as long as they
charge only what the state ordinarily allocates for each pupil. This allows
for experimentation free from local authority control. Neighbouring state
schools don’t want to lose their pupils to new rivals so they improve their
standards. Everyone’s a winner.
City academies are a watered-down British attempt at the Swedish model – hence
Conservative approval. Lord Adonis hails the success of his “new consensus”.
In fact it is a competitive consensus. Both Blairites and David Cameron’s
young Tory modernisers agree that British state schools aren’t delivering
the goods – comparisons with other European countries look dire – but the
opposition has decided to trump Adonis, not just copy him.
By competing with the government on educational reform, the Tories have also
forced Gordon Brown to keep the city academies programme alive. He might
otherwise have genuflected to old Labour prejudice and let them wither soon
after defenestrating Tony Blair. Tory enthusiasm for academies also
reprieved Lord Adonis. The prime minister and his golden boy, Ed Balls – now
Adonis’s boss at the expanded children’s super-ministry – couldn’t afford to
incur the odium of sacking him. It would have signalled to everyone that
public service reform was dead and buried. So they kept him on, our canary
in the Brownite coal mine.
This is not just of interest to policy wonks. As many as 100,000 children are
likely to miss out on their first choice of secondary school tomorrow –
admissions day. Some places will even be allocated by lottery. As Gove says,
the problem is that there aren’t enough good school places to go round, with
all the parental distress that entails.
The prime minister’s views on public service reform aren’t fixed. As
chancellor he opposed many Blairite schemes to improve education and health
– but supported others. His opposition was sometimes ideological, sometimes
pragmatic, sometimes born of hate. Brown’s character hasn’t changed since he
got to No 10. He is a cautious, calculating fellow who needs an incentive to
do the right thing.
Take the Tories’ recent radical assault on a welfare policy that allows
millions to rot on incapacity benefit rather than get a job – it’s done
Brown no end of good. In his cabinet reshuffle the prime minister promoted
the Blairite James Purnell to work and pensions. Lo and behold, last week
there came a shiny new government policy to pay private agencies to get the
unemployed back to work. The whole notion of incapacity is to be reexamined.
Now don’t take my word for it. See what happens when those cynical Tories stop
competing with Labour on shaking things up.
After David Cameron got the top Tory slot, every poll and focus group screamed
at him that the public didn’t trust the Tories with the National Health
Service. Fair enough: opposition policy largely consisted of “helicoptering
out” its supporters from the NHS by giving them a subsidy to use private
health schemes, leaving everyone else to fester. He gave up all that.
But the opposition leader then decided to match any Labour increases in health
spending pretty much unconditionally. And on reforming the NHS he offered
“evolution, not revolution”. In speech after speech Cameron declared: “I
love the NHS.” His health spokesman, Andrew Lansley, told us that his lovely
daughters had all been born in NHS hospitals. NHS doctors helped him when he
had a stroke. Aaah, a big hand, then, for the NHS.
In the meantime Brown the prime minister actually came up with some radicalism
of his own. He wants to replace many GPs’ practices and accident and
emergency hospital units with “polyclinics” that will double up as both. He
once drew me a diagram of how his curate’s egg of a plan would work, but
quickly snatched the paper away when I thought of pocketing it as a
souvenir. The Tories campaigned against his “health cuts” and “closures”.
The spirit of Dave Spart lives on in the unlikeliest of places.
Gordon took note. He was already enraged by a badly negotiated contract for
GPs that had broken the NHS bank – see the full horror of the lost £1.76
billion in last week’s National Audit Office report. Alan Johnson was sent
from education to health to quieten things down. And, boy, are things quiet.
A review – there is no deadlier word in the political lexicon – was
announced. The rest is silence.
Yes, nothing very much is happening any time soon in the good old NHS. People
are still dying from cancer in greater numbers than in most civilised
countries in Europe. Money is still being wasted from the great splurge on
health presided over by Blair and Brown – spending has roared ahead.
Productivity is still going south. It’s harder than ever to see a GP out of
hours. True, a start has been made on allowing private contractors to
provide services.
You don’t have to go as far as Lord Mancroft, the Tory peer slapped down by
Cameron for condemning slatternly nurses. On a personal note, my mother got
bedsores after a recent routine operation in the hospital where she had
worked as a volunteer for many years. I had to badger staff to get her the
right bed. My father’s care before he died was patchy. So you love the NHS
as it stands, Cameron and Lansley? Well, I don’t.
In a garbled interview last week, Lansley gave the impression that
taxpayer-funded spending on health would need to increase by a further £28
billion to 11% of GDP. The shadow chancellor, George Osborne, poured oil on
troubled waters. A Tory administration would get value for money from the
NHS and seek to reduce its burden. Yes, there’s gold at the end of the
rainbow and the cheque is in the post.
If Lansley tells an audience of doctors and nurses that the Conservatives will
no longer fiddle with the NHS like new Labour, he will get easy applause.
Health workers are truly fed up with obtuse management and endless Whitehall
directives. But after the clapping has died down he should ask that room
whether the NHS should continue as it is.
Thanks to Lord Adonis’s courage and a mature Tory decision to support his
policy, more parents will live near a city academy to which you might
consider sending your children. On the NHS there is no such hope on the
horizon. So if the Tories don’t raise their game on health nothing
will happen.
David Cameron, you present yourself as the future, the new politics. If you
don’t offer the prime minister a challenge on health reform then another
decade will be wasted. By not rocking the boat you think you will get more
votes. Maybe. But you’ll be passing up a great opportunity and we will all
be the losers.
