TO MEASURE the seriousness of a government’s grip, ask not how loud the bang when a new policy is announced, but how noiseless the tinkle when it is dropped. As each trumpeted initiative is quietly shelved, the shrugged shoulders speak volumes. Only when we notice how unsurprised we are to hear that it won’t happen do we realise how unconvinced we were it would. Truly there is something of
King Lear in this final act of new Labour’s tragedy.
For Tony Blair’s domestic legacy-mongers it has been a good week in which to bury bad news. Distracted by mayhem in the Middle East, lords a-leaping, the Met arresting, extra British troops marching off to God-knows-what in Afghanistan, and mocked-up newspaper pictures of John Prescott in a cowboy hat, Britain has this week barely registered the news of two serious road accidents in domestic policy. Local police forces are to stay — after all — local, and for the foreseeable future the British are unlikely — after all — to be forced to carry identity cards. Two big wagons in Downing Street’s road-train of policies have careered off into the ditch.
These policies, had they made the leap from the virtual world of new Labour’s “narrative” into the world where we live, would have carried serious consequences for the country we may inhabit a decade hence.
A sweeping amalgamation of small constabularies would have brought gathering momentum towards huge regional police forces or a national force. The process would have changed the face of policing in England and Wales. It would have pushed forward the division (and dilution) of England into regions. It would have undermined the institution of the English county. It would have concentrated and gathered more power into fewer hands. And now it is history. It disappeared with hardly a sound.
The introduction of what was intended to become, over time, a compulsory national ID-card scheme has not been officially withdrawn, but the timetable has been ditched, no new timetable has replaced it, none is promised, the problems look imponderable, the political will is faltering, the Home Office is in enough of a mess as it is, and the money is running out.
Of course, in modern British administration, policies don’t hit the buffers: they run into the sand. Best to put it in a Home Office spokesman’s own words: “The timetable is very much secondary to the review the Home Secretary is carrying out. It is an incremental process and it will happen when the time is right.” Quite. RIP compulsory ID cards.
They were brought in for the Second World War and abandoned in the face of public fury some years later. The plan to revive a compulsory national scheme would have proved arguably the most significant mark that Mr Blair could have left on the face of 21st-century Britain. Devolution was the late John Smith’s idea; Labour’s much touted “controversial” reforms to health and education have been for the most part the warmed-over and watered-down remnants of 1980s and 1990s Tory plans. Our complex new family tax credit scheme is more Gordon Brown’s than Mr Blair’s. So is the national minimum wage.
But ID cards were Blair: pure Blair, one of his few hard policies, a big, bold, difficult idea which would have importantly altered the way we view our relationship with the State. They subtly but critically rebalanced that relationship. They were a constitutional issue. That French friends of mine say they cannot imagine what the fuss here has been about tells you all you need to know about the place accorded to the French State in the Frenchman’s imagination, as opposed to the subtler and more ambiguous British view.
The scheme would also have immeasurably enlarged the State’s ability to keep track on us, and (potentially) enabled government departments easily to record and exchange information on people. It offered the State the possibility of an order of control beyond what had been imagined. ID cards did not render an Orwellian Britain inevitable, but they could have made it possible.
And all that disappeared this week. As the Home Office balloon dips perilously close to the wave tops and the new Home Secretary prepares for a mini-“relaunch” next week, his department tip overboard what ballast they can. Splash — out goes police restructuring. Splash — out go ID cards. Otherwise — splash — out might go John Reid, and we don’t want that.
Only a tiny splash was recorded (hilariously) yesterday in Ann Treneman’s parliamentary sketch, as an unwanted piece of deadweight was chucked unceremoniously overboard from the Treasury balloon. Readers who still take big new announcements by the Prime Minister seriously may have thrilled to a key section in Mr Blair’s conference speech on September 27 in Brighton last year. I quote:
“And to back all this up, to ensure our future priorities in spending can be secured, we will publish next July the Fundamental Savings Review of all Government spending: where we can save, where we need to spend more; how we keep investment flowing in to our priorities but keep our tax system competitive for our economy and help hard-working families to increase their prosperity . . .”
Mr Brown’s expression as Mr Blair spoke was not recorded, but we may guess at his enthusiasm for this poking of the prime ministerial nose into his own department. Still, there it was; a Fundamental Savings Review, with capital letters, had been promised: an important initiative.
This Wednesday the importance had gone, the name had gone, “Fundamental” had gone, and the capital letters were transferred to a new name that no longer implied the Chancellor was spending too much. Mr Brown tried (until Mr Speaker stopped him) to slip the promised “July announcement” into an answer to a routine question at Chancellor’s Questions. A slim document — “Releasing Resources to Meet the Challenges Ahead” — fell stillborn from the printing press.
ID cards mattered. Police restructuring mattered. The Fundamental Savings Review doesn’t remotely matter. All, however, bear similar witness to what could prove a very real legacy left by Tony Blair: a strange and growing psychological chasm between two worlds: the Britain that people live in, and the schemes, projects and plans of the British Government.
I am used to this chasm because I was born and raised in Africa and have lived too in the West Indies. Nobody in these places believes a word that leaders say about what they will do or what will happen. Politicians and their rhetoric inhabit a virtual world: a poetic universe peopled by ideals and visions, dreams and promises, designed (in Labour’s unforgettable phrase) to “send a message” rather than describe a reality. A political leader doesn’t even try to translate this dreaming into practice. Nobody expects him to. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” they smile.
It has been Mr Blair’s special genius to bring something of that Third World flavour to our politics. I have written often enough that I think he has a delusional streak: a serious detachment from reality. In the pathology of the sincere impostor this is typically coupled with charm, an apparent self-belief that beguiles others, an almost childishly short attention span, ruthlessness, an impatience with practicalities and a curious selective amnesia. I believe this wishes-are -horses syndrome has infected the whole new Labour project; and this in turn has contaminated the public’s view of democratic politics.
Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me your world changed this week when you saw two big policy commitments dropped. Tell me these plans went out with as big a bang as accompanied their arrival. To me the sound was a resounding tinkle.
