by Blair, Tony
To bridge the gap between reform and aspiration, we set alongside these piecemeal reforms a swathe of performance targets to eliminate the longest hospital waiting times, raise school literacy and numeracy and GCSE scores, etc. There were also new national agencies and structures to drive improvement, such as the National Commissioning Frameworks, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in the NHS, the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, and a new National College for School Leadership with mandatory leadership qualifications for new head teachers, to raise standards in education. These were sensible steps to improve accountability for extra funding and spur departments and their agencies to greater efforts. We were to go further and – as I describe later – publish a full ‘NHS Plan’ in July 2000 which highlighted greater staff flexibility, greater decentralisation and the reduction of waiting times as key priorities. These were to be achieved alongside the step change in NHS spending and the transformation of the NHS estate starting to take place thanks to the recent Comprehensive Spending Review.
But as we flogged the horse harder for only partial improvements, it became clearer to me that only so much could be done by driving improvement from the centre through targets and piecemeal top-down reform, even with the significant extra funding coming through. I increasingly came to see the centralised systems themselves, and the disempowerment of front-line managers and the denial of user choice which they entailed, as a fundamental part of the problem. I wondered – as did some of the newer and more radical faces in my Policy Unit, although this was still heresy in the party, not least among most of my ministers – whether we had been right to dismantle wholesale GP commissioning in the NHS and grant-maintained schools in education, instead of adapting these concepts of local self-governance to spread decentralised management across the state health and education systems, but without the inequity inherent in the underfunded Tory reforms we inherited.
From talks with capable voluntary and private sector providers only too willing to engage in public service delivery but prevented from doing so, I also chafed increasingly at the restrictions placed in the way of good independent providers establishing themselves within health, education and the other public services. This seemed to me a classic case of the confusion between means and ends which had dogged the left for a generation – and which it was New Labour’s mission to overcome. For public services to be equitable, and free at the point of use, they did not all need to be provided on a monopoly basis within the public sector, controlled in a rigid way by national and local bureaucracies often deeply resistant to innovation and genuine local autonomy.
In short, our mantra was ‘investment and reform together’ – emphasising rhetorically the big difference in the public services between New Labour and Old Labour (investment without reform) and New Labour and the Thatcherite Tories (reform without investment). But where was the scale of reform to match the scale of the investment coming on stream?
In welfare and law and order, I similarly worried that we had a good mantra – ‘rights and responsibilities together’ – but no comprehensive policy thrust to underpin it. It wasn’t just the benefits system. Another acute concern of mine was antisocial behaviour. What were we actually changing on the council estates to eradicate the constant barrage of low-level crime which made a misery of so many lives, and to break the grip of worklessness passing from generation to generation? More police officers, and police modernisation – which we took forward with, for example, the introduction of auxiliary community support officers able to do much of the community policing job in a more focused way – were only partial responses; the police also needed better, more immediate tools for the job in terms of sanctions, which meant a shake-up of the criminal justice system. We had to move from concept to policy, and were doing so only fitfully and painfully.
I was starting to think more systematically about New Labour and its relationship with the welfare state we had inherited and pledged to preserve and improve. The welfare state and public services, as we recognise them, were created after the tumultuous events of the Second World War, but their origins lay in the early budgets of Lloyd George, in the groundbreaking economics of Keynes, in the combination of vision and mastery of detail that was Beveridge. The state would provide.
Capitalism had driven the Industrial Revolution. Unregulated, unrestrained, untamed, its giant wheels rolled over the great mass of the people, squeezing work and profit out of them. But it was also bringing them together, letting them see how they toiled and sweated not as individuals but as a collective machine, and not for their own benefit but for the benefit of the owners of capital.
Out of such common struggle came the trade unions, the cooperative societies, the great engines of collective spirit and will to confront the grinding wheels of capital. For some, such confrontation was for the purpose of eliminating capitalism; for others, to make it fairer.
Out of this struggle came the idea that to change society, there had to be political organisation and there had to be democracy. The mass was the majority. They should take command of the laws of the land. Those who had too much should yield to those who had too little. The ones who took the profit by their capital should yield to those who made it by their labour.
Out of this idea came the notion of the state, not in the sense of the ultimate authority, but in the sense of the political and social expression of this collective will; the state not as in the phrase ‘the grand affairs of state’, but as in the state as benefactor, as provider for those who couldn’t provide for themselves.
So the state grew, first in the field of pensions and National Insurance, then in education, then finally after the war in the National Health Service. The state also regulated: health and safety laws; mining; the Protection of Children; redundancy and unfair dismissal legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. The state would protect. Its power would regulate, restrain and tame the power of capital.
But, in time, two things happened with profound political consequences for progressive politics, not just in the UK but everywhere where the same process of change had occurred. First, as the state ameliorated the conditions of the people, so the divide became more apparent between those who wanted to humanise capitalism and those who wanted to eliminate it. For fifty years or more, this put the Labour Party on the rack, meaning that its divisions were not just about means but about ends, giving it a fatal incohesion right in its guts. Second – and for the purposes of reform, of more consequence – the state grew, and as it grew, its very success became its problem. Suddenly, alongside the vested interests of capital could be seen very clearly the vested interests of the state. Bureaucracies are run by people. People have interests. And whereas the market compels change, there is no similar compulsion in the public sector. Left to its own devices it grows. Governments can change it, but governments use the public sector, depend on it and are part of it.
Moreover, and partly as a result of what the state has achieved, as prosperity spreads, the beneficiaries of the state find they are also its funders through their taxes.
In the 1930s, before the state’s full power had been developed and when the mass of the people were still ‘the mass of the people’, the middle way in politics could be easily defined. It was a public sector, owning assets and regulating in the interests of fairness, alongside a private sector suitably constrained. Harold Macmillan’s book The Middle Way, written in 1936, was extraordinary for its time. It accurately reflected where social democratic politics should have been. But such politics only got there in the 1960s.
And that was the point. By the 1960s we had caught up with the 1930s. Anthony Crosland’s book The Future of Socialism was a magnificent essay in bringing Labour to the reality of life in the 1950s, but we only really imbibed it and digested it by the late 1980s.
Whatever the enormous impact of the Thatcher reforms had been on the private sector of the 1980s, we had inherited a public sector largely unreformed; and we weren’t instinctively inclined t
o reform it. The state was still as it had been since 1945. In fact, had Clement Attlee come back to earth in 1998 and examined modern Britain, much would have astounded him. But the welfare state, rather like Whitehall, he would instantly have greeted as an old friend.
There was a further political complexity of which I was all too acutely aware, and which bore directly on the issue of reform and the unease I felt. As I say above, the people today are largely beneficiaries and funders of the welfare state and public services. Unfortunately, what this means is that simultaneously they want more of them and to pay less for them. And, again unfortunately, they are perfectly within their rights to hold these apparently contradictory sentiments.
It also makes them sorely prey to those within the service who tell them change will harm them. It always makes me hoot when the polls are trotted out showing how respected and trusted are doctors’ opinions on the NHS, and how despised the opinions of politicians (and in 1998 the British Medical Association attacked us for the first time), when it is so obvious that those who are running a service have a self-interest as well as a public interest to serve, and when for most of the politicians, there is no reason other than public interest for taking them on.
So all this I knew. And if I am honest, I hesitated to probe fully my own doubts about the true radicalisation of what we were attempting. What we were doing up to then was working well politically, and well enough on the ground.
In the NHS, we were beginning to reorganise the system itself. Power to commission was being devolved to primary care trusts, themselves run by GPs. Increasingly, they would hold the budgets and negotiate with the hospital trusts. But the reality was that a large part of the commission was already accounted for, in ensuring emergency admissions, operations, consulting appointments and so on. And there was no alternative provider to which they could turn. Likewise, GPs had a complete monopoly. Competition, even in the event of a hopeless service, was literally banned. So the different bits could negotiate with each other, but if they were unhappy, there was not a lot they could do.
We had, of course, increased the investment and there were extra staff being recruited and so on, but not enough to notice in what was a massive organisation, the biggest single employer in Europe.
It had been our pledge to remove the so-called divisive internal market of GP fundholders and ordinary GPs. This was a limited market experiment. Some GPs loved it. Others hated it. It did indeed make for a two-tier system. As grammar schools had. The trouble with this criticism was that an unreformed system also had its tiers. The middle class will always find a way to make the system work, or at least answer to them in some form or other. So good schools, comprehensive or not, would be in good neighbourhoods.
Throughout that period, then, roughly March 1998 to December 1999, we went through enormous policy introspection as the Green and White Papers flowed, the policy wheels turned and the Civil Service toiled. I debated with policy experts, think tanks and the Number 10 unit headed by David Miliband, but had, as I have said, a growing hunch that our approach was not right. Not that it was wrong or having no effect – it was – but that it was incomplete at best, short of a dimension that was not peripheral but core.
The extraordinary thing was that there was no outside body, or institute or centre of learning that provided the dimension, with the possible exception of the work Richard Layard did for us at the London School of Economics on the New Deal. I used to pore over the latest offerings from various highly reputable academic or scholarly quarters, and find nothing of any real practical help. The trouble was that they essentially wanted to discuss the ideology behind the issues of reform. In a bizarre way, they focused on the politics – but that was not what I needed help with. I needed to know the practical answer. To me, to charge for the NHS or not is a political or ideological question, but the fastest way to cut waiting lists is not.
While we were trying to come up with solutions – ‘what counts is what works’ – the sobering truth was that the system of welfare and public services was vastly complex, and ‘what does work?’ was the question I kept referring to, without a great amount of external intellectual sustenance being provided. So we continued with the approach we had taken – driving from the centre – but we shied away from deep systemic reform. As a result, we could not produce change that was self-generated or self-sustaining, but only change generated and sustained from the centre.
Nevertheless, at the party conference in 1998 the speech flowed. It set out the third way – not old left nor Thatcherite right; we had enough momentum to show things were changing; and to be fair the basic message was one of constant challenge, at least to the party. It was strong on devolution within the nation and partnership outside of it with Europe and America. It had all the right themes, pressed all the right buttons and, on the whole, generated the right responses.
As I sat afterwards with the close political family – Jonathan, Peter, Alastair, Anji, Sally, Peter Hyman – I knew we were still at the start of the journey, knew we still had a mountain to learn about as well as to climb, and my feelings were mixed, impatience and frustration knocking shoulders with the pride in achievements and political success; and of course there was also this glimmering of an appreciation that the rhetoric and the reality were out of alignment.
Another part of the problem was that there was increasingly no real interest in a policy debate. The Tories were in many ways hors de combat, still licking their wounds and, aside from Europe, not much bothered in opposing a government that, by governing from the centre, was making it pretty hard for them to get orientated.
Moreover, the media had settled into a mode, developing over time, whereby without a major controversy or visual focal point, there was no real interest in describing policy. For instance, they had been more engrossed in the Harriet Harman and Frank Field pas de deux than in the intricacies of the pension debate, Harriet being the Secretary of State for Social Security and Frank being the Minister for Welfare Reform. Admittedly, this saga was fairly engrossing. Harriet was not really a policy wonk and this portfolio required a lot of wonkery. Frank was not really politically astute and it required a lot of political astuteness.
The result was a severe mismatch, like a kind of ‘dating agency from hell’ mistake. Frank was hugely persuasive on the big picture, but I couldn’t seem to get him to focus on the practical policy. Harriet was desperate to be supportive of the policy, without quite understanding that it was her job to devise the damn policy.
Frank used to lock himself away in his office to ‘think the unthinkable’, but the problem was not so much that his thoughts were unthinkable as unfathomable. Harriet fussed and fretted. They would sit in the Cabinet Committee disagreeing with each other, which was more than mildly disconcerting. The upshot was that we tried to steer policy out of Number 10, but it was hard. And, of course, the policy area itself was incredibly hard. The results were less than satisfactory.
I removed Harriet in the July reshuffle, which she took well, to her credit. When I refused to make Frank Secretary of State, he resigned. It was embarrassing, and though I both really liked and respected Frank – a genuine free independent spirit – I was also relieved. Some are made for office, some aren’t. He wasn’t. Simple as that.
After party conference we began preparing in earnest for the Queen’s Speech. Although for the reasons given I was not wholly satisfied with the welfare reform package, it was to be the centrepiece of the speech. The weeks prior to it – and it was rather late that year, on 24 November, delayed by the leftovers from the previous packed parliamentary session – were a direct lesson in how the agenda can be hijacked by events from the grave to the trivial, or at least the sensational.
On the morning of 27 October, Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell suddenly interrupted the usual slew of meetings to pull me into the Downing Street dining room. The two of them together always meant trouble. What they told me made my eyes get wider and wider until I was like someone with
goitre. It was one of those laugh, frown, gasp, sad routines.
Ron Davies, the Secretary of State for Wales, had been robbed by a black male prostitute on Clapham Common. My mind was fairly boggling, and we asked Ron to come into Number 10.
‘It’s all very easy to explain,’ he began. ‘I had been in Wales for the weekend, I drove up to London, and to stretch my legs I decided around midnight to go for a walk on Clapham Common.’ Puzzled looks from listeners. ‘I bumped into this Rasta bloke and we got talking, you know, as you do.’ Eyebrows raised further. ‘He said: Why not go for a curry? I said: Fair enough, and got in his car.’ Mouths start to fall open. ‘Then we met up with a few of his mates and suddenly I was set upon and robbed. Could have happened to anyone.’
Stunned silence, then almost in unison, ‘Er, not really, Ron.’
I know it’s all absurd and, set out like that, comic; but it was also someone’s career and life just about to disappear down the drain. That is what is so unbelievably cruel about political life. Of course it was the dumbest thing. In Ron’s statement, which I helped to draft, I described it as ‘a moment of madness’, but I knew his career couldn’t be salvaged. The problem was not anything to do with sex or not, it was the misjudgement. I felt desperately sorry for him. I had known him since we came into Parliament together in 1983. He was a talented operator, though most people felt he was too talented an operator for comfort. But no one really deserves what he got.
And, naturally, it followed the same course as virtually every resignation I ever dealt with. At first they understand and comply. Then, as the enormity sinks in, they rebel and finally they become resentful. Ron followed that pattern precisely. And, of course, the hounding they get is a horrendous pressure on them and their family. Ron’s was a resignation that was inevitable.