Spot the difference: where have all the ideas gone?
Posted by Matt Clifford on November 28th, 2007
Compare:
“So, making education for skilled work our first priority, we need to provide new incentives and new obligations to train; we need to transfer resources from welfare to education and move claimants from passive recipients of welfare benefit to active job and skill seekers; far-reaching reforms of our welfare state and education system to put us right in the forefront of the higher paying, highly skilled economy of the future.â€
Gordon Brown - 26 November 2007
and:
We grant an “absolute priority to education and skills as the means of both enhancing opportunity and creating an efficient economy†… “On welfare, the Labour objective is not to keep people on benefit but to grant the financial independence that comes from employmentâ€
Tony Blair - June 1994 and July 1995
When I read Gordon Brown’s speech to the CBI on Monday morning I couldn’t help but wonder whether there’d been any new ideas in British politics for 15 years.
Brown managed to use the word “new” nearly fifty times - speaking of “new eras”, “new worlds” and “new thinking” - but when you compare his words to what Tony Blair said before he was even elected Prime Minister, it would seem that Labour’s ideas have barely moved on at all. Now, don’t get me wrong - this isn’t a Labour-bashing post. In fact, if the Tories have changed tack at all, it’s because they’ve just about learned to shut up about the pound and immigration.
My point is that the aim Gordon Brown professes is exactly the one that Blair did, well over a decade ago. It’s not (especially) that Labour has failed to achieve what it set out to do: there has been significant welfare and education reform. It’s that no one really has a clue what a politician can promise to do other than to manage what we have a little better than the other guy.
As Lord Adonis told Clare Politics last year, that might be a sign that there’s nothing particularly wrong with the country. Perhaps. But look at the number of children who leave school with no qualifications or racial tensions in our big cities. Politics doesn’t want for lack of problems, but lack of big ideas. All our politicians seem to be able to do is repeat tired maxims about opportunity and ambition while throwing more money at things. As I’ve suggested before, a lot of the best public policy ideas are coming from outside politics.
Of course, saying something really radical is dangerous - and there’s a lot of mileage to be made out of merely claiming to be a good manager. So who’ll dare to have an idea?
Filed under: conservatives, gordonbrown, ideas, labour, mattclifford, tonyblair on November 28th, 2007
I imagine that among British Prime Ministers there have been far more mediocrities and opportunists than true ideologues. I blame the (obvious) fact that climbing “the greasy pole” is not best achieved by promoting a radical programme of new ideas. Many influential people (businessmen, party donors, newspaper proprietors) have a strong vested interest in promoting a safely mediocre pair of hands.
I think one of my favourite Prime Ministers is Robert Peel. A ruthless career-parliamentarian from the age of 21, he got to the top and then opened himself up to other people’s ideas. He converted to the Anti-Corn Law cause while in office. The same goes for Gladstone and Irish Home Rule.
I guess Blair too had a “Peel moment” - it was when he converted to the Iraq War cause. It’s interesting that, to Blair, foreign policy was the arena for bravery and domestic policy was the arena for caution. For Brown, it’s caution all over.
That’s really interesting. In fact, I would say that Blair did have a domestic “Peel moment”, but far too late to have much influence. In 1997, he came into government, abolished grant-maintained schools and dismantled the NHS internal market. Then, some time after 2004 he decided that markets worked - and all of a sudden we have foundation hospitals and trust schools.
It was as though Blair was finally given the levers of power after nearly two decades of staring at them wistfully - and then, after six years of tugging, suddenly decided that the levers didn’t work and that we needed some new ones. Brown, I think, never had quite the same epiphany - hence the 1995-type language.