Public Services - More of the same from Labour, Tories & Lib Dems
Written by Geoff Collard Thursday, 22 April 2010
Well, it’s official. This general election is wide open. Both the Tories and Labour reveal themselves as totally wedded to the Blairite agenda. Cameron wants more choice and power for people over their public services (how new!) and Brown wants to be seen as Blair’s heir by making it clear another Labour government would make all hospitals ‘foundation hospitals’ and all schools academies or trusts (a real fresh breath of wind in British politics, I don’t think!) And after Nick Clegg’s performance in the first of the ‘three leader’ debates, the Lib Dems are in with a real chance of doing well in the election.
The truth is that neither Labour nor the Tories has any new ideas and are still trumpeting the same old same old politics. Is it any wonder that the public is disenchanted with them? (quite apart from the expenses scandal). Is it any wonder Nick Clegg’s appeal for a change from the two ‘old’ parties appealed to the electorate and touched a chord? This is surely one of the main reasons he polled well in the public mind after the debate. Labour and the Tories offer nothing new and, more importantly, no choice since both parties are singing from the same hymn sheet, bowing down to the goddess of the liberal free market. In the debate, Brown’s politics sounded tired and unimaginative, Cameron’s unconvincing, except in the Tory traditional areas of immigration and family values. It is a supreme irony that both Labour and the Tories say they want to offer people more choice in their lives and public services but by the very fact of having this same free market agenda they offer none in their politics. The substance is the same; the only difference between the two of them is a question of degree.
It is fascinating that only at the beginning of this month the House of Commons Select Committee on Health (composed of backbench MPs, like all House of Commons committees) published a report in which it seriously doubts that the marketisation of the NHS over the last 20 years - begun by the Tories and carried on by Labour - has been a success. The report calls the commissioning of services (brought in by the internal market) wasteful, bureaucratic and inefficient, and the Committee says it may need to be scrapped!! Yet those same tired old parties want to push the internal market still further!
So what do their manifestos really mean? For Labour, Gordon Brown wants all hospitals to become foundation hospitals and all schools to be academies (200 more in the pipeline) or trusts: ‘failing’ schools will be taken over by ‘better performing’ ones, hospitals that ‘don’t come up to scratch’ will have a change of management or taken over by other hospitals. The New Labour ‘internal free market’ in the NHS will continue to be alive and well and to grow if Brown gets another 5 years (inside?!) More health services will be opened to private provision. Brown wants to ‘spread excellence’ in schools, ‘through mergers and take-overs’ for goodness sake. There is no doubt Brown is pushing the whole Blairite agenda – more than even Blair did – and I bet the ousted Blair is laughing all the way to his Buckinghamshire mansion.
And what about the Tories? Well, as I said, with the public services their policies are the same as Labour – it’s just a question of degree: the Tories are frank that they want to ‘open up the NHS’ to private providers. The Tories also want to give power to people in their communities to manage their own public services such as education. This sounds laudable, until you realise that this would in effect mean a Tory government abdicating responsibility for the public services and would inevitably lead to the destruction of the welfare state. And of course any people power in such a situation of the loosening of the bonds of state control would be wielded by the well educated well-off upper middle classes, leaving poorer people to fend for themselves. This is not new politics. It is uncaring 19th century politics.
Well, what about the Liberal Democrats? It seems pretty clear to me that they have a more enlightened programme than either Labour or the Conservatives (not difficult!) They want to scrap ID cards, not replace Trident etc. But this isn’t new for them – they are old policies, although it’s good to see them restated. They also have a much stronger intention to control the banks (as do we) than either Labour or the Tories, and this will of course play well with the electorate, so I think they’ll do well. In my view, unlike the Lib Dems (and us, the Greens of course!), both Labour and the Tories, are seriously underestimating public anger at the bankers for causing the economic crisis in the first place, and at their continuing bonuses. MPs expenses is an extension of this perception that they’re all corrupt, or at least out for themselves.
But the problem for the Lib Dems is that being the party of, yes, Liberalism, they are silent about privatisation of the public services. There seems to be little doubt that here they fall into line with Labour and the Tories. For example, the Lib Dem manifesto shows that they are, like the others, wedded to the principle of the internal market in the NHS – they want health boards to ‘commission services from a range of different providers’. None of the three larger parties want a return to an integrated health service which simply provides its own services.
And of course none of them come close to being serious about climate change, unlike the Greens, as the Independent made clear (16th April).
It’s going to be an interesting election, and I predict that it will be a hung parliament, even though most pollsters are saying the Tories will win (although not with a large majority). I think the Lib Dems and the Greens will do well (perhaps along with other smaller parties), leading to a hung parliament, and if Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion (and Adrian Ramsay in Norwich South and Darren Johnson in Lewisham Deptford) are elected, we could see interesting things!
Most especially, let’s hope that proportional representation comes closer............