The free-market Adam Smith Institute is having problems adjusting to the Tories’ sudden leftward lurch. In response to Conservative health spokesman Andrew Lansley’s announcement in September 2005 that the party was abandoning its policy of the patients’ passport, because it would benefit only richer patients, director of the ASI, Dr Eamonn Butler, fired off the following post on the organisation’s blog: ‘He’s wrong … Lansley … doesn’t understand how competition works… With the passport empowering patients to choose, NHS hospitals would be having crisis meetings within days, and reforming themselves within weeks. And that would benefit even those who stayed in the NHS system.’
However, Butler’s posting on January 5 2006 puts a rather more positive gloss on the Tory u-turn: ‘Cameron remained positive that market ideas to reform the funding of healthcare (like the passport) were aimed at improving the delivery of what the NHS stands for – universal access to essential healthcare, regardless of wealth. But then the actual policy he inherited was a messy partial-voucher which looked like a plan to help the rich, while the real aim of voucher principles is actually to empower the poor.’
Another Thatcherite idea currently favoured by the free-market thinkers is the Tories’ much-criticised ‘pupils’ passport’. With that particular policy now under review by Cameron’s Conservatives, no doubt the ASI will be steeling itself for another graceful climb down soon.
Britain is suffering from ‘a quiet crisis of unhappiness’, according to a book, entitled Porcupines in Winter, published by the re-launched think tank the Young Foundation.
Despite the ‘huge social advances of the last 50 years’, says the Foundation’s director and book contributor Geoff Mulgan, the country has experienced an unprecedented decline in levels of ‘mutual support and neighbourliness’, leading to widespread social isolation, depression, and public distrust. ‘Remaking these soft, often invisible social supports,’ says Mulgan, ‘so essential to the quality of our lives, is one of the great challenges of this century.’
In the book, the former head of the No 10 policy unit casts a critical eye on Labour’s own plans for restoring ‘respect’. ‘The recent debate on “respect” exemplifies the possibilities and limits of government action,’ he says. ‘Although coercive laws can bring down the worst examples of anti-social behaviour, casual denunciations of “yobs” will do little to reinforce respect and may, at worst, be counterproductive.’ He concludes that ‘the best way to strengthen respect is through activity: projects and tasks that give people reason to recognise each other as human beings, rather than as categories.’
Including a foreword from the eminent sociologist and ‘respect’ guru Richard Sennett, this shot across the bows of Labour’s flag-ship policy from a former No 10 insider will no doubt have some members of the government sit up and take note.
Gordon Brown’s call for a modern patriotism may have dominated news of the Fabian conference on Britishness in January. The talk on the day, however, was of a fracas that erupted at a question time session in the afternoon, much to the bemusement of panellists Madeleine Bunting, John Denham, Sunder Katwala and Trevor Phillips.
The trouble started when one delegate, whose question to the panel had gone on for 10 minutes and whom the chair had repeatedly asked to sit down, had the hand mike that she was using switched off. At this point, a witness informs us, ‘she went mental, and started shouting and screaming. Conference voted several times to remove her – by this point she had run on to the platform – and John Denham made a speech about democracy and responsibility and how she was abusing it. In the end, conference was disbanded.’
According to our spy, the offending delegate was made to ‘sign a piece of paper saying she would never come to another Fabian event.’ And we thought the security at last year’s Labour conference was a tad overbearing.