In the maelstrom, one fact has been forgotten: David Cameron isn’t good enough. His team has no depth and they are eminently beatable. This is good news but only up to a point: it doesn’t say a lot for us if we don’t knock them over.
We can start by getting the relevant critique of Cameron and sticking to it. He is empty. He has no cogent analysis of the problems of the country and an incoherent set of gestural, symbolic responses. He is an inexperienced risk, which the team behind him makes worse. The contrast with the experience and record of the prime minister is very telling.
Note: this critique does not rest on the accusation that the Tories will make savage cuts to public services. In all probability, after an initial period of grace, they will. And there is no harm in pointing out that they don’t have much idea where the money will come from.
But this shouldn’t be the headline. It won’t ring true until it is too late. The Tories will counter that they will increase spending rather than cut it. The hole in their finances is important. They are £6bn short. Cuts somewhere will be inevitable. But that argument’s not enough on its own.
There are two new elements to the political argument that we now need to recognise. First, by associating himself with changes that he opposed and the government made, Cameron has begun to decontaminate his brand. If we describe the Tories as malign it will not chime with people’s perceptions; we’ll risk looking like everyday cat-fight politicians.
Second, the argument has entered a new phase. By the time of the next election we will be 10 years into an extensive public investment programme. The question will no longer be about the amount of money. It will be about the return on that money. If we concentrate exclusively on the raw numbers we will end up beside the point.
We have to run on a record. We have to keep reminding people that economic prosperity did not come about by accident. Nobody should take a well-run economy for granted. And we have to keep arguing that the combination of investment and reform to public services has been successful.
It won’t be enough to say that things are better than in 1997. People are tired of that message and, besides, political memories are very short. There are lots of mothers who don’t know that Sure Start hasn’t always existed. Some of our claims are ancient history in political terms. We need to be able to point to the two years before the election and say: look at the progress.
If we go into the next election with continuing progress on the economy, education, health and crime, we will win a handsome victory. Against a backdrop of solid achievement in domestic policy Gordon Brown will win convincingly because he will have a cast-iron response to the question that Cameron will be asking us: where is the money going?
And here we just need to remind ourselves of the formula that has stood us in such good stead until now: investment and reform.
We must not forget the lessons of first term New Labour. We inherited deep failure in most public services. Strong command, central control and rigorous performance management made a big difference. The investment followed. But we discovered, soon enough, the limits of flogging the system. It is hard, thankless work. It gets you from poor to adequate but not further.
We took the services from adequate to good by changing their structures. It was only when changes started to bite in the NHS that the waiting lists really began to come down. Academies, in some of the most deprived parts of the country, have done more for poor children than the schools they replaced. As we changed the structures we got higher standards.
There is still too much failure. Indeed the admirable toughness of the plans for failing schools should be receiving more favourable coverage than they are. A serious regime for tackling failure quickly was an obvious absentee from the Tory plans.
But, generally, we are now in a new phase in public service provision – turning good services into superb services. This next step is within our sights. We now have a choice before us about how to approach it.
The temptation to slow down is obvious. There’s a perfectly good case for it. It runs like this: change causes unnecessary upset. Look at the headlines about the health service a year ago. Let’s keep it out of the news for a while. Let’s give the service a bit of respite care.
But you get no laurels in politics in a state of rest. Conflict cannot be wished away, unfortunately. Rightly or wrongly, cancelling the next set of independent sector treatment centre contracts gives the impression that we are not going to take the next step. It leaves us open to the charge – which we have seen levelled – that we are abandoning the policy needed to make further progress.
It is all the more galling that the commentators are preparing the verdict that we have nothing left to say. How unnecessary it all is – we are not in the least intellectually spent.
We have three principles on which domestic policy should proceed. First, power should be transferred to the people. We can give them a say in the process, a choice over a provider, a vote or a budget. The precise mechanism will depend on the problem.
Policy mechanisms such as these are just tools to be used appropriately. If ever there appears to be a zeal for any one of them – the accusation is always around choice – then that zeal is misplaced. We should define the objective clearly and then use whatever tool, whichever sector, to get there. Health is not education and education is not welfare. The method will differ but the point will be the same: control should pass to the people.
Second, the systems need proper incentives and rewards. We know how to devise public services that can adapt and adjust naturally rather than being continually prodded and pushed from the centre. We cannot realistically personalise schools or health care by central fiat. It would have happened by now if that were possible. It’s not as if personalization has been illegal.
The government never won the party over on these arguments. Too often they were assumed rather than articulated. The progressive case for change was made too late and was too far down in the mix. If policy is designed correctly then it serves very traditional left wing ends.
Third, public services need to take prevention seriously. We intervene but we intervene too late. Progressive social policy, improving the life chances of the least well-off, requires us to change the balance of policy – towards the poor, earlier in their lives.
In practice, of course, there is a period when you have to do both prevention and cure. You cannot abandon people with pressing needs because you are in the midst of a transition. So there is a period in which provision will be both expensive and in need of a lot of state direction. This shows something we don’t understand properly: reform is always about the intelligent use of the state, not the withdrawal of the state.
If only we had more confidence in ourselves. In a way our lack of self-esteem is endearing. After a decade in power the Tories were convinced that a natural order had been established. We have started running away from our own achievements.
There is a deep historical pathology here. The Labour party is accustomed to the consequences of failure – I suppose it has had enough practice. Success is much rarer and much more difficult to contend with.
If only we could allow ourselves to think that we were doing the right things. Instead, seduced into a spurious argument about ‘change’ by those who really meant it, we are in danger of getting stuck. And then what follows when you get stuck on policy is that you come unstuck.