Daily Mail, 3 May 2004

What do politicians do when they are in trouble? They kiss babies. What do the sophisticates of New Labour do when they’re in trouble? They nationalise childhood.

Yesterday, the beleaguered Prime Minister told head teachers that the government would hugely expand services for the under-fives. He did so against the backdrop of feverish speculation about his future. Political insiders say Tony Blair is all washed up and will imminently step down.

This has provoked fierce counter-briefing by his supporters, who fear that this kind of talk may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Accordingly, the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell hails Tony Blair as ‘indispensable’, while the former minister Stephen Byers says Labour needs a radical ‘Blairite manifesto’ for the next election.

This appears to be based on the belief that what has gone wrong is an absence of radical vision and the passion to convince voters of the genuine mission, and therefore the trustworthiness, of the Prime Minister.

So Mr Blair has returned to his original passion, education. Indeed, he says he becomes more passionate about education ‘with every passing year’. It would not only be unkind to say he becomes more passionate about education with every other passing difficulty; it would also miss the point.

For Mr Blair does indeed have a vision. He envisages ‘a great national mission‘ for ‘teachers and schools to transform society’. And he intends to achieve this by extending the power of the state to dictate how children should be brought up.

He aims to establish a universal service for under-fives based on the ‘personal needs of each child and their parents’, which would represent a ‘new frontier for the welfare state and education system’.

Education starting at age five, he says, no longer meets Britain’s needs. But that’s because it is failing. Yet instead of facing up to this failure, he blames those who identify it as ‘reactionary and backward-looking social élitists’.

So it’s ‘reactionary’, is it, to deplore the fact that a smaller proportion of pupils from poor homes now goes to good universities than before Labour came to office? It’s ‘backward-looking’, is it, to condemn the fact that one third of 11 year-olds can’t read or write properly or master mathematics to the approved level? And it’s ‘social élitism’, is it, to be appalled that the universities now have to run remedial courses because the standards of their students are so low?

Mr Blair scoffs that those who complained standards were too low in the past now complain standards have risen. But such critics don’t say standards have risen. On the contrary, the vertiginous rise in the number of top grades and exam passes stretches credulity, and can only be explained by a lowering of standards.

Mr Blair uses such tired and silly jibes to ignore the manifold failures of his policy in schools. Instead, he is now turning his attention to the period before school even starts.

The Sure Start project for under-fives may sound benign, even inspiring. But it gives state employees unprecedented leverage to influence the way children are brought up and ensure that parents conform to state notions of what is acceptable. Parents are thus reduced at best to ‘partners’ with schools in the project to change society, and at worst to miscreants to be punished if they fail to co-operate.

Undoubtedly, there are now very serious problems with parents who do indeed need to be held to account for failing their children. But the provision of welfare to parents regardless of whether they stay together, the use of state employees to tell parents how to look after their children, and the massive expansion of child care so someone else looks after them — all with the government playing the role of beneficent super-parent — have progressively stripped parents of a sense of responsibility. Punishing them if their children truant is locking the stable door after sending the horse on its way with wads of cash in its saddle-bags.

Mr Blair’s speech was a good illustration of the difficulties into which he has got himself. He believes that he is a leader with a noble mission to transform society. Yet he combines rhetoric that is as high flown as it is sinister with a myopic refusal to look hard and urgent problems in the face.

And that surely lies at the heart of his predicament. For well before the death of Dr David Kelly, the difficulties in Iraq and the debacle over the EU constitution referendum which have all brought the political temperature to boiling point, his close advisers were saying that the New Labour project appeared to have lost its way.

The public services weren’t delivering, and the rows over university top-up fees and foundation hospitals exposed deep tensions and confusion within Labour’s ranks over the proper relationship between consumers of these services and the state.

Since then, the government appears to have persuaded itself that there are actually tremendous improvements in the public services, and that the only reason people think these are failing is because the wicked media tell them so.

Accordingly, they have to change the story to one of triumph, progress and optimism, just as Mr Blair was doing yesterday. But proclaiming a sense of mission will not fix the Blairite project, for the simple reason that its very sense of mission makes it innately incoherent.

This is because, like all leaders possessed of a strong sense of personal destiny, Mr Blair think that only he and his true believers can bring about the transformation of society. This is why has centralised power in himself and his personal circle, bypassing the civil service and parliament and undermining professionals such as doctors, teachers or police officers — and increasingly, parents as well— by trying to micro-manage their performance.

But of course, micro-management from Number 10 is impossible — not least because Gordon Brown has a parallel sense of destiny and exercises even more power by pulling the purse-strings.

The result has been chaos in the public services as good people left the professions in droves, delivery targets distorted priorities and money disappeared down black holes. In addition, there has been chaos in government as the civil service was devalued and sidelined, and parliamentary scrutiny of legislation short-circuited.

The way out of Mr Blair’s predicament is not a Blairite manifesto. It is to understand that the many contradictions of New Labour are the problem. To rescue his premiership, he needs to do two things.

First, he should take politics out of the public services altogether and make professionals accountable not upwards to Whitehall but downwards to the public. Second, he should dispense with his political court and government–by-sofa, restore primacy and integrity to the civil service and give power back to Parliament.

But he won’t do that, because he won’t give up Labour’s mission to create the new Jerusalem of equality and correct thinking. As a result, he will continue on a collision course with a British public rightly hostile to such coercion, intrusiveness and threats to their independence. The trap he is in is the stuff of which tragedy is made.

Posted by melanie at May 3, 2004