Tag: Tony Blair

How many poll taxes fit into an area the size of Wales?

There are many shorthand measures used by newspapers to indicate size: Wales for geographical area, Wembley for crowds, swimming pools for volume, Nelson’s column for height, double-decker buses for dinosaurs (a rather specialised subset).  There seems to also be one newspaper measure for showing just how big a problem a politician has got himself into: the Poll Tax.

For Blair, ID cards, university top up fees and inevitably Iraq all got the “Is this Blair’s Poll Tax?” treatment.

Gordon Brown had fewer Poll Tax moments – perhaps he just had less time to stumble into them, although Polly Toynbee was worried that it might be the Tube.

For David Cameron, overwhelmingly it’s NHS reform, although Socialist Worker wants it to be tuition fees,   Labour Uncut feels it could be the housing crisis  and the TUC is warning about the whole package of cuts.

How young do you have to be before the Poll Tax ceases to be meaningful as something which happened during your political lifetime and becomes something that has to be set into context – in the same way that I had to have  Suez explained when it was the standard measure for British humiliations in world affairs (I grew up in the 1970s, there were LOTS of those).

The Poll Tax riot was in 1990.  Thousands of people who voted in the general election  weren’t born when it kicked off.  Does it mean anything to them or is it time for the hacks to stop being lazy?

Update:  Just checked, following today’s Big Society-debacle headlines.  No-one has actually called the BS David Cameron’s Poll Tax – yet.  The WSJ has already described the Big Soc as “the silliest idea to have come out of the party since the Poll Tax” so it’s probably only a matter of time.

What’s a government for?

Intrigued by reports of Tony Blair’s “lessons I have learned from being in g0vernment speech to the Institute of Government the other day.

It’s a strikingly managerial account of  government – as you’d  expect from a philosophy-lite PM who believed that “what matters is what works” .  The ten lessons are:

  1. Governance is a debate about efficiency rather than transparency
  2. We are operating in a post-ideological politics
  3. People want an empowering, not controlling state
  4. The centre needs to drive, but not deliver, systemic change
  5. Departments should be smaller, strategic and oriented around delivery
  6. Systemic change is essential in today’s world – as the private sector demonstrates
  7. The best change and delivery begins with the right conceptual analysis
  8. The best analysis is based on facts and interaction with the front line
  9. The people you appoint matter dramatically – private sector skillsets are needed
  10. Countries can learn from each other

“good politics boils down to good policy – to ‘a serious intellectual business’ of conceptual and technical analysis of the problem, and competent and efficient delivery of the solution.”

And so it does.  The mantra of evidence-based policy will be  familiar to anyone who worked in Whitehall over the past few years and it’s evidently right.  It’s sad that the evidence was so often bent to fit a political timetable, with initiatives piled upon each other to catch a headline and maintain an impression of dynamism, rather than because the evidence dictated them.  If only he’d stuck to his guns (on reflection possibly not the best choice of words…)

Social change  takes a long time.  Even gathering the evidence of where the problems are, to start indicating what to do about them, takes longer than political parties are willing to wait.  It takes even longer to see results.  So Labour didn’t wait, and while they had lots of good instincts and some of the right answers, it was a lack of patience, a shortage of managerial skill and a fatal habit of over-promising and under-delivering that did for them in the end.

I wouldn’t disagree with anything on Blair’s list between numbers 3 and 10.  But Lord what a depressing picture is conjured up by 1 and 2.    Governance is a debate about efficiency rather than transparency.  Really?  I’m  not even sure I know what that means – it’s more important to be efficient than honest?  It’s more important to be efficient than fair?  Whatever happened to the idea of politics as a moral crusade?   What I’d really like to hear from the Labour leadership hopefuls  is an intellectually coherent, passionate argument for what they believe in.   What do they want to do with power when/if they get it back?  Otherwise we might just as well hand the country over to McKinsey (not that we can afford them).

Running the whelk stall

Yesterday was the last day of the government contract I’ve been working on since last year.  Coincidentally the day I left my civil service job to go freelance  was the day Tony Blair stood down.  In a very different way yesterday also felt like the end of an era for Labour, even though the fall out this time round will be messier, more rancourous and (almost certainly) fatal for the party.

The permanent replacement in my role has just come into the civil service from a job in the private sector and evidently couldn’t believe the Looking Glass world I was briefing him about. (‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ said Alice. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the cat. ‘We’re all mad here.‘ )

It’s not at all impossible that everything I’ve been doing for the past six months will be torn up and thrown away by an incoming Minister after the reshuffle, not because it’s bad or wrong, but because the points have changed and we’re all off on another track as of Monday.  In the meantime, at least in our case yesterday, we carry on as though nothing at all had changed – making arrangements for a Ministerial visit next month, even though there is no Minister, no agreed policy, no diary to fix a date in and no idea of whether or not the policy will survive the week. Or as Lewis Carroll would have it – I can’t go back to yesterday – because I was a different person then.