20June
The Economist recently wrote,
Gordon Brown observed that even a fag-end Tory government was preferred to Labour, and calculated that it would always be so as long as Labour was associated with high taxes and wild spending. Mr Brown, by then shadow chancellor, saw that Labour must side with the industrious and ambitious, as the Tories had done, to win power. To that end, he ruthlessly cut back the grandiose spending plans of his shadow-cabinet colleagues. Working closely with Mr Blair, he began to eradicate every promise that suggested Labour was out of touch with the sentiments of middle England, such as the enforcement of the union closed shop. Much of this outraged senior colleagues, among them John Smith, the party leader.
It's almost surprising that the Econ doesn't challenge the position it attributes to Mr. Brown. Labour's defeat in 1992 wasn't so much about the economy, but about the great leap of faith required to put Neil Kinnock into Downing-street. By this time, Mr. Kinnock was a great electoral liability, just as Mr. Hague would be in 2001. It's entirely possible that a Labour party running on something close to the 1983 manifesto would have been elected in 1997, and absolutely certain that a John Smith party would have won a handsome - though not spectacular - majority. The magazine is blaming Mr. Brown for Labour's unquestioning acceptance of Thatcherite values.
Brown's twin mantras were prudence with a purpose and no investment without reform. Taxpayers were supposed to be reassured that once Labour started spending, the Treasury would ensure that every pound went where it could do most good. But the target culture required a degree of centralisation that discouraged initiative, from the heads of big departments down to junior hospital managers and head teachers. It meant that, too often, managers ended up trying to hit targets rather than running their operations. It continually irritated cabinet colleagues, who resented Treasury officials dictating to them. And it also exacerbated Mr Brown's growing strife with Mr Blair.
After the first two years of budgetary stringency, Mr Blair's main priority was to get Mr Brown to loosen spending for shabby schools and run-down hospitals before the voters noticed that Labour had done nothing much. Mr Blair went along with targets, partly because he had yet to develop his own vision of how to reform public services.
The presumption that micromanagement by target is a good thing? Gordon's fault. The wasted first term? Gordon's fault. The complete shambles of NHS management? Gordon's fault, though not entirely...
Having manoeuvred Mr Brown into committing the government to reach continental-European levels of health spending by 2005, Mr Blair and his radically minded health secretary, Alan Milburn, set about creating a National Health Service that would increasingly become a commissioner rather than a monopoly provider of services. The first big step was to be the setting up of semi-autonomous foundation hospitals, free to borrow on their own balance sheets if they wanted to expand.
It is hard to say what riled Mr Brown more: the threat to the Treasury's financial discipline, or the speed with which Mr Blair sought to transform the NHS into something that, in his view, would no longer be a bastion of fairness.
In a speech in 2003, Mr Brown tried to set out the role and limits of markets in a modern economy. The free market position which would lead us to privatised hospitals and some system of vouchers and extra payments for treatments, starts by viewing health care as akin to a commodity to be bought and sold like any other through the price mechanism. But in health care we know that the consumer is not sovereign.
In effect, the chancellor suggested he would oppose the prime minister if the latter were to follow his most radical instincts in the reform of public services. And by making it clear that in the tussle between equity and efficiency he stood nearer the former, Mr Brown also drew a distinction between his own deep roots in Labour tradition and Mr Blair's more contingent relationship to the party.
Yet Mr Brown has never articulated his alternative vision, or had the debate with Mr Blair over public-service reform which that speech and others suggested he wanted. Partly as a result of this unresolved divergence of views, the government poured billions of pounds into health and education long before reforms were in place to improve them.
The Economist also delivers a punch to the oft-repeated claim that Mr. Brown has ensured the UK is on a stable financial footing.
Brown's control of the public finances, by contrast, has not been sensible. The early years of tight control gave way in 2000-01 to an explosion in spending that drove up costs across the public services, especially wages. Government expenditure has been pushed from 40.8% in 1996-97 to 42.2% of GDP. Although Britain's fiscal position is still relatively sound, Mr Brown has left the nation's finances less healthy than might have been hoped.
Nor has all evolved faultlessly elsewhere. Mr Brown's tax-credit scheme for poor families, for example, has gone badly wrong. A looming crisis in pensions owes something to Mr Brown's early tax raid on pension funds, and still more to long-term defects in the means-tested approach that he has favoured.
The magazine fails to discuss another of Mr. Brown's ideas for storing up trouble, the Public-Private Partnership (PFI). This is a way of making spending commitments for the next 20, 30, even 50 years, and of spending vastly more money than would be required for equivalent projects constructed entirely by public funds. This is certain to come back and bite the economy in the years ahead, by which time Gordon Brown will be sunning himself on a tropical island somewhere near Fife.
All in all, we can't see that Mr. Brown enjoys the support of The Economist. Does anyone trust this loser? Matthew Parris does not support Gordon Brown.
Brown is psychologically unfit for the office he craves because:
1. He has persistent difficulty in handling human relationships with anyone who questions his authority or criticises his plans;
2. He snubs, cuts, bullies or ignores people he works with; he displays shocking ingratitude and bad manners;
3. He confines all serious deliberation to a tiny inner circle;
4. He will not let even senior staff know his mind;
5. He excludes talented equals from his circle and promotes talent only in juniors;
6. He punishes the bearers of bad news and favours those who tell him what he wants to hear;
7. He’s a control freak;
8. He transmits but seems unwilling to receive; he will not engage;
9. He seems unable to negotiate, he just keeps restating his position;
10. He is vengeful, given to ancient feuds;
11. He divides the world into a tight entourage that he can utterly trust and relax with, and an outer darkness of sworn enemies and uncertain friends, among whom he treads with suspicion, treating them gracelessly;
12. He hogs credit for himself and hates others to claim it;
13. He leaves other to take the flak and ducks when trouble looms.
14. He lacks imagination.
15. He lacks courage.
Inter alia, he sounds just like prochain ancien British prime minister Mister Tony Blair.
