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530  20 November 2002   

Blair's Ministers are in the same case.  Their principal interest must be to remain in office, and to lay the ground for their post-Ministerial careers.  They are career professionals, keen to look after their families, make their mark in the world, and enjoy a comfortable retirement - just like their counterparts in other careers.  I do not condemn that, or in any way disdain those aspirations.  But I do observe that for these professional politicians the best way to do that is to stay in office for as long as possible.

That is why the conclusion now seems obvious, almost inescapable.  We are viewing the emergence, within the shell of the Labour Party, of a Government Party.  The aim is not only to abolish Boom and Slump - it is to eliminate the swing of the Party pendulum, according to incumbent parties very long periods of tenure, at the helm.  Tony Blair used to say that he sought to make the Labour Party the natural Party of Government - as the Tories had previously seemed to be.   That may have been true at the time - but the idea has undergone a subtle metamorphosis.  For he now seems intent on building, upon the foundations of the Labour Party, a new form of Government Party. 

A Government Party is a Party dedicated to only to one objective, namely staying in power.  All principles are to be sacrificed, all compromises essayed, which might keep the silent majority on board, electorally.  In France, Chirac's Presidential Party sounds like the same thing - the recent trimming by the Chinese leadership raises similar suspicions, and Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party (which he he hi-jacked, in the same way as the Blairites hi-jacked the Labour Party) - is clearly a Government Party.  In the US, pendulum politics seems set to continue, with Al Gore mobilising for a second tilt at the Presidency.  In Germany, Italy and France the hope is that pendulum politics will survive - but that is certainly no foregone conclusion.

In the UK, the Prime Minister is clearly intent upon securing a second re-election as supreme leader. These are simply a few personal observations, which readers may well be inclined to supplement.  As Prime Minister Tony Blair has -

• Hi-jacked the Party by elbowing aside its own Chairman and arbitrarily and undemocratically creating "his own Chairman" - paid at Cabinet salary-rates, but with moneys drawn from Party funds;
• Sidelined the Party's own processes, in particular its National Executive Committee;
• Sidelined the Cabinet, avoiding any substantive Cabinet debate;
• Developed a massive "Downing Street Office" charged with delivering his personal will and policy throughout the Whitehall machine;
• Devised diversionary and irrelevant "Policy Forums", the function of which is to pretend that what matters is the "long-term", while he remains free to consolidate his personal power base in the short-term;
• Appointed 17 Ministers from outside the Commons, demoralising his own Party, and creating a cadre of ministerial hangers-on who are totally dependent for their position upon his personal patronage;
• Recruited to his personal advisory team a range of senior non-Party figures, even favouring those with distinctive positions to the right of the political spectrum (Lord Simon, Adair Turner);
• Moved deliberately to occupy Tory positions, risking a gravity-flip to the centre-right, because he perceives the Tories as a greater threat to his Government Party than the LibDems;
• Neutralised the Liberal Democrats by bringing them into joint-committee consultation, to the despair of his own Party supporters;
• Deployed weak devolution formulae for both London and the English regions, to avoid any real leakage of power from the Westminster redoubt of the Government Party;
• Crippled local government to the point of near-extinction, thus rendering it incapable of asserting any competing mandate from which to challenge central hegemony;
• Rejected radical House of Lords reform, both to placate Middle England opinion and to preserve as much as possible of his patronage base;
• Developed a strong pro-Monarchy position, consciously and publicly taking the Sovereign's part;
• Cultivated a public image of studied religiosity calculated to appeal to the "non-political" millions of the English middle-ground

Is the charge made out?  Am I imagining all this?    It is not just Tony Blair: he could do achieve this change alone.  I see the present pliant Cabinet as the latest manifestation of the risks of professionalising politics, of turning politics into a full-time salaried career.  In future, these new Government Parties (and they will come in different shapes and sizes, throughout Europe) will grow to constitute in themselves a new threat to our civil liberties, our human rights and freedoms.  Ian Duncan Smith and Oliver Letwin face the parallel challenge of forging the Conservatives into right-of-centre Party capable of recruiting able career professionals.  They must move decisively away from the ideology-politics of Margaret Thatcher.

• One scenario is that at some stage the poles of UK politics will flip - Labour will go on hoovering up Tory votes and become a Christian Democrat party - with a new Liberal Socialist Party forming to the left of Blair's Government Party, uniting the majority of current Labour members and some leftwing Liberal Democrats - and that pendulum politics will resume on that footing, with a very small LD rump. 
• The other scenario is that Labour will pull back from the centre-right brink, allow the Tories to re-group and to recapture that Butler/Macmillan territory, sever institutional links with the Unions, make common cause with the left of the Liberal movement, become more sensitive to human rights and individual freedoms, and form a new Opposition to a Tory-generated Christian Democratic party. 
  • I suspect that might be the Gordon Brown strategy, seeking to reclaim "Labour" as a centre-left Party before Tony loses control of the drift-to-the-Right, and making common cause with leftwing Liberalism, as Labour has done in Scotland...  That would certainly be my preferred strategy.

Either way, the ordinary citizen will have to watch out - because the professional political salariat will be frying their own fish....

What was that I heard?  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance?  Who said that...?

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531   20 November 2002   

This confused debate is rapidly leading nowhere.  Frank Dobson has got a good point about "elitism", if poorly expressed.  The Guardian is right to deplore the continuing excessive preoccupation with hospitals, in particular big hospitals.  And only Peter Mandelson seems so far to have grasped that Alan Milburn is pioneering major constitutional reform.  Let me try and unpick the isshoos.

First: Alan Milburn is planning to re-configure the leading hospitals as freestanding, self-governing public bodies.  There is much yet be done to define the concept, many arguments to be had - but the idea is an exciting and important one.  The Victorians invented democratically-elected multi-purpose local councils as the primary means of delivering local service, and for over a century they performed that role.  Yet they are now, for the most part, moribund, demoralised and in decline.  Public interest in theiir work is at a pitifully low ebb, public engagement non-existent.  If local communities could genuinely take over responsibility for their own hospitals (whatever the funding regime) that would constitute a huge democratic gain, enrich our public life, and galvanise local NHS delivery.

• NB  Alan Milburn is a long way, as yet, from proposing this principled solution.  He talks of the election of a majority of the hospital board, but with the professional management occupying key voting positions on the same board.  That would not work.  He is talking about election by patients, by some form of special electorate: that would not do, the democratic gains would be made only if the entire electorate could become involved, in a true democratic change.

Second: Alan Milburn is planning to grant this independence only to a few leading hospitals.  That would be wrong: the idea is a good one, and it should be applied to all hospitals simultaneously.  This would remove much of the sting from the Dobson attack.

• NB  It was Peter Mandelson, in his Commons speech on the Queens Speech, who highlighted the potential of this "elected Board" approach  to local democracy, which was more common at the turn of the century, with popularly-elected "School Boards" (abolished by the Tories in 1902..)

Third:  Gordon Brown was right to rein in the Milburn juggernaut by insisting that the financing of these hospital Boards (in particular their borrowing) should remain subject to Treasury controls. We should recognise that to unleash independent borrowing strategies would threaten to destabilise public spending in unacceptable ways.  But even without the full financial independence originally planned, the introduction of elected function-specific public-service Boards would make a vital contribution to the development of new democratic institutions - "for the 21st century", as they so glibly say..

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