Friday, July 10, 2009
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Building, or just blundering?
Gordon Brown's latest relaunch this week met with a preditably underwhelming reception from the public. Here's this week's Journal column.
Sometimes in politics, governments and Prime Ministers find themselves in a position where, whatever they do or don’t do, they are effectively in a no-win situation.
If they stick to their guns and attempt to drive through their programme in the teeth of opposition, they are criticised for being inflexible, arrogant and authoritarian.
But if, on the other hand, they try to demonstrate that they are “listening” to their critics by changing their mind on some key issue, they are lambasted for having “lost authority.”
It is a conundrum that goes to the heart of all political debate. Does the public actually want a government that “listens,” or does it merely want one that shows “strong leadership?”
Well, the answer is that it probably wants both, but history shows that while an ability to listen is all very well, the foremost requirement of any government is the ability to lead.
A government which proves, early on its lifetime, that is capable of “strong leadership” is much more able to show flexibility later on without the risk of damaging its authority.
By contrast, governments which fail to establish such a reputation in the first place tend to find that subsequent attempts to “listen” are invariably interpreted as further evidence of weakness.
In such a position does Gordon Brown’s administration find itself at the moment, in a week which saw both an attempt to show leadership in the shape of the draft Queen’s Speech, and a series of U-turns which, so ministers claim, show they are “listening.”
First, then, the attempted show of leadership. For me, the most interesting thing about Mr Brown’s latest “relaunch” on Monday was the slogan – “Building Britain’s Future.”
This is the nearest thing Mr Brown has had to a “Big Idea” in the whole of his two years at No 10 – but the amazing thing is that it has taken him so long to get there.
“Building the future” has been being talked about as a possible leitmotif for the Brown premiership for at least 18 months, – not least in this column where it was first mooted back in December 2007.
Okay, so it’s not the kind of soaring vision his predecessor might have come up with, but it’s as good a slogan as any for a Prime Minister who prides himself on his work ethic and sense of public service.
If “building” was the theme of Monday’s package, housing was the obvious focus, with a £2.1bn pledge to fund 110,000 affordable homes to rent or buy over the next two years.
But Mr Brown soon ran intro trouble with the promise to change council house allocation rules to allow councils to give preference to local residents.
Not only might this be illegal under EU equality laws, it will invariably be seen as a response to the growth of the British National Party in some traditional Labour areas.
As such, it risks having the same negative impact on the Prime Minister’s credibility as his infamous “British jobs for British workers” soundbite at last year’s Labour conference.
The other big problem with Mr Brown’s housing plans, in common with other pledges made in Monday’s Commons statement, was of course the price tag.
In the light of the massive debt burden already facing the British economy, it was hard not to listen to some of the Prime Minister’s announcements without a growing sense of incredulity.
It was a bit like Mr Brown’s Budgets and spending reviews of old, in the days when he was able to chuck a few billion here and a few billion there with seemingly gay abandon.
Part of Mr Brown’s problem is that he is still wedded to his old mantra of “Labour investment versus Tory cuts” – but most people now believe there will be cuts whoever wins the next election.
What of the U-turns? Should they be seen as evidence of a “listening” government, as Justice Secretary Jack Straw claimed on Thursday, or do they in fact show that it is no longer in control of events?
Well, the move to water-down the national ID card scheme has been predicted ever since Alan Johnson went to the Home Office in the recent reshuffle. If he ever does manage to become Prime Minister, it will almost certainly be scrapped altogether.
Likewise, the decision to abandon the proposed part-privatisation of the Royal Mail was forced on the Prime Minister by his backbenchers’ refusal to countenance the plan.
The measure was doomed once it became clear that Mr Brown would have to rely on Tory votes to get it through the Commons, however much Business Secretary Lord Mandelson may have fought to save it.
What this all demonstrates is that the overarching narrative of the Brown government isn’t “building,” it’s something else that begins with b – blundering from one crisis to the next.
And there comes a point where a government has blundered from so many crises to the next that everything it does starts to be seen in this light.
Sadly for Mr Brown, this point in the lifetime of his administration was reached a very long time ago.
Which is why this latest attempt at a relaunch is likely to be about as successful as the last.
Sometimes in politics, governments and Prime Ministers find themselves in a position where, whatever they do or don’t do, they are effectively in a no-win situation.
If they stick to their guns and attempt to drive through their programme in the teeth of opposition, they are criticised for being inflexible, arrogant and authoritarian.
But if, on the other hand, they try to demonstrate that they are “listening” to their critics by changing their mind on some key issue, they are lambasted for having “lost authority.”
It is a conundrum that goes to the heart of all political debate. Does the public actually want a government that “listens,” or does it merely want one that shows “strong leadership?”
Well, the answer is that it probably wants both, but history shows that while an ability to listen is all very well, the foremost requirement of any government is the ability to lead.
A government which proves, early on its lifetime, that is capable of “strong leadership” is much more able to show flexibility later on without the risk of damaging its authority.
By contrast, governments which fail to establish such a reputation in the first place tend to find that subsequent attempts to “listen” are invariably interpreted as further evidence of weakness.
In such a position does Gordon Brown’s administration find itself at the moment, in a week which saw both an attempt to show leadership in the shape of the draft Queen’s Speech, and a series of U-turns which, so ministers claim, show they are “listening.”
First, then, the attempted show of leadership. For me, the most interesting thing about Mr Brown’s latest “relaunch” on Monday was the slogan – “Building Britain’s Future.”
This is the nearest thing Mr Brown has had to a “Big Idea” in the whole of his two years at No 10 – but the amazing thing is that it has taken him so long to get there.
“Building the future” has been being talked about as a possible leitmotif for the Brown premiership for at least 18 months, – not least in this column where it was first mooted back in December 2007.
Okay, so it’s not the kind of soaring vision his predecessor might have come up with, but it’s as good a slogan as any for a Prime Minister who prides himself on his work ethic and sense of public service.
If “building” was the theme of Monday’s package, housing was the obvious focus, with a £2.1bn pledge to fund 110,000 affordable homes to rent or buy over the next two years.
But Mr Brown soon ran intro trouble with the promise to change council house allocation rules to allow councils to give preference to local residents.
Not only might this be illegal under EU equality laws, it will invariably be seen as a response to the growth of the British National Party in some traditional Labour areas.
As such, it risks having the same negative impact on the Prime Minister’s credibility as his infamous “British jobs for British workers” soundbite at last year’s Labour conference.
The other big problem with Mr Brown’s housing plans, in common with other pledges made in Monday’s Commons statement, was of course the price tag.
In the light of the massive debt burden already facing the British economy, it was hard not to listen to some of the Prime Minister’s announcements without a growing sense of incredulity.
It was a bit like Mr Brown’s Budgets and spending reviews of old, in the days when he was able to chuck a few billion here and a few billion there with seemingly gay abandon.
Part of Mr Brown’s problem is that he is still wedded to his old mantra of “Labour investment versus Tory cuts” – but most people now believe there will be cuts whoever wins the next election.
What of the U-turns? Should they be seen as evidence of a “listening” government, as Justice Secretary Jack Straw claimed on Thursday, or do they in fact show that it is no longer in control of events?
Well, the move to water-down the national ID card scheme has been predicted ever since Alan Johnson went to the Home Office in the recent reshuffle. If he ever does manage to become Prime Minister, it will almost certainly be scrapped altogether.
Likewise, the decision to abandon the proposed part-privatisation of the Royal Mail was forced on the Prime Minister by his backbenchers’ refusal to countenance the plan.
The measure was doomed once it became clear that Mr Brown would have to rely on Tory votes to get it through the Commons, however much Business Secretary Lord Mandelson may have fought to save it.
What this all demonstrates is that the overarching narrative of the Brown government isn’t “building,” it’s something else that begins with b – blundering from one crisis to the next.
And there comes a point where a government has blundered from so many crises to the next that everything it does starts to be seen in this light.
Sadly for Mr Brown, this point in the lifetime of his administration was reached a very long time ago.
Which is why this latest attempt at a relaunch is likely to be about as successful as the last.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Who will clean up Parliament?
Who will be the one to clean-up politics in the wake of the MPs expenses scandal? David Cameron? Gordon Brown? Or perhaps new Speaker John Bercow? Here's today's Journal column.
So was it a petty act of revenge by Labour MPs who know they are going to lose their seats and want to leave as poisoned a legacy as they can for David Cameron and the Tories?
Or was it a long-overdue attempt to provide a fresh start for a House of Commons tarnished almost beyond redemption by the MPs’ expenses scandal?
If the truth be told, the election of one-time Thatcherite radical John Bercow as the 157th Commons Speaker this week was probably a bit of both.
While some of the MPs who voted for him on Monday undoubtedly did so to make life uncomfortable for the Tories, who by and large detest their former colleague, others genuinely saw him as the candidate best-placed to provide a “clean break” with recent events.
Okay, so I wanted Sir Alan Beith to win, and I thought Margaret Beckett would win, but it is clear the former Foreign Secretary suffered from a backlash in the final days against what were seen as government attempts to install her.
As one sketch-writer who wrote a delightful account of the election using horseracing metaphors put it: “Mrs Beckett was deemed to have made excessive use of the whips.”
I was right about one thing, and that was that the election would be determined by whether Labour MPs decided to swing en bloc behind a single candidate
In the end they did, but that candidate was not Mrs Beckett, but Mr Bercow, who at 46 becomes the youngest Speaker since the 19th century and the first person of the Jewish faith to hold the post.
Already the new Speaker has made his mark. Indeed, anyone watching his first Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday might have concluded that he, not Gordon Brown or Mr Cameron, was the real star of the show.
Ticking off braying MPs for making too much noise during the weekly half-hour joust, he told them: “The public doesn't like it and neither do I."
On another occasion, he told the Tory backbencher Michael Fabricant to calm down as "it is not good for your health".
And he cut short a rambling question by the Labour backbencher Patrick Hall on housing, telling him he had “got the gist” of what he was saying.
I suspect Mr Bercow is right in thinking that the public will be generally sympathetic to his attempts to bring what he calls “an atmosphere of calm, reasoned debate” to the parliamentary bear-pit.
But he is walking a difficult tightrope. Just as spin doctors are not supposed to become the story, neither are House of Commons Speakers.
Although it is understandable that he wanted to make a splash with his first PMQs, he will need to learn to fade into the background if he is to avoid becoming a political football like Michael Martin.
To paraphrase Dr W.G. Grace, if he starts to believe that the public have come to watch him umpiring rather than the MPs performing, then his days in the Chair will be numbered.
The central conundrum facing Mr Bercow is ultimately the one that did for Mr Martin – is the Speaker merely the servant of the House, or should he or she in some way seek to be its master?
The truth is that Mr Bercow will somehow have to be both – seeking to nudge the House in the direction of reform, while ultimately reflecting its wishes.
Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Brown, at least, do not have that dilemma. Each of them is seeking to persuade the public that he is the man to “clean up politics” in the wake of the expenses scandal.
Sadly for the Prime Minister, it is a contest which currently he is decisively losing.
From the start of the expenses row, Mr Cameron has led the way in taking action against his own recalcitrant MPs, and this week he ordered them to pay back another £125,000 to the taxpayer.
The Tory leader seems to be preparing the ground for a large-scale clearout which could see up to half of the current crop of Conservative MPs stand down at the election.
In a speech this week, he also sought to link the need for reform with the need for people to regain power over their own lives, highlighting the drift towards the “surveillance state” under Labour.
Mr Brown has concentrated more on wider constitutional reforms, but has been predictably outflanked on this score by Mr Clegg, who has the advantage of leading a party that genuinely believes in it.
In a speech this week, the Prime Minister said voters wanted to see his government clean-up politics, help people through the recession, and – wait for it – “put forward our vision.”
But the fact that Mr Brown is still talking about setting out his “vision” two years after coming to power is surely emblematic of the failure of his administration.
Nowhere has this failure been more acute than in the field of restoring trust in politics, which was supposed to be the big theme of his premiership in the wake of the loans for lordships scandal and the general moral decay of the Blair years.
If cleaning-up Parliament had been part of Mr Brown’s confounded “vision” in the first place, Parliament would probably not be in the mess it is in now.
So was it a petty act of revenge by Labour MPs who know they are going to lose their seats and want to leave as poisoned a legacy as they can for David Cameron and the Tories?
Or was it a long-overdue attempt to provide a fresh start for a House of Commons tarnished almost beyond redemption by the MPs’ expenses scandal?
If the truth be told, the election of one-time Thatcherite radical John Bercow as the 157th Commons Speaker this week was probably a bit of both.
While some of the MPs who voted for him on Monday undoubtedly did so to make life uncomfortable for the Tories, who by and large detest their former colleague, others genuinely saw him as the candidate best-placed to provide a “clean break” with recent events.
Okay, so I wanted Sir Alan Beith to win, and I thought Margaret Beckett would win, but it is clear the former Foreign Secretary suffered from a backlash in the final days against what were seen as government attempts to install her.
As one sketch-writer who wrote a delightful account of the election using horseracing metaphors put it: “Mrs Beckett was deemed to have made excessive use of the whips.”
I was right about one thing, and that was that the election would be determined by whether Labour MPs decided to swing en bloc behind a single candidate
In the end they did, but that candidate was not Mrs Beckett, but Mr Bercow, who at 46 becomes the youngest Speaker since the 19th century and the first person of the Jewish faith to hold the post.
Already the new Speaker has made his mark. Indeed, anyone watching his first Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday might have concluded that he, not Gordon Brown or Mr Cameron, was the real star of the show.
Ticking off braying MPs for making too much noise during the weekly half-hour joust, he told them: “The public doesn't like it and neither do I."
On another occasion, he told the Tory backbencher Michael Fabricant to calm down as "it is not good for your health".
And he cut short a rambling question by the Labour backbencher Patrick Hall on housing, telling him he had “got the gist” of what he was saying.
I suspect Mr Bercow is right in thinking that the public will be generally sympathetic to his attempts to bring what he calls “an atmosphere of calm, reasoned debate” to the parliamentary bear-pit.
But he is walking a difficult tightrope. Just as spin doctors are not supposed to become the story, neither are House of Commons Speakers.
Although it is understandable that he wanted to make a splash with his first PMQs, he will need to learn to fade into the background if he is to avoid becoming a political football like Michael Martin.
To paraphrase Dr W.G. Grace, if he starts to believe that the public have come to watch him umpiring rather than the MPs performing, then his days in the Chair will be numbered.
The central conundrum facing Mr Bercow is ultimately the one that did for Mr Martin – is the Speaker merely the servant of the House, or should he or she in some way seek to be its master?
The truth is that Mr Bercow will somehow have to be both – seeking to nudge the House in the direction of reform, while ultimately reflecting its wishes.
Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Brown, at least, do not have that dilemma. Each of them is seeking to persuade the public that he is the man to “clean up politics” in the wake of the expenses scandal.
Sadly for the Prime Minister, it is a contest which currently he is decisively losing.
From the start of the expenses row, Mr Cameron has led the way in taking action against his own recalcitrant MPs, and this week he ordered them to pay back another £125,000 to the taxpayer.
The Tory leader seems to be preparing the ground for a large-scale clearout which could see up to half of the current crop of Conservative MPs stand down at the election.
In a speech this week, he also sought to link the need for reform with the need for people to regain power over their own lives, highlighting the drift towards the “surveillance state” under Labour.
Mr Brown has concentrated more on wider constitutional reforms, but has been predictably outflanked on this score by Mr Clegg, who has the advantage of leading a party that genuinely believes in it.
In a speech this week, the Prime Minister said voters wanted to see his government clean-up politics, help people through the recession, and – wait for it – “put forward our vision.”
But the fact that Mr Brown is still talking about setting out his “vision” two years after coming to power is surely emblematic of the failure of his administration.
Nowhere has this failure been more acute than in the field of restoring trust in politics, which was supposed to be the big theme of his premiership in the wake of the loans for lordships scandal and the general moral decay of the Blair years.
If cleaning-up Parliament had been part of Mr Brown’s confounded “vision” in the first place, Parliament would probably not be in the mess it is in now.
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