Gordon Brown’s party conference speech has been overtaken by the Sun’s cruelly timed front page announcement that it was switching its support from Labour to the Conservatives. Only time – and YouGov’s daily polling – will tell us what the impact of Rupert Murdoch’s decision will have on the electoral hopes of the major parties. In the meantime, we can look at the new commitments made by the prime minister yesterday.
The headlines included extra support for elderly people in need of care, ‘supervised homes’ for young single mothers, free child care for 250,000 two-year olds, protection for schools’ spending, a people’s post office, powers to restrict 24-hour drinking plus constitutional proposals such as a referendum on voting reform, further change to the House of Lords and a possible power of ‘recall’ over errant MPs. Individual proposals were evidently aimed at particular sections of the electorate and/or the Labour activist core. The PM also adopted a populist tone to attack the bankers and question the wisdom of unfettered market capitalism.
Following Peter Mandelson’s Houdini-meets-Captain Hook speech on Monday, Brown signalled that Labour was now the party of change. This was good tactics for a party that has been in power for almost 13 years. The big question is: did the initiatives in the speech add up to a radical shift of direction?
To which the answer must be: not really. If the PM is moving on from ‘New Labour’, it is hard to see how the classic Blairite mixture of tough and tender policy is demonstrably a change in orientation. Saying nasty things about bankers would only be radical if the PM intended to signal a move away from his long-held view that Britain should be a flexible, liberal, Anglo-Saxon type economy. But he did not. And he won’t because his cast-iron certainty of mind is such that he evidently finds change personally difficult.
His opponents will point to the fact the government is still happy to announce initiatives that require public spending increases but still refuses to give any details about how public spending might be reduced. Ed Miliband, under questioning from Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman, stated that the costs of additional care for elderly people would, in part, be paid for by ‘efficiencies’ within local government. This is a formulation any party could use: just announce a socially tender new policy, then say it will be paid for by detail-free efficiency savings. Councils will also be expected to deliver the ‘hostels for young mothers’ policy. They will probably have to do this with efficiency savings, too.
Nothing much has changed. It will be fascinating to see if David Cameron’s Conservatives can be more open and detailed about their plans for spending reductions, as opposed to any commitments to protect and increase existing spending. If the Tories also fail to do this, the choice for the electorate will be between two parties that magically expect efficiency savings to produce painless savings. They won’t. The sooner we know the truth, the better.
