End-of-term report on our masters
Danny Kruger
BETTER OR WORSE? by Polly Toynbee and David Walker Bloomsbury, £7.99, pp. 346, ISBN 0747579822 The only good thing New Labour have done in office they did in their first week: the granting of independence to the Bank of England. In every other respect, things have gone the other way: a 60 per cent increase in taxes and spending; the ruthless subordination of schools, hospitals and police forces to the imperatives of politics; and a great extension of the state into the lives of individuals, families and businesses.
This book is an unqualified celebration of that achievement. Written by the Guardian journalists (and husband and wife) Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Better or Worse? concludes happily that the state has grown much larger under Labour, and shows, in detail, how.
It is ineffably boring. The ToynbeeWalkers are modern Bevanites with the soul of Gaitskell, the desiccated calculating machine. Like the three men who understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, they and Gordon Brown might be the only people in Britain who can see their way clearly through the Working Families Tax Credit, the Children’s Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Childcare Credit and the Child Trust Fund. The reader needs stamina and scepticism. The authors rely on statistics, and always on the rosy ones.
Take waiting lists. The longest waits have come down since 1997, but (they don’t mention) the average wait has risen; and the number of people on waiting lists has remained stubbornly over one million. Take crime. The authors note that the British Crime Survey shows a fall in crime since 1997, but not that recorded crime statistics show an increase.
Or take asylum. Asylum figures have fallen by a half in the last year, in direct response to a prime ministerial promise. This has happened partly because the government has reintroduced Conservative measures to deny benefits to failed asylumseekers and remove those who come from safe countries — measures which Labour denounced as ‘racist’ and ‘unfair’ when in opposition — and partly because the gov ernment has discouraged the police from arresting illegal immigrants who would, if arrested, claim asylum. The authors do not point this out.
New Labour are the heroes of this story, but the villains are not the Conservative party, except as a sort of folk demon which serves to show how much things have improved. Modern Tories are dismissed early on as ‘petty Poujadistes’ and ignored thereafter. The real enemy is the public, who refuse to accept the evidence of the government’s statistics. The authors regret ‘the absence of a national seminar’, in which presumably Toynbee and Walker, a grim pair of tutors, would lecture the country on the true state of things. Britain suffers a ‘cultural handicap’, ‘a climate of curmudgeonly disbelief that anything ever gets better’. We are all ‘clueless’; Labour has had to endure the ‘ingratitude of the voters’, ‘bleat[ing] about red tape’ and ‘subsist[ing] on stereotypes’.
‘The moral right of the authors has been asserted,’ it says on the copyright page. It certainly has. In a revealing aside, the authors complain that 75 per cent of the circulation of daily papers is ‘owned by ... right-wingers’. What this actually means is that 75 per cent of newspaper readers choose to buy right-wing papers. Yet Toynbee and Walker imagine that people cannot make free choices; that the decisions which matter are taken on high; and therefore that it is the job of the ‘progressive’ Left to take them. They are disparaging about efforts to localise power. Why would people want to vote on who runs their police force, they wonder? Far better to have the state manage everything for us.
It is in this spirit that Polly Toynbee’s favourite policy proposal, familiar to fans of her Guardian column, is given a fresh outing: there should be a national network of ‘universal children’s centres’ run by the state. This idea, owing its inspiration to the child-rearing policy of ancient Sparta, has in fact already been tried out, in the notorious Family Centre in Tottenham where Victoria Climbie was supposed to receive the ‘services’ she needed. But Toynbee and Walker are not concerned with specifics: ‘the child’s death caused a disproportionate moral panic,’ they observe, distracting attention from efforts to create ‘a common framework for children’s services’.
Despite their de haut en bas cold-bloodedness, one is forced in the end to admire the authors’ attempt to make Labour face its own nature. They regret the absence of ‘a defining legend’ in the party, ‘a galvanising, rallying, progressive message that would make sense of what Labour was actually doing — taxing and spending’. It is, indeed, only in these terms that Blair’s government can be judged a success, but because of those 75 per cent of the public who read conservative papers, this is not a message he wants anyone to hear.
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