The FishTank

With the last PMQ’s of the session over and done it’s interesting to reflect on what the last few weeks have shown us. After months of varying political tactics, David Cameron has, it appears, found a trick that works. To wit, he takes one government policy area – anything will do – and picks a single question that Brown doesn’t want to answer. Then he pursues it doggedly, typically using all of his questions to ask the same thing. Naturally, he doesn’t get an answer, but the next week he moves on to another question and begins the process again. Brown is unable either to parrot government statistics or to claim he is facing a lightweight who doesn’t want to talk policy. He fumbles, struggling to avoid answering the question, leaving press and public with the impression of a man who is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth.
Tactics are all very well, of course, but outside of the Westminster village why do they matter? They matter because, for the last few years, first Blair and then Brown have been using their own formulaic strategy for handling debate. In the early years they simply blamed everything on the Tories. It no longer washes, but they still had to say something. The most typical question asked of a failing government – other than in planted questions from their own side – is essentially why some area of policy is failing to improve the lives of a member’s constituents. Why is my hospital being forced to close wards? Why are my constituents’ children dying in Afghanistan? Why is law and order broken in my back yard?
To all of these Blair and Brown have one response. Not to answer the question, but first to trumpet how much money they have pumped into the relevant policy area – sometimes with specific figures for the constituency in question – and then to claim that this money was opposed by the questioner’s party. The money argument may have lost traction in the current recession, but the claim of opposing government policy still seems to have resonance.
And you might say that it isn’t unreasonable. After all, the Conservatives can hardly complain about ward closures if they were against extra investment in hospitals. They can’t complain about child poverty if they opposed SureStart. But that’s the trick: New Labour’s tactics are premised on the position that theirs is not only a policy that can deliver, but that it is the only policy that can deliver. The problem is not that the Conservatives had a different view on how to deal with terrorism, but that they opposed an extension to detention without charge. It’s a strategy that has been used for everything from NHS funding to 90 day detention, from the recession to the recovery, and it’s damaging our administration.
The reason this is damaging is that a government which takes this line cannot – without serious political damage – change their position. Blair used to say he had no reverse gear – not because he couldn’t think of another direction to go, but because he wouldn’t admit he’d gone in the wrong direction in the first place. Brown likewise cannot admit his failings as chancellor, despite the necessity of doing so in order to solve the problems he faces as Prime Minister. The my way or no way strategy may make for effective political grandstanding, but it’s absolutely lethal for policy. Governments need to be able to admit mistakes because – let’s be realistic – they always make them.
And it is this more than anything else that is causing Gordon Brown’s paralysis. After twelve years of failed policy, claiming all money thrown at a problem was, in and of itself, a solution, he has nowhere to go. To admit to reducing spending is to deny his previous claims that any such cuts would be disastorous to front-line spending, automatically closing schools and hospitals with every penny saved. He can try to rebrand his U-turns, making out that targets in schools were effective and that he’s scrapping them as the next part of an ordered plan, pretending that real-terms cuts are zero percent rises, but every such statement damages what little credibility he has and makes his career and that of his party that bit shorter. His only hope is that, somehow, circumstances will produce an economic miracle before the election. It’s woefully unrealistic, and with every week that Cameron picks apart one piece of his policy his stock sinks that little lower. From a possible hung parliament in 2007, he is now looking at what is potentially the end of Labour as a political force.
For us, of course, the war is far from over. Whoever takes up the reins after the next election we have to hope they will learn from the New Labour experience that politics is about more than despatch box strategy. We have to hope that Cameron, despite proving effective at opposition politics, concentrates more on policy than political tricks if he gains office. He’ll have a term of good grace if he hits the floor running, but he has to have proper answers ready when the questions come. If all the electorate hear is blame laid at the feet of the previous government, the cycle of political despair will simply begin all over again.