Not quite heirs to Blair

I have a column in the March edition of Public Finance, explaining why the coalition's public service reforms are not as much in the Blair tradition as they imagine.

David Cameron’s closest coalition colleagues are said to follow a ‘cult of Blair’ on domestic reforms. They proceed with pace, avoiding Tony Blair’s lament that he acted too slowly. They proudly display the scars on their backs from opposition to their changes. And they are extending some New Labour initiatives in health and education. But they have parted company with its ‘investment and reform’ approach in important ways - and that might be their downfall.

You can read the full column here.

Gordon's productive term

The last few months has seen more productive activity from this government than the previous two years. With today's long overdue announcement of plans to electrify the rail lines to Wales and the West, another sign of Andrew Adonis's hyperactivity at transport, we have seen a government willing to grapple with several big issues that had been largely neglected in the past. The recent proposals on care for the elderly and on energy are other good examples, and there have been continuing economic and public services reform proposals. And the management of the flu crisis has to date (despite a phoney media crisis at the weekend) been well managed.

Of course, the problems in Afghanistan will inevitably overshadow this work, as probably will tonight's Norwich results (though I couldn't resist a small 8/1 bet on Labour a few weeks ago). And the rushed attempt to appease the media over MPs expenses have had to be watered down. But the idea that this is a government that has run out of steam has been shown to be so much media narrative.

The challenge for the government is to get past that sense of inevitability about Cameron come the autumn. For the truth is that in many policy areas, the Tories have still not got much to say, and on issues like health, what they do have to say is deeply dispiriting. The only shame of it is that this bout of serious policy came two years into Gordon's premiership rather than two months.

Alan Johnson hits the right target

While Harriet Harman appears to have been engaged in bizarre manoeuvres over the leadership of the Labour Party - I have little to add to Luke Akehurst's take on the subject - Alan Johnson has been showing what the chair and deputy leader of the Party should be doing.

Johnson is an effective health secretary - when was the last NHS 'crisis'? - presiding over a credible reform programme that puts patients first, unlike the the Tories' BMA-dictated approach. And today, he offers just the sort of critique of Cameron on the public services that the party chairman should be providing, were she not so distracted.

In today's Guardian, Johnson writes rightly that Cameron has thought little about the delivery of his reforms:

It has been interesting to watch David Cameron try to hug us close on public services. I've been impressed with his ability not to sound Tory.....On schools and hospitals, he seems to understand what the public want to hear....But while his language is nearly pitch-perfect, his party's policies still strike an entirely different note.....

In my own area, health, shadow minister Andrew Lansley has backed him away from Labour's key reforms. So despite the conciliatory rhetoric, Cameron has now said he would dismantle minimum standards such as the two-week maximum wait to see a cancer specialist or a wait of no more than four hours in A&E. That makes no sense to me nor, I suspect, the patients who will suffer......

So while I applaud a great deal of the sentiment in what Cameron says, it is clear he has spent far more time thinking about careful delivery of speeches than fair delivery of public services. I've pushed through some difficult reforms myself, for example on higher education - a policy Cameron once opposed but now supports - and learned that real policy change requires a lot more than just a few vague sentiments.

Spot on. Let's hope there's more where that came from.

Brown spikes Cameron's guns

Gordon Brown's article in today's Financial Times is the culmination of a series of moves since Christmas that have helped to put his government back on the reform track. It will be a big disappointment to David Cameron that his main line of attack against the PM has been so roundly scuppered (and this coming after Alan Johnson successfully took on the BMA over weekend working, a stark contrast with the subservience preferred by Dave's health spokesman for life, Andrew Lansley). With a strong team now backing the PM in no 10, it will be back to the drawing board in Tory HQ at Millbank Tower.

That vision thing

Yesterday was not the best day of Gordon Brown's life. An uncomfortable press conference, a sneering media and a revitalised opposition combined to undo his carefully cultivated image of the summer. However, a new Populus poll in today's Times suggests that he retains strong underlying support: Labour is two points ahead of the Tories on 40-38%. The conference season may have strengthened the confidence of Tory supporters in the economic wisdom of their leaders, but it has had little impact on other voters. Brown and Alastair Darling remain well ahead on economic trust: Darling must reinforce that impression with his pre-budget report and spending review announcements today. But all this won't be enough in the medium to long-term. It is to be hoped that Brown has now had his share of mini-disasters. So he needs to demonstrate strength on the public services. That means more than keeping the basic Blair reforms; he must embrace them as his own. In his first weeks, Brown threw a few bones to anti-academy backbenchers, but as Fiona Millar demonstrates in today's Guardian, those campaigners won't be satisfied without abolishing Academies - the most successful sustained effort to tackle school failure in decades. Brown should ignore these siren voices, and talk up Academies. It isn't difficult: their improvements continue to outpace other schools, and their structures present a readymade picture of progress for the voters. By all means continue with efforts to boost the 3Rs too, but don't underplay Academies. Equally, Brown must become a stronger reformer on the NHS and police: after all, he faces the charge that as Chancellor, he poured money into pay and staffing with little return on productivity. So he is right to personalise these services, and demand weekend surgeries. But he must be bolder in saying where he believes things should be ten years hence. That should be the vision which, as he himself says, he now has the freedom to explain.