by Blair, Tony
The most important element was that it implied a resolution of what had been revolving in my mind for some time. We had come to power in 1997 saying it was ‘standards not structures’ that mattered. We said this in respect of education, but it applied equally to health and other parts of the system of public services.
In other words, we were saying: forget about complex, institutional structural reforms; what counts is what works, and by that we meant outputs. This was fine as a piece of rhetoric; and positively beneficial as a piece of politics. Unfortunately, as I began to realise when experience started to shape our thinking, it was bunkum as a piece of policy. The whole point is that structures beget standards. How a service is configured affects outcomes.
That is, unless you believe that centrally managed change works best. This is where the change in thinking had deep political as well as service implications. Part of the whole thought process that had gone into creating New Labour was to redefine the nature of the state.
Except on law and order, I am by instinct a liberal. That is one reason why I used to go out of my way to praise Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge; and why I always had respect as well as affection for the mind of Roy Jenkins.
In a world in which the individual sought far greater control and power over their own lives, it seemed inconceivable to me that any modern idea of the state could be other than as an enabler, a source of empowerment, rather than paternalistic, handing out, controlling in the interests of the citizens who were supposedly incapable of taking their own decisions. That intuition, that gut feeling then obviously had to be translated into the praxis of state institutions. Really it was as simple as that; a symmetry between the policy and the philosophy.
From early 2000 onwards, with the funding issue resolved, at least in general terms, Alan and I and a close team of advisers started to work out what would become the ten-year NHS Plan.
Meanwhile, we were working in other policy areas to similar purport. Andrew Adonis had taken over as my education adviser. I can’t remember exactly how he came to us. He had been an academic at Oxford and member of the SDP. He had been committed to writing a biography of Roy Jenkins (which the pressure of work prevented him from completing) and had been a journalist for the Financial Times and the Observer. His arrival was fortuitous and gloriously productive. He was totally decent, had a first-class intellect, and was not afraid to think without ideological constraint. He completely ‘got’ New Labour.
Of course, there was resentment of him because of the SDP past. By the way, it was similar with Derek Scott, who advised me on pensions and macroeconomic policy. Derek was really tough-minded and acerbic, and added a new dimension to the team. He had, however, the diplomatic skills of Dirty Harry. Meetings with the Treasury would turn into war zones and he could go off faster than the average firecracker. But, funnily enough, I liked having him around.
Andrew, by contrast, was such a thoroughly nice guy that even diehard SDP-haters found it difficult to dislike him. Not that a few of them didn’t try really hard, mind you.
David Blunkett, like me, was undergoing the same reconsideration around standards and structures, and of course Andrew greatly urged in this direction. David had pulled around him a strong team as well, with people like Michael Barber and the permanent secretary of the department Michael Bichard, who was one of the best. So we also began rethinking our way through school and university reform, with the same principles as in health.
Criminal justice was altogether a different bag of nails. There the problem was and is profound. Over time, it led me to a complete reappraisal of the nature, purpose, structure, culture, mores, practice, ethos – you name it – of the whole system. It was and is essentially dysfunctional. But more of that another time.
Suffice to say, as one of my longer year 2000 notes put it, we needed to become more searching, more radical, more groundbreaking in our approach to the whole post-war settlement around public services and the welfare state, right across the board.
Throughout the first half of the year, we beavered away, especially on the NHS. In March, I made a statement to the House on NHS modernisation, which paved the way for the later July plan.
At the same time, the mayoral race trundled on with entirely predictable outcomes. There were two stages: first, the race for the Labour nomination; second, the race for the office itself.
As to the first, we put our all into securing Frank Dobson the nomination. We had a formidable machine in those days and it did its job formidably. The feeling about Ken among the top brass was unbelievably strong. And, of course, stupid. I don’t exempt myself. I didn’t feel visceral about it, as John and Gordon did. I rather admired Ken’s style, his quirkiness, which made him stand out as different, and his ability to communicate. I also exaggerated the dangers of his policy positions, not wilfully, but just out of force of habit when describing an opponent’s politics. It shouldn’t be like that; there is always a risk in politics that when you disagree with someone, you magnify the disagreement. Two shades of grey become black and white. A mistaken policy becomes a disastrous one.
Ken as a Labour candidate was going to be a problem for a very simple reason: he disagreed totally with the public/private partnership John Prescott and Gordon had designed for the Tube. Since London transport in many ways defined the job, it was going to be difficult to have a Labour candidate dedicated to stopping the Labour transport policy.
I supported the policy, but felt strangely less sure about its modernising nature. I also thought Bob Kiley, who Ken wanted to bring in to run the Tube after a successful spell as chief of transport in New York, had something to commend him.
But John had the contempt of Northern Labour for London Labour, and didn’t trust Ken or some arriviste New Yorker. And Gordon just detested him. Also Neil Kinnock expressed himself very strongly as only Neil could. And in any event, I had, as I say, not discouraged Frank from resigning to stand, so Ken was therefore obviously not the leadership candidate.
In time, I learned to let go and realised the stupidity, indeed the futility, of imposing the leadership line in situations where the whole point was to devolve power. It was, in fact, a hangover from the days of Labour Party indiscipline. There was such a fear of departing from the line that a sense of perspective easily got lost. So, in the end, I decided that, all in all, an independent Ken victory may be the least worst option, given Frank as mayor was undoable.
But we still had the party election to go through. Frank won, but due to union votes. Not a great New Labour outcome. I saw Ken at Chequers just before the result and asked for a pledge of loyalty if Frank won. He gave it, but without enthusiasm, and I was not really surprised when after the result he announced he would stand as an independent. I didn’t really blame him. Interestingly, some of the London Party people who were supportive of me, but a little leftish, told me they were going to vote for Ken come what may; and that I had just been daft in opposing him, because, as they said, if Ken doesn’t stand, don’t think Frank will be mayor. He won’t. They were probably right.
At the last moment, just before the primary got under way within the Labour Party, I made a last-ditch attempt to switch horses.
There had been some whispers that Mo Mowlam might consider entering the list. Now this was a wholly different order of proposition. Mo would give Ken a real run for his money. I asked her if she was serious. She said she was. I latched on to the idea. I invited Frank and his wife Janet round to Downing Street and had a drink with them in the flat. Alastair was there, and Cherie popped in. I explained I thought it would be difficult for Frank to win and explored whether he might contemplate standing down. The answer was firm; he wouldn’t. I can’t say I was surprised, and he probably, and with some justification, felt let down by me even broaching the subject.
In the end, Mo was not really prepared to press it either. My relationship with her also was not quite what it had been.
One of the problems in politics is that when you are le
ader – and it is, I guess, the same in any organisation – you have to take personnel decisions that can be highly fraught. There are only a certain number of top jobs and there are many more applicants or supplicants than appointees.
Reshuffles are hard enough. Sacking people is always a ghastly business, but so is failure to promote in accordance with the person’s estimation of themselves. There is often a yawning gap between their judgement about their capacity and yours.
Mo had been fabulous in Northern Ireland – just what the situation needed – but when I came in late 1999 to consider a change there (as usual it was unhelpfully mooted in the press, and as usual even more unhelpfully ascribed as part of a Downing Street operation, which was completely untrue – I would never have done that to Mo), I had a one-to-one discussion with her out on the terrace of Number 10.
She was not averse to moving, though she was annoyed at the stuff in the media, which was understandable. But she then startled me by saying (and she was nothing if not blunt): I am the most popular person in the government; Robin Cook is unpopular and tarnished; you should make me Foreign Secretary. It was a bid I was completely unprepared for, and I’m afraid I showed immediately that I thought it was unthinkable.
And there is the problem. The moment the chasm opens up between their revealed sense of their capability and your revealed sense of their capability, the relationship never recovers.
Mo had been an early supporter of mine. She had real political sense. She was immense fun to be around. She handled her illness with beautiful dignity. She was the most popular member of the government.
Her unique brand of what I can only call ‘Mo-ness’ was a healthy culture shock in Northern Ireland. I shall never forget the moment in the peace negotiations when in front of some fairly orthodox Irishmen, she came into my room, took off her wig, slapped it on the table, put her feet on the desk, belched loudly and opined, ‘Well, this isn’t a barrel of laughs, is it?’ and proceeded to tell them how many other things she would prefer to be doing right then, starting with vigorous sexual intercourse. In a matter of seconds she altered all hitherto fixed canons of behaviour recognisable in previous British Secretaries of State. But I quailed to think of what this attitude would do when thrust upon the slender sensibilities of foreign ministers and tricky international summitry. I wasn’t sure the Foreign Office – the grand building imbued with the spirit of Palmerston and Grey and Halifax and even Peter Carrington – was quite ready for ‘Mo-ness’. So it wasn’t to be.
Incidentally, it is an amazing thing about the Foreign Secretary job – everyone wants it. It is not simply that the Foreign Secretary is one of the ‘great offices of state’, but also because you basically spend your time with people who are polite to you, on the global issues of the day, and travel the world generally dispensing goodwill and opinions to those who seem relatively keen to receive them. Not for you the horny-handed sons of toil badgering you over fuel prices, or complaining about the government’s clearly ill-motivated refusal to spend money on this service or that, or the minutiae of road schemes. You are too lofty to be troubled by such ephemera. Your stage is the world; your discourse is of strategic interests too rarefied and majestic for ordinary souls; your attitudes can be balanced and measured in a way wholly inconsistent with the rough and tumble of the domestic scene. Even in the House of Commons – the nearest you ever come to the brute side of life – you can still talk of things and places and pronounce names that have the average Member of Parliament nodding along in gratified incomprehension.
So people want it. One of the reasons why I had such huge regard for Jack Cunningham, a great example of a serious grown-up in the Labour politics of the 1980s and 90s, was that he had been John Smith’s choice as Shadow Foreign Secretary. I moved him to make way for Robin Cook, who was not Jack’s favourite person. He took the decision – if he resented it he never showed it – and got on with things. Such people are rare.
All this, however, is to digress. The mayoral election was doomed to be messy; and so it proved. Ken duly stood as an independent, trounced Frank and became mayor. I was careful, though, not to go OTT in attacking Ken during the campaign and kept lines of communication open. After the race, we settled down to a proper relationship with remarkable ease, something he deserved real credit for.
Throughout these months, despite the politics of London, fresh tremors in Northern Ireland, the hijacking of a plane at Stansted by (ironically in the light of future events) Afghans escaping the Taliban, May Day riots by anarchists who defaced the Cenotaph and all the normal flotsam and jetsam, I was still burrowing into the geothermals of public service reform.
The intricacy of the issues involved was really hard to unravel and reconstruct. At this stage, I was still feeling my way, holding endless meetings with advisers, experts and those within the services. I was trying to get a sense of how change might be fashioned, formulated and most important put in place on the ground, in real situations with real people.
I found it all intensely frustrating. At points, I wanted to give up everything else and just spend days on the front line, learning what it was like to manage a service, what its real pressures were, what could be done within the conventional parameters and how the parameters might be changed.
Also here I bumped up against the single most difficult thing about making change in any organisation. It’s what I call ‘taking away the givens’. By this I mean as follows. Usually, you operate in any organisation within boundaries of thought and of practice. These become ‘givens’. So in the NHS, it is a given that the surgeon performs operations, and the GP is a general practitioner who doesn’t touch the surgeon’s knife. The nurse doesn’t (or didn’t then) do complicated prescriptions. The more hospital beds, the better the service. In the private sector you pay; in the public sector you don’t.
Or in a school, you have a standard national curriculum. Or in the Civil Service, you have a set career path. Or in the courts, there is a trial process that is hallowed.
Challenging these ‘givens’ within which the system operates can be hard. They are always there for a reason and, historically at least, often a good reason. Changing them can be even harder. A whole web of custom, practice and interest has been created around them; yet for the organisation to make progress, they must be changed.
So we began a reconsideration of the basic principles on which these services were run, trying to measure them not against the ‘givens’ but against the contemporary reality, the potential and possibility opened up by change, the parameters we would want if we were relieved of all political constraint and just exercised freethinking.
I used to call the experts in and say, if you had a completely free hand and you could do what you want, how you want, what would you do? The picture I started to build up conformed to my own instinct, but it was clear the services would require radical change.
Thus the ten-year NHS Plan. I didn’t think I would last ten years and neither did Alan, but we were conscious of the need to set a framework to construct a platform that would place the NHS on a different trajectory. The pace might be quicker or slower, but the direction would be irreversible, at least if we were allowed the chance to show what reform could do.
But we had to proceed with the utmost care. There was party opposition – John Prescott was often hostile; the Treasury sceptical though at that point merely mildly obstructive; the unions wary and (rightly) suspicious; and the professions within the services basically dominated by the traditionalists.
There was another challenge. People could accept there were areas of clear and obvious failure in the public services. It wasn’t, to be fair, hard to persuade people we needed to change the way we dealt with the NHS winter pressures. It wasn’t hard to persuade people to do something with failing schools, by which I mean schools that were to all intents and purposes basket cases – 10 per cent, 15 per cent, 20 per cent of pupils getting five good GCSEs – but that was nowhere near the ambition I wanted.
/> I take an essentially middle-class view of public services, and you can’t understand anything I tried to do to reform them without understanding that. I sent my own children to state schools; they were good state schools – but I wanted them to be even better. And they were, at least then, reasonably rare. It wasn’t simply the schools getting 10 per cent, 15 per cent or 20 per cent of their kids to the right level that concerned me, but the schools getting only 50 or 60 per cent.
It wasn’t reducing waiting times for inpatients from eighteen months to six months that was the final goal; I thought six months totally unacceptable. I knew I wouldn’t stand for my own loved ones waiting that long. Why should anyone else? And why should it be an impossible dream to alter the system so that the best happened?
So we had a much greater ambition for change. The trouble was for many people, including, ironically, the public we were wanting to serve, a coasting or average service seemed fair enough.
In any event, though there were people prepared to settle for less than they deserved, there was a large swathe of New Labour support that voted for us precisely because they shared that middle-class mentality. By the way, none of that means ‘working-class’ people want less; but the very fact that I feel that the phrase now goes in inverted commas shows something (and not just about me!). The aspirant working class aspire to be middle class.
It all comes back to the same thing. Most people are ambitious for themselves and their family and don’t feel guilty about it. Neither should they. It’s just they should not begrudge such ambition or achievement for others and should feel a sense of obligation to help bring it about for those less fortunate or successful.
The problem, however, was that though much of the party could accept radical reform in the event of chronic failure, most would not accept that radicalism in the case of passive mediocrity. So we had a battle to change structure, to alter the ‘givens’; we also had a battle to change attitudes, to promote excellence not at the expense of equity but as a legitimate goal in its own right.
