Labour's last chance to stop a Tory victory

Published on Sunday 28 June 2009 21:14

WHEN rumours started circulating in the aftermath of the European election results that Gordon Brown was drawing up a "National Plan", it was perhaps unsurprising that more venerable political commentators had a sudden feeling of déjà vu.

For it was the National Plan drawn up by Gordon Brown's near namesake, Labour's then deputy leader George Brown – whose title of "First Secretary of State and Secretary of State for Economic Affairs" was almost as gilded as Peter Mandelson's most recent acquisitions – that formed the centrepiece of Harold Wilson's 1960s Labour government.

The aspirations and common purpose forged by George Brown's National Plan helped Labour transform the Commons majority of three it had secured at the 1964 general election into a landslide victory at the election of 1966. But the plan itself is commonly held by today's politicians to have failed. It was supposed to harness the "white heat" of Wilson's technological revolution to drag the UK out of the Edwardian era into the shiny efficient future of Concorde, hovercraft and atomic power. But Concorde was affordable only by the few; the many had to make do with the appalling build-quality of British Leyland cars.

It is this that may explain 10 Downing Street's official insistence these past few weeks that the "National Plan" is not a National Plan at all, but instead a "Plan for building Britain's future". The 2009 plan, it is true, is broader, seeking to address wider issues, from schools and skills through housing, police and immigration through to climate change and energy. Its role will be to provide the narrative framework for the reforms to Britain on which Gordon Brown will fight the next election.

George Brown's plan, reflecting the limited departmental purview of its author, was concerned fundamentally with the economy: with growth. Indeed, Labour's electoral appeal in 1964 had essentially been it would be more effective at planning the economy and ending the cycle of "stop-go" economics (the 1950s idiom for "boom and bust") that had bedevilled Britain under the Conservatives. The blame for the failure of Wilson's government to rejuvenate Britain's flagging economy is often laid at the clay feet of George Brown. He is a convenient scapegoat, no longer in a position to present the case for the defence. He died in 1986, in the meantime destroying his reputation with a succession of injudicious, drunken outbursts.

The blame is also laid at the door of the National Plan itself. But in its insistence that its shiny new plan is a different sort of plan from the 1960s plan, Downing Street risks making a mistake almost as serious as the Conservative predilection for attacking government investment in infrastructure and public services during a downturn, which, as Keynes demonstrated many decades ago, is actually the most sensible time to do it of all. While Gordon Brown's strategy to deal with the downturn envisages investment in infrastructure and public service improvements, giving a Keynesian counteracting boost to the economy, David Cameron's, in contrast, seems to rely more on cuts, which would make the downturn even worse.

The problem in the 1960s was not the plan, but the implementation. Even at a basic level, ministers failed to succeed in ensuring the bureaucracy of government pulled in the same direction.

That Gordon Brown envisages a plan to tackle Britain's ills across such a wide canvas means his challenge is, if anything, greater. To take just one area on which he is said to want to focus – tackling crime – over recent years, the Home Office research directorate, in the interest of developing and evaluating evidence-based policies, has commissioned millions of pounds of external research. According to one of the main centres of expertise, the Cambridge University network of criminologists, the single most common finding of Home Office research has been "implementation failure"; evaluators have been unable to document programmes' comparative successes and failures because the programmes have not been implemented as intended.

Another aspiration, to foster more green jobs in the UK, is undermined by the failure of government to think through consequences in other areas. So, while Ed Miliband's Department for Energy and Climate Change urges wind turbine manufacturers to invest in Britain to supply the market for wind farms, it has failed to unblock the bureaucratic obstacles placed by other departments of government – such as the MoD, which claims wind turbines might complicate radar systems – that have made the UK onshore wind energy market considerably less attractive than Obama's United States, with the result that jobs are going there instead.

Gordon Brown's Downing Street is at pains to emphasise the new plan is "not about central command and control" but "better delivery", "public service reform" and "greater accountability". This is laudable stuff, but, as an aspiration, it is not new. It has been Labour's aspiration since at least 1997. "Delivery" is undoubtedly better than it was, but with a great deal more invested in it, it would be remiss were it not to be. The challenge will be to bring improvements while making it more efficient. That is the harder stuff to do. And it requires making "joined up government" far more of a reality than it has thus far been. But if Brown and his team can do it, it may be their best chance of turning round the Conservative poll lead.