This constitution is no more welcome than it was when Mr Blair flew to Brussels on Thursday. Our poll shows it would be rejected in a referendum by more than two to one, 49% to 23%. The apparent defeat for the Franco-German axis and the rise of a UK-led “new” Europe should be taken with a pinch of salt. President Chirac left the summit a happy man. He knows the “pink lines” — such as enhanced co-operation on economic policy — will bypass some British objections. There is no reason to believe that the balance of EU power has undergone a fundamental shift.
The caravan moves on. Mr Blair is keen to refocus the political debate on domestic issues and away from Iraq. Michael Howard, after the questions asked of his party’s position on Europe by the UK Independence party, also wants to emphasise Tory ideas for reforming and improving public services. In the Punch and Judy version of the debate over public services, Labour will claim that the Tories are bent on privatising everything, while the Tories will insist that the tens of billions the government has pumped into public services have not made even the tiniest difference.
Mr Blair now pledges a “change of gear” on public services, with ministers planning to go “further and faster” in reforming delivery. While polls show that voters are aware of some improvements in the National Health Service, they also reveal, rightly, that the government is not getting good value for taxpayers’ money. The process will start this week with John Reid, the health secretary.
Next week Gordon Brown will publish his fourth comprehensive spending review, raising NHS spending to £109 billion by 2007-08, more than 9% of gross domestic product, and education spending by £14 billion to £78.6 billion by 2007-08. He will also announce tighter settlements for other departments and additional civil service job cuts, but Labour’s spin doctors will be working to ensure that the extra bounty for health and education grabs the headlines.
Missing from Labour’s plans is genuine reform. For all the talk of handing power down to local level and abandoning the centrally planned 1948 model of the NHS, the government’s reforms are timid. Foundation hospitals were neutered by Brown’s insistence that they have no effective financial autonomy. The devolving of power to primary care trusts is constrained by centrally set targets. The returns on education, to judge from the performance of state secondary schools, are negligible.
Advertisement
It would be good to be able to say that after seven years in opposition the Tories have come up with a radical alternative. Mr Howard, in a speech last week on public services, rightly criticised Labour’s centralising approach. But the opposition has been drawn neatly into the government’s trap. If Labour is offering tens of billions more for health and education, the Tories feel obliged to do so, too — £34 billion for health, £15 billion for education.
Mr Howard has abandoned education and health passports because voters associated them with privatisation, instead adopting what sounds like a Saatchi & Saatchi slogan, “public services are highly individual services”, and emphasising “the right to choose”. He promises that the policy, to be unveiled in the coming weeks, will be more radical than the tenants’ right to buy council houses was in the 1980s. That looks unlikely. Voters have peeled away from the main parties because they felt they were not being offered enough of a choice on Europe. As things stand, there is not enough of a choice on public services.