The only good thing New Labour have done in office they did in their first week: the granting of independence to the Bank of England. In every other respect, things have gone the other way: a 60 per cent increase in taxes and spending; the ruthless subordination of schools, hospitals and police forces to the imperatives of politics; and a great extension of the state into the lives of individuals, families and businesses.
This book is an unqualified celebration of that achievement. Written by the Guardian journalists (and husband and wife) Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Better or Worse? concludes happily that the state has grown much larger under Labour, and shows, in detail, how.
It is ineffably boring. The Toynbee-Walkers are modern Bevanites with the soul of Gaitskell, the desiccated calculating machine. Like the three men who understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, they and Gordon Brown might be the only people in Britain who can see their way clearly through the Working Families Tax Credit, the Children’s Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Childcare Credit and the Child Trust Fund.
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