A giveaway Budget in March preceding a general election in May against an improving economic backdrop: that, we’re told, is Downing Street’s favoured scenario. But still the election is Keir Starmer’s to lose, so here’s my start-the-year advice to him. Don’t bang on about Rishi Sunak being too rich; don’t make immigration the issue, because you have no solutions; don’t pretend to admire Margaret Thatcher; but do channel John Major – to whom you bear much closer comparison – and offer a new Citizen’s Charter.
What? Isn’t that 1991 exercise in footling managerialism, forever associated with the ‘cones hotline’, remembered as a laughable failure? Maybe, but its intention was good: to deliver better performance across every aspect of public administration through accountability, user choice and private-sector best practice. And isn’t our greatest source of misery and low productivity today the dysfunction of everything from commuter trains and NHS dentistry to backlogs in the criminal courts and the chaos of ‘making tax digital’? I am, as it happens, a constituent of Sir Keir in Holborn and St Pancras: if he comes up with a new deal to transform public services, I might even vote for him.
Dames and knights
For once, some interesting boardroom names in the New Year Honours – a list that traditionally reflects British anti-business prejudice by saluting every other walk of life ahead of enterprise and corporate leadership.
It helps to be different, of course – and I raise my hat to ‘UK Women in Finance Champion’ and Aviva chief Amanda Blanc for her damehood, even if her policy of overseeing senior appointments to stop them all being filled with white men is a provocation to anti-wokeists.
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