‘Things need to be different than what they currently are,’ Derek Simpson, the general secretary of the trade union Amicus, said on the Today programme last week. This is a proposition around which the whole country can unite. But there Mr Simpson’s status as national spokesman begins and ends. The former communist is one of the foremost union barons pressing Labour to change direction radically when Tony Blair leaves office. New Labour, Mr Simpson argues, was the problem: it is time to reassert the workers’ rights and to win back the electorate.
It should be obvious to anyone with the slightest knowledge of recent electoral history that his two objectives — socialist and electoral — are not only distinct but utterly incompatible. As the Prime Minister told the last TUC conference he will address, ‘Believe me, the issue at the next election is not whether we have put in sufficient amounts of money, or have been sufficiently supportive of public sector workers. The issue will be whether we have managed to deliver the outputs for the money the taxpayer feels that they have put in.’
As we argued in this space two weeks ago, New Labour is obsolete: its old-fashioned social democratic prescriptions do not answer the needs of the time. That said, Mr Blair’s rebuke to the brothers was correct. The electorate is not concerned with the so-called ‘privatisation of the public services’. It is, however, increasingly enraged by the pitiful value for money that taxpayers have been offered under this government, even as the tax burden has crept above Germany’s.
Every reliable indicator shows that NHS productivity has declined even as untold billions have been spent on the world’s most bureaucratic and centralised health service.
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