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Monday, May 26, 2008
David Howarth on the end of New Labour
There is a characteristically incisive article by David Howarth (Lib Dem MP for Cambridge) on the Guardian's Comment is Free site:
This is not the end of New Labour, but its culmination. It is the logical consequence of the driving principles of the New Labour project.
Had to get down to Peter Guillam's first comment on that article before I felt that I was reading sense in the comments, but he then wobbled a bit when commenting about charges of inefficiency in public services. His first comment included: "In 1997 Nu Lab had a genuine chance to chart a new course of competently administered social democracy of that sort that exists to a greater or lesser extent in most North and West European countries. They blew it for the reasons identified in the article, plus an addiction to managerialism and many other things." Exactly - but they found a civil service unfit to work like those other countries, and did nothing about it. Actually they made it worse by beating it with sticks instead of reforming it, and Brown is still not reforming it. On the rocks indeed.
Had to get down to Peter Guillam's first comment on that article before I felt that I was reading sense in the comments, but he then wobbled a bit when commenting about charges of inefficiency in public services. His first comment included: "In 1997 Nu Lab had a genuine chance to chart a new course of competently administered social democracy of that sort that exists to a greater or lesser extent in most North and West European countries. They blew it for the reasons identified in the article, plus an addiction to managerialism and many other things." Exactly - but they found a civil service unfit to work like those other countries, and did nothing about it. Actually they made it worse by beating it with sticks instead of reforming it, and Brown is still not reforming it. On the rocks indeed.
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