There are many adjectives one might use to describe Tony Blair’s decade in power, but one most people are unlikely to choose when it comes to reform of public services, is “revolutionary”. Blair himself, just before stepping down, expressed disappointment that he had not transformed the health and education systems, and other branches of government, as much as he had hoped for in those heady days of May 1997.
Certainly, improvements have been made – there are fewer NHS patients waiting a very long time to get treatment, for example – but they have generally been at a high cost to the taxpayer. Looking back, Blair often expressed the wish that he had gone further, faster – more revolutionary than evolutionary. Labour, he famously said, was “at our best when at our boldest”.
Anyone wanting to learn and apply the lessons of the Blair years, not least the Conservatives, might be tempted to think that if a new government wants to ensure it makes a difference that is noticeable to voters, it must be revolutionary. This is stirring stuff, and would make a good rallying cry, but it is only half true.
Debating whether we should have revolution or evolution suggests all that matters is the pace of change. But if you want to transform public services in Britain, what matters far more is the way things are changed, and the direction of change. Better to do things right and do them slowly, than fast but wrong. Revolutions are not necessarily a bad thing, but you have to handle them with care. Ill-considered revolutions have a nasty habit of backfiring. There are different types of revolution, as I will come to; some you definitely want to avoid, and others you want to embrace.
In government, as in the rest of life, you travel further if you take small, steady steps in a straight line, than if you run around in circles. Margaret Thatcher did not generally see herself as a revolutionary, but her direction of travel was constant, each piece of legislation building on earlier legislation. The result, after a decade, really was a revolution: she transformed Britain from a sclerotic mess to a dynamic, self-confident country, and laid the foundations for the economic success the Labour government inherited.
The problems of the Blair government frequently lay in its lack of direction. Not knowing where it was going meant it often ended up back where it started. For example, soon after the party came to power, it abolished the much-demonised NHS internal market, only to reinvent it a few years later. It abolished grant-maintained schools, and then reintroduced them in all but name as academies.
The Blair era was an intellectual odyssey for the left; a national experiment disproving, one by one, many of its most cherished beliefs. Frank Dobson, the first Labour health secretary, believed the NHS should be run by ethical principle. He called on doctors and nurses to pull together for the good of the nation. But that didn’t work. The Labour government thought money was the key, but found increases in spending weren’t matched by increases in output. Imposing targets was not without incident. When the law of unintended consequences struck, targets were scaled back, and Labour (or at least, the Blairites within it) embraced choice and competition, and the need for financial incentives to permeate public services in order to continuously drive up standards and improve efficiency. But internal splits on this issue meant the government could only do it half-heartedly – witness, for example, tentative steps to allow private companies to treat patients under the NHS banner and the partial liberalising of the supply of schools in the form of the academies programme.
The Conservative Party does not have the same internal barriers that Labour has in terms of public service reform – it is not dependent on trade union donations and it has fewer MPs opposed to such reforms. In my view, a Conservative government would almost certainly find it more straightforward to travel in a constant direction in terms of delivering market-oriented reforms.
