Imagine a football match in which your team is performing formidably. It leads 3-0, then, inexplicably, it slows down, allowing the adversary to advance despite a weak, unconvincing performance and a desperate shortage of star players. Welcome to the match of your lifetime: Team Labour v Team Tory.
Though based in Washington, DC, where I am a Master’s student, I follow British politics closely. It seems to me that during more than a decade of leadership, Labour has delivered Britain into the 21st century. Sustained investment in state education has yielded demonstrable results. The risk of being a victim of crime is at historically low levels. The effectiveness of the British health-care system is envied in the US, and again the improvement is undeniable. Prime Minister Gordon Brown is potently orchestrating domestic and global economic strategies.
Yet, for reasons I find increasingly hard to understand, the Labour Party has been hesitant about defending its own policy record. This is surprising because Labour’s decade-long policy output is so superior to the Conservatives’ platform for the future that the latter does not stand up to serious analysis. On education, for instance, the Conservative vision is to divert funding to building new independent schools. This will incur unnecessary costs for taxpayers. Additionally, some of their proposed schools are to be funded based on the number of children they attract. The Tories are ignorant of, or unconcerned by, the severe distributional implications of this competitive system.
Wealthier parents will have an incentive to invest more in their children’s education in the same way they invest in luxury cars. Inevitably, schools in poorer areas will fall behind. The imperative for education should transcend the obsession with individual success conditioned by market competition and the profit motive.
Equally questionable is the Conservatives’ evaluation of education, which resembles
an engineer’s assessment of road construction. Using percentages of “poor discipline” and “truancy” to punish teachers and state schools is nonsense. It conjures up America’s No Child Left Behind programme, whose assembly-line approach consigned students to a vicious cycle of inequality. Education is a complex co-productive process, in which students, parents and teachers are all responsible for the outcome.
Tory policy on crime rests on a false causality between law enforcement and criminal behaviour. Overall, their objective is punishment at all costs to deter criminals,
but with no guarantee of subsequent social integration. They assume that punishment will generate fear and reduce criminal intent. But criminals do not act because of an absence of fear. Crime rates may be simultaneously a function of the economy, health, deprivation or family. Isolating enforcement from the rest is imprudent. This demonstrates a failure to distinguish between “law enforcement” as procedure and “increasing personal and public safety” as a policy goal.
Also unreasonable is the Tory rejection
of programmes such as early release. They shape their response to fit transient public fear, and call for more prisons and more severe sentencing, irrespective of crime type. Yet here, again, the Conservatives refuse to consider that the costs of building additional prisons and extending incarceration stretch out into the future, multiplied by the costs to society when inmates are released without proper rehabilitation. Cost-benefit analyses overwhelmingly show that enforcement tailored to the degree of criminality is more cost-effective than generic long sentencing, and transitional programmes are twice as cost-effective as longer sentences.
On health, the Conservatives introduce profit motives, exposing the NHS to the uncertainty of the free market. They believe that health providers must have financial incentives to deliver a better service, which implies an infusion of government funds into greedy competition among doctors and hospitals. Inevitably, rewarding providers for success will transform health care into a supply-driven system at the expense of the taxpayer. You can expect the NHS to overflow with unnecessary medical procedures that will increase costs.
Finally, the Tories’ overall economic policy is inconsistent with their spending pledges for education, health and crime. First, they commit to interventionist funding at all costs, especially as they promise corporations seats at the table. Next, they pledge fiscal conservatism by lowering business taxes and raising the inheritance tax threshold to £2m. This is oblivious to long-term negative consequences, including an imbalanced national budget.
The immaturity of the Tories’ platform reveals itself again as they intend to interfere with the demand-and-supply dynamic of the jobs market. They promise to ensure work for everyone, which is noble indeed. However, their actions would disregard sensitive aspects of the economy such as elasticity of demand for certain jobs. Failure to consider these will hurt British workers in the long run and could unleash endemic unemployment.
When we discuss the Conservatives’ policies here in Washington, DC, we are often reduced to laughter that a political party seeking to govern a country as important as Britain could publish such plans as it has. But it has. It is time that they were subjected to proper attack.
Alina Palimaru is a student in advanced public policy analysis at American University in Washington, DC
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