Is it too obvious to write about the Guardian’s comment pages? I just thought the three main pieces today were all extraordinary in different ways.
It’s good to see Jonathan Freedland gamely struggling for some answers to the Left’s dilemma (or is it the government’s?) of how to backtrack on New Labour’s market fundamentalism.
One of Blair’s great errors has been to allow reform to become synonymous with privatisation.
You got it, Jonathan.
This is the great Blairite error and the reason the New Labour project lost so many in the party and the wider left even before the disasters of Iraq and the various financial scandals that have followed. There is creeping despair abroad in the party and this model of reform will no longer provide hope of a way out. It has become clear that the “what works” test was always tilted in favour of the private sector. Freedland’s solution, or one of them, is to introduce more of the voluntary sector into public services, but I’m not convinced it is robust enough. The real answer is to reinvigorate the public sector from within, but no one believes that can happen any more: the public service ethic is too battered to make this possible.
Oddly, Camila Batmanghelidjh, writing on the next page, illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of Freedland’s argument. Her projects, Kids Company/The Place2Be, have shown that the voluntary sector can work to improve the lives of the most damaged children in society. She calls them the “suicidally uncaring” i.e. children who have been so badly abused that they no longer care if they or others suffer physical harm. The government has consistently refused to apply her model of intensive therapy and out-of-school education on a national level. Perhaps it can’t be replicated. But until we learn from these types of local initiative, their effect with remain just that… local. The market (even one that includes the voluntary sector) is not geared to creating nationally consistent systems.
But Camila’s batty analysis is spot on:
Our structures are failing children because we are scared of love. The expression of our humanity terrifies us into political cowardice. We deaden the space where creative solutions could thrive. So often those in power are too busy minding their own professional standing that on the way they trample over the disfranchised (sic).
Lastly, there is the always-readable-but-often-wrong Simon Jenkins. His piece on the “loans for honours” scandal is an exercise in political cynicism. He argues that there’s no need for a police investigation because governments have always been corrupt and sold honours. And yet there is no doubt that Jenkins wouldn’t have been writing about this had the police not insisted on pursuing the investigation. Such world-weary knowingness is deeply irritating. It is almost impossible to investigate political corruption in this country, let alone bring a prosecution. The Labour Party, in its desperation for cash has walked into the one area of potential malpractice which is well established in English law. So we should let them get on with it, as the public administration committee has done by suspending its inquiry until the police investigation is complete.
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