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The public sector swamp
Struggling up as best he can from the mire of sleaze around him, the prime minister protests that he, and New Labour with him, must be judged by whether he can deliver. That means delivering on what really matters - on schools and hospitals and social services and crime. The simple answer is that he can't. It isn't that he doesn't want to, or doesn't really mean to. It is simply that he can't. The reason is that he hasn't been able and won't be able to stand up to the public-sector mentality.
Tony Blair may have been able to root old socialist orthodoxies out of the Labour party, up to a point, but they remain powerfully embedded in all the public services that matter. The persistence - the astonishing resilience - of the old, discredited socialist mindset in those services is why they are now at the point of collapse, why our schools and hospitals are an international disgrace, why there's more crime in London than in New York and why the police have just announced that they cannot cope.
Tony Blair did, I believe, at one time think he could stand up to this orthodoxy. What he got were scars on his back, as he complained in an unguarded moment last year; however, so powerful is the state-sector orthodoxy that he had to apologise almost immediately.
After all, a huge number of Labour voters work in the Augean stables that is the state sector, and if they don't want any stuck-up Hercules-come-lately telling them what to do, then he'd better stop. They, in fact, are the real forces of conservatism which hold back the public services, which stifle any criticism and undermine all reform; it is their mentality which is the enemy of the people.
Any mentality must be hard to sum up, obviously enough, but I think that this one was very strikingly personified, about this time last year, by a nameless employee of a Walsall jobcentre. He emerged briefly from obscurity to give a glimpse into the insane, Kafkaesque inefficiency of this mentality.
According to news reports, he told a publisher who wanted to advertise for a trainee in the jobcentre that he must not use the words "enthusiastic and hardworking" in his advertisement, because they might be discriminatory under the Disability Discrimination Act. The jobcentre later said the word "reliable" was also unacceptable, for the same reason.
Where does one begin? That is how NOT to deliver jobs. That is how NOT to deliver employees to employers. That is how, abandoning all common sense, to lose sight of the important priority in hand - getting jobs for people - in pursuit of an entirely different agenda; with the best of all possible intentions, and precisely because of those intentions, that is how to fail completely. And that is how the entire state sector works, or rather doesn't work.
In the name of equal opportunities, or ethnic outreach, or gender grievances, or job protection, or union guidelines or promoting social change, well-meaning people lose sight of what they're really supposed to be doing - tending the sick and old, or catching criminals, say. Instead they must learn the language of "empower ment", only to be deeply confused by it, as in Walsall. Instead their time is taken up with ever-increasing mountains of paper work, which, with the inertia of bureaucracy, diverts yet more time and money and people away from the bedside or the blackboard.
Then ever more money and ever more workers become necessary, to deliver ever more assessments of best practice and quality assurance and training in - yes - equal opportunities, ethnic outreach, job protection, anger management and the whole shemozzle. That, of course, is part of the point; the orthodoxy seeks to entrench and perpetuate itself. And those who don't go along with the orthodoxy often feel shamed and silenced by it; there is a strong element of bullying about it, in my experience.
Pursuing something other than your top priority is doomed to failure. In the private sector it could not happen. That's not to say that the private sector, any more than the public sector, ought to be able to get away with unfair discrimination, against the disabled or anybody else. Nor does it. There is plenty of legislation - arguably too much - to prevent it.
But any private-sector employment agency which behaved so counter-productively as the one in Walsall would go bust immediately; it would have no public subsidies to disguise its uselessness. That is largely why private schools and private
medicine are so astonishingly much better, as anyone with any direct knowledge must admit.
I did for a short time think that the appearance of New Labour might mean the end of this mentality. Not so. Ministers propose, but the state sector only disposes if it feels like it; try changing something in social services, and despair. The idea that public services can only be provided by the public sector refuses to die.
Like the Conservatives, Blair has been unable to drive a stake through its bad old undead heart. It is quite the other way round; the state sector, and the state-sector mentality, will drive a stake through his, and probably before very long. He will be judged by this.
The Guardian | Tuesday, May 15, 2001
