As you know I find Heffer unpredictable. Sometimes he goes into overdrive and ruins his own case but here he has had a good day and lists the failures of New Labour as well as the things they have done as deliberate policy which have also been failures.
Christina
TELEGRAPH 12.8.09
The trouble with Labour is that they never grasp the consequences
The Government's failure to think ahead will leave a disastrous legacy, says Simon Heffer.
One shouldn't mind whether it is Gordon Brown, Lord Mandelson, Harriet Harman or Bert the Dog who is running the country today, because it doesn't matter. I can see that if Iran suddenly launched a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv, or if Russia decided to re-form the Soviet bloc, there might be some curiosity about who was in charge. But in this climate, where a wounded, bleeding rodent of an administration drags itself through the last months before a general election, it is unlikely that either Mr Brown from his social work, or Lord Mandelson from his sunlounger, would make any difference to our rate of decline.
Lord Mandelson has one virtue – if you can call it that. His cynical pose as a poor man's Noël Coward helps reinforce the notion that we can all be "relaxed" about how things are going. He isn't taking the rough and tumble of politics too seriously, and so, perhaps, neither should we. We are no longer governed: we are crisis-managed. There is no point to this government other than to keep its supporters in jobs for as long as possible. It has no vision, it has no programme; it is just there to do its impersonation of holding things together until someone else takes the poisoned chalice. It is irrelevant which intellectual or moral inadequate is in charge. The least said, in many respects, the better.
The damage was, after all, done long ago. The ministers who now purport to "run" the country have all been complicit, mostly through neglect, in creating the present mess. A theme runs through their dereliction, of having failed at every turn to think strategically. Even people as anti-statist as I am believe the state has a limited function in securing the best interests of the nation. Whatever Labour might protest otherwise, it has never for a moment pursued that course. When it has claimed to think for the long term – and how many robotically boring speeches by Mr Brown have we sat through at party conferences in the past 15 years where he droned on about planning a golden future – it has in fact always allowed its managerial incompetence and ideological blinkeredness to prevent any progress from being made.
It was reported this week, for example, that the Government is afraid that the security of our food supply is threatened by the paucity of produce grown here, and our reliance on imports. Yet what has the Government done for the farmers? What has it done to encourage not just the viability of businesses on the land, but to encourage new businesses there? What has it ever done (despite promises made by Tony Blair before the 1997 election) to extricate ourselves from the Common Agricultural Policy, which militates against the efficiency of our farmers in subsidising the inefficiency of so many abroad, where in some countries agriculture has become a branch of the welfare state?
Such inability to see the consequences of any policy is typical. If we are not careful, we shall within a decade require phased power cuts because the Government in office for the past 12 years has neglected to order enough nuclear power stations. Mr Blair himself admitted that we needed more, but any sense of planning a secure future for energy (which must be just as important as a secure future for food) is non-existent. The romance of returning to candlepower will soon wear off when tempered by the economic realities of a three-day week
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Let us not forget, either, the 12-year programme of mediocrity in our schools, and now indeed in our universities, where for reasons of the Government's addiction to ideology we turn out young people many of whom hold qualifications that do not translate into an ability to hack it in the real world. Let us not forget our transport policy, which makes us appear prehistoric in comparison with our closest European neighbours, and which continues to damage the ability of our industry to compete with international rivals. Let us not forget the debacle of our immigration policy which, having been allowed to run riot by such people as Jack Straw, the present Justice Secretary, when at the Home Office, now in some areas overloads our education, health, social service and housing systems to the point where they can barely function; and where racial tensions are stoked up to the point where the BNP can secure two seats in the European Parliament. And, on a matter of life and death, let us never forget how an obtuse dereliction in properly resourcing, manning and supporting our Armed Forces has provided the need for a new generation of war memorials.
But, supremely, let us not forget the mother of all failures, that of running the economy. Mr Brown will continue to blame the Americans, and the banks, for his own epic incapability of balancing the books, and for his borrowing and spending binge that threatens to indebt us through to our great-grandchildren. This strategic disaster does not merely highlight a failure, or rather a refusal, to understand economics. It highlights the absence of common sense peculiar to almost all these acts of wanton damage: the apparent impossibility of grasping that if you do certain things, certain other things happen.
If you ignore the plight of farmers, you end up with little food. If you don't build nuclear power stations, the lights go out. If you don't build a rigorous culture of excellence in schools, they turn out uneducated pupils. If you don't build new roads and railway lines, you can't shift people and goods around the country efficiently. If you don't have a strict immigration policy, you have infrastructural meltdown and the emergence of Nazi-style political parties. Above all, if you choose not to regulate banks adequately, then they fail, and if you choose to allow well over a trillion of debt, much of it owed by the Government, the country goes broke.
Instead, the Government has done other things. It wasted years "reforming" the constitution, with the result that the House of Lords is no longer an effective revising chamber and the United Kingdom could be on the verge of breaking up. It has created numerous anti-terrorist laws that allow the state to entrap, snoop upon and restrict the legal activities of millions of harmless citizens. It has built the client state and turned the welfare state from being an agent of compassion into an alternative career structure for the proletariat. It has given up having a foreign policy and relegated us as a power in the world. It has politicised the Civil Service and largely wrecked its ethos of disinterested conduct. It has treated Parliament with contempt. It has rolled over in front of Europe. Its great triumph was to abolish foxhunting. It now mostly spends its days turned in upon itself, having initial skirmishes in a civil war that will be unleashed after the next election. The main players are concerned, as always, about their own futures rather than that of the country. These have not exactly been 12 years of signal achievement, have they?
So, since nothing will change, let us enjoy our own holidays, and stop worrying about which cabinet minister is or is not having theirs. Not being governed at all would have been better than having to stomach this shower since 1997. Sadly, that does not seem to be an option.
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