Politics

I did a strange thing the other day. I read Hansard, the parliamentary record. I’m not an MP any more, but I’m still a policy wonk. And it’s hard to find out about policy from the newspapers. Not because they don’t cover policy, but because it’s almost always editorialised—seen only through its political implications or the prism of a columnist.

To get to the raw material of policy, the best place to go is parliament. Weird, I know. When I first worked for Tony Blair as a researcher in the early 1990s, he used to read Hansard the whole time. Honestly. In the mornings, he’d come in to the office, kick back and open the Official Record. He was a keen writer of congratulatory notes, an additional epistolary explanation for why he was the parliamentary Labour party’s favourite in 1994.

He would say that if you couldn’t command the House, you’d never make it. That’s partly about technique, but mostly about argument. Anyone can come up with a soundbite, and a good one can cover up quite a lot. But if your policy is weak, your argument will be too. And that will be cruelly exposed in the Commons.

Anyway, back to my reading: I wanted to catch up on where the parties had got to on health and education. In each case there was a far more subtle debate than I’d got from the airwaves. Take this: “The debate at the heart of this bill is not about whether competition, choice or the private sector has a part to play in the NHS—they have and they do.” Who was speaking? A Tory backbencher hoping to impress? No, John Healey, shadow health minister.

Over in education, Andy Burnham had an equally unexpected argument: that Michael Gove, far from devolving power, was centralising it into his hands.

Voters haven’t heard these arguments. That’s because the Tories have succeeded in defining their reforms as being about something else: free schools and GP commissioning. And they’ve turned that into a test for their opposition: if Labour doesn’t support such structural reform, it will show that they are not prepared to reform, and are no longer progressive.

This has a history. After his election as party leader, David Cameron and his advisers set about detaching Tony Blair from Labour (helped by the fact that many Labour MPs were already heartily on the job). They did this partly through symbolism and briefing (the “heir to Blair” stuff), but their breakthrough was backing Blair’s education reforms while Labour was opposing them. It allowed the Cameroons to say that if only Labour weren’t so anti-reform then we could get all these sensible changes to our schools through. It was their best raid on the progressive torch.

And they’ve now repeated the trick in government. Whenever Labour spokespeople sound like they’re against a reform, the stock Conservative tactic is to point out they are opposing what they were doing under Blair only recently. It doesn’t really matter if it’s true. The subliminal message is that Labour has vacated the centre ground, and the Tories have filled it.

Labour should turn the Tory trick back on its originators by supporting free schools and GP commissioning. That would make it hard for the Tories to use their next stock accusation: that Labour is just opportunistically opposing everything. And it would allow Labour speakers a second half to their sentences. So: “we support free schools, but we wouldn’t be cutting funding.” “We support GP commissioning, but we think bringing competition policy wholesale into the NHS is tonto.”

Which, by the way, it may well be. I’ve read Andrew Lansley’s health white paper and it’s like a book written by two authors. The first one talks about how he wants to get rid of top-down control. Then the second puts it back in, through an independent regulator intervening on competition.

It’s hard to follow the logic. The government will have given up its ability to manage the NHS on health grounds. But there will still be top-down control, just exercised by someone else, on competition grounds—and European ones at that. If Tory backbenchers don’t like European courts telling us whether prisoners can vote, imagine how they’re going to react when Euro-judges tell us how to run the NHS. There’s plenty for Labour to get its teeth into here—and that’s before explaining to voters that their GPs will be able to choose a treatment because it’s cheaper rather than better.

But the government will be hoping instead that the test at the next election is whether free schools have been popular. They probably will be: Labour will have to admit it won’t close them, and look like it lost the argument. Better to shift the goalposts, to the second half of the sentence.