It’s a funny old world. The Tory-led Government’s cuts will mean ten thousand fewer police, perhaps even more. When in office, Labour put more police on the streets and crime fell. Fear of crime can be as debilitating as crime itself and Labour’s neighbourhood policing made a difference. Policing is about people and to pretend, as the Government is doing, that 20 per cent can be saved by sacking backroom bureaucrats will not fool anyone.
During the 2010 election campaign we heard not a word about the NHS other than for David Cameron to extol its virtues. In his 2006 speech to the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth, Cameron proclaimed that the National Health Service was safe in his hands. He told his party “I don’t need three words to explain my priority – I can do it in three letters: NHS.”
Since then, despite those words and the misleading statements in the coalition agreement, we have the Health and Social Care Bill going through the House of Commons. This will see the virtual end of the NHS as we know it and provision calculated, not on quality but on cost. Throw in the sale of our forests; parts of rural England left without buses and the vandalism of library closures and we are faced with cuts that are nothing short of brutal.
Labour seems to have finally found its voice and is doing what it is supposed to do – oppose. Yet the truth is that the party compromised. The Government can peddle the line – as it does, ad infinitum – that it is merely implementing cuts and “reforms” that Labour was either in the process of doing or would have had to do.
Those on Labour’s front bench now need to show that they have learned the lessons, not just, as they parrot, of the 1980s, but of the 1990s and the last decade. Otherwise the good things that were achieved will be lost.
This Government is unlikely to collapse anytime soon, but it is looking ragged. Its big idea – the Big Society – is imploding. First Big Society tsar Lord Wei, confronted by reality, realised, what is apparent to the rest of us, volunteering is not always easy when there are bills to be paid. Next Phil Redmond and Liverpool council retreated from being in the vanguard of the Big Society with a pilot project because the reality, this time the scale of cuts to the council’s budget, meant that an empty idea could not be delivered.
Who needs libraries when you can get books cheaply from Amazon? Can’t we just download everything on to an iPad or Kindle? And as for children needing somewhere to do their homework? Well, who ever would have thought of that? This Cabinet is simply out of touch.
How, you might ask, would the Big Society provide transport in those rural areas deprived of buses? Let’s round up a few chums with 4x4s to take people to their nearest out of town Tesco. I don’t think so. It all has a ring of: “Let them eat cake”.
There is nothing wrong with social solidarity, it’s what Labour has always been about, but the Big Society is not it. And in Munich last weekend Cameron pulled off the mask and spoke from the hard-right Tory manual when he attacked multiculturalism. This speech, wholeheartedly endorsed by Defence Secretary and arch-Thatcherite Liam Fox, did what it was meant to do when things aren’t going as planned – it created an enemy within.
It is not that multiculturalism has failed. In parts of the country, it has not been allowed to thrive. When the mills and manufacturing industries diminished, so did the trade unions that would have allowed for more integration. This will be repeated in the northern towns, where people are together but separate, when the axe is taken to the public sector. At least public bodies sought to employ from across the spectrum.
This monstrous experiment in fiscal rectitude is being undertaken so that the Prime Minister, while saying that he can’t cut taxes right now, will be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat in the run-up to the next general election.
