For Tony Blair most of all. But so too, alas it seems, for William Hague's Conservative Party though in rather a different way. For so far from being able to develop and present a clear critique of Labour policy, along with a coherent alternative of their own, the Tories' tragically dominant impact has been one of carping and feuding, with the manifesto adding little in the way of detailed insight.Consider, for example, the "debate" about the financing of Britain's health services. For as long as anyone can remember, successive oppositions have denounced successive governments for meanness and mismanagement and promised themselves to transform the outlook, with additional billions of tax revenue. But both sides have been equally coy about any alternative source for such largesse.Chancellor Gordon Brown has committed himself to increasing NHS expenditure at an annual rate of 5 per cent over twice the expected growth rate of GDP. The Prime Minister, even more ambitiously, aims to raise NHS spending to the average European percentage of GDP (although that ambition may have been quietly dropped). Yet Blair apparently plans to forswear any future increase in income taxes.
The Conservatives even less believably plan to maintain Labour's NHS spending, while still hoping to reduce taxes.The missing fact, which neither side dares to emphasise indeed, even to point out is that our continental neighbours spend on health services about half as much again (as a percentage of GDP) as we do some 9 to 10 per cent, as against our own 6 to 7 per cent. More important still, the whole of that additional 3 per cent comes not from the State or the taxpayer but from the private sector by means of state-organised health insurance.Consider for a moment what's happened to ophthalmic services over the last decade or so. Almost every High Street now has more than one competing supplier of spectacles with free sight tests still available for those who need help. And customers drop in, as naturally as for years they've done on their holiday travel agents, mobile phone, video and TV suppliers, tobacconists and off-licences. Is it so unthinkable that as in most other countries, Commonwealth as well as European patients could move towards bearing directly some part of the cost of other health services?"Healthcare needs extra sources of money," said Michael Portillo to the Royal College of Nurses just three years ago. "I can tell you this," he continued, "because I am not in politics; those who are must go on pretending that they can solve the problem without changing the system." Now, of course, he's back "in politics," as Shadow Chancellor and just about as shy as any other politician of addressing the real arguments. Portillo's RCN lecture was entitled "The Bevan Legacy." For Labour, that legacy has buttressed their stubborn reluctance to face the need for fundamental change in the pattern of NHS finance.
And Conservatives have been similarly paralysed by paranoid fear that thinking along these lines would expose them to the allegedly fatal though totally unfounded smear that they would "privatise" the Health Service.There are plenty of other topics on which the parties continue to withhold from the electorate arguments that need to be brought out loud and clear, if democratic debate is to regain reality. The clearest example of all, of course, is over Europe and the euro. For four years now, Prime Minister and Chancellor alike have displayed the most resolute collective cowardice in refusing to spell out the basic arguments in favour of British membership of the single currency.New Labour could end up paying a very heavy price for this even in the general election itself. For if they believe that William Hague and his like-minded colleagues will miss the opportunity, towards the end of an up-hill campaign, of whooping up this argument for all that it is worth, they are likely to deceive themselves decisively with potentially serious impact. How much better it would have been, would still be, to trust the people sufficiently to lead them through a grown-up debate about what is certainly the most important item on Prime Minister Blair's agenda for the history books. He may learn too late the wisdom of Douglas Hurd's latest aphorism: "Inertia can develop its own momentum."The author was Deputy Prime Minister, 1989-1990. Once there was hope in the Middle East I witnessed it And it was, just briefly, very real.
