Spinning out of control
Andrew Rawnsley, reviewing Labour’s week of woes, observes:
This failure is emblematic of New Labour’s worst habits as a government. It is mad for writing new laws, but bad at ensuring that laws which exist are effectively applied and that core functions of the system work.
This illustrates again the cost of pursuing the next day’s headlines at the expense of considered and strategic action. There is accumulating evidence that the immigration service ignored foreign prisoners because so much of its energy was concentrated on making good Mr Blair’s attempt to assuage an earlier media storm by pledging to reduce the number of asylum applications. There appears to have been no serious effort to track down the missing prisoners until the scandal was making headlines.
This really does sum up the fundamental problem with so many of Labour’s legislative proposals - ID Cards Act, Racial and Religious Hatred Act, a new Terrorism Act and a new Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act - that have no real value over and above what already exists.
The problem is not that existing laws aren’t strong enough, but the the Government is completely incapable of applying them.
Quite a lot of other bad news has been buried under the atrocious news from the Home Office. It is nine years since Labour came to power promising that there would be no more than 30 children in any primary school class. It was revealed last week that the number of classes with more than 30 has risen again. The introduction of a new system of farm subsidies has been messed up, an overspend on legal aid is going to lead to job losses in the court services and ministers have had to admit that new staff contracts in the health service have come in at £610m over budget.
And while Gordon Brown’s supporters are cheerily looking forward to a speedy handover from one New Labour politician to another, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Chancellor’s house isn’t in quite as good an order as he would like us to believe.
The Brownites must be reckoning that few will have noticed that the public accounts committee has just revealed a continuing failure by the Treasury to sort out the colossally expensive chaos that continues to characterise the payment of tax credits. For the second year running, £2bn has been paid out which shouldn’t have been, money which will either have to be clawed back to the distress of the recipients or written off at a cost to the taxpayer.
New Labour have eschewed ideology in favour of managerialism. Unfortunately the truth is that they have no direction and are quite clearly unable to manage.
Sunday 30 Apr 2006 | Paul | The Pit
